pull in only two can play this gameHEADmaster

1 files changed, 4945 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/only_two.otx b/only_two.otx
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4bf52c8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/only_two.otx
@@ -0,0 +1,4945 @@
+BOOKS BY JAMES KEYS
+
+Probability and scientific inference
+(published as by G Spencer Brown)
+
+Laws of form (published as by G Spencer Brown)
+Twenty-three degrees of paradise
+Only two can play this game
+PREFACE BY R D LAING
+All rights reserved
+
+including the right of reproduction
+
+in whole or in part in any form.
+
+Copyright © 1972 by The Julian Press, Inc.
+
+Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-80667
+Published by The Julian Press, Inc.
+
+1 5o Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10011
+
+First U.S. edition September 1972
+
+Manufactured in the United States of America
+o
+
+Very few people would write such a book,
+and fewer still could.
+
+This is a rare document,
+
+of high quality,
+
+and those who cherish such things,
+
+will appreciate it.
+
+R D Laing
+London England
+15 day of May 1972
+(pdeds
+
+SO\ =
+
+Prescript 9
+Introduction 17
+
+Letter before 45
+
+The Opening 49
+An Accident go
+Dog or Cat g1
+Yesterday’s You 54
+The Candle 56
+
+Once upon a time  §7
+7 You are my Wife 60
+5 A Great Treasure 63
+q Tell me Lies 64
+
+{ O The Test 67
+{1 Untitled 68
+) Z Benediction 72
+
+Extraduction 7§
+Letter after 77
+Postscript 83
+Other Books 87
+Goodbye Trip 117
+
+Notes 123
+To his Coy Mistress
+thagoupr
+
+If like me you were brought up in a western culture, with the
+doctrine that everything has a scientific explanation, there will be
+certain ideas you will not be allowed to know.
+
+These ideas are in fact as old and as widespread as civilization
+itself. But your education will have programmed you so that
+whenever you hear or read about any of them, it sets off a built-in
+reflex that shouts ‘mystical nonsense’ or ‘crazy rubbish’.
+
+People who have already studied these ideas a little, and who
+may have read some of the books I mention later on, will know
+of course that they are neither all that crazy nor all that mysterious.
+But if we wish to talk about them we are all handicapped by a
+
+great gap in our education—we have no agreed method.
+
+Itis of course true that everything can be scientifically explained.
+It can be explained this way or any other way. But at a price. And
+by price I mean something more serious than money.
+
+We are maybe just beginning to realize what our scientific
+knowledge is costing us. That the advantages it confers must be
+paid for. And that the price is steeper than we thought.
+
+The irony of it is that the price of scientific knowledge has
+always been prominently displayed: and the cruel twist is this:
+the place where it is displayed is in the books that scientific
+knowledge itself insists are ‘not scientific’.
+
+Once a person steps into the science machine, once he accepts
+the doctrine as to what is ‘scientific’ and what is not, he is in a
+
+9
+foolproof trap. He has accepted a contract for which, from the
+moment he signs the agreement, he can never know the price.
+
+Let’s begin with some definitions. What do we mean by
+‘western culture’? [ take it we mean the mode of life, at least
+nominally Christian, of civilized residents in Russia, Europe,
+occupied parts of Africa, Iceland, North and South Americas,
+New Zealand, the Philippines, and occupied parts of Australia.
+This is in contrast to ‘castern’ cultures, comprising largely
+Buddhist, Confucianist, Taoist, and Hinduist civilizations. There
+are at present nearly a thousand million of us in each of these two
+groups, and about a thousand million more with cultures, the
+most widespread being Islam, standing somewhere between.
+
+And what do we mean by ‘civilized’? Well, if we follow the
+word to its roots, we see that it simply means living in cities.
+
+Every civilization has its culture. Although the culture of our
+western civilization has many sources, its main roots are two: we
+get our religious ideas from the early Jews, and our scientific
+ideas from the ancient Greeks.
+
+Now the early Jews and the ancient Greeks had this in com-
+mon. They were both anti-female. Not in the same way.
+
+The Jews were anti-female in their religion. The sort of heaven
+they were after, if you examine it critically, is largely unisexual,
+with the emphasis on maleness.
+
+The Greeks were anti-female in a more mundane way. In
+heaven they allowed equal rights to both gods and goddesses, but
+on earth they were frankly homosexual. They thought that only
+man has a soul, and that to love a woman, who is without one,
+
+would be degrading.
+Now, and this is the surprising bit, the feature that our culture
+took from each of these two roots was in each case the one that is
+
+anti-female. We took our science from the Greeks and our religion
+
+10
+from the Jews. We thus started life with a built-in double de-
+gradation of one of our two sexes.
+
+This, as I say, is surprising. What is not surprising, having
+started life in this strange manner, is that we are now in deep
+trouble.
+
+There still exist cultures, side by side with ours, that have not
+lost half their potential in this way, that are still very properly
+conscious of the two sides of things. They are conscious of the
+pompous, military, formal, impressive, idealistic, and utterly
+humourless masculine side, but they are equally conscious of, and
+allow an equal importance to, the intimate, secret, informal,
+intuitive, regenerative, and hilariously funny feminine side. And
+this side, alas, is the side that our culture won’t allow us to take
+seriously.
+
+Other cultures allow it. Ours does not. Other people’s heavens
+are full of females with a complementary status to the males, and
+complications galore. Ours does not approve of this sort of thing.
+Officially, it is frowned on.
+
+Of course, poets have always dug it. We dig it from the muse.
+Hence music. And the muse, please note, is female. She is not a
+
+god but a goddess.
+
+But then poets, in our culture, are also frowned on. Of course.
+Anyone foolish enough to think that a woman has anything sen-
+sible to say to a man must be crazy. They must be joking.
+
+Yes indeed. Joking. But does anybody ever stop to consider that
+a joke is never the least bit funny unless it is true.
+
+These other cultures, the ones that allow an equal importance
+to both sides of existence, we have, from our one-sided view,
+corrupted grievously. How it is that a half-culture can dominate
+and corrupt a whole one, I shall discuss later in the book.
+
+11
+Since some years back [ have felt the need for an author, brought
+up in the western tradition, and having attained at least a profes-
+sional degree of competence in more than one science, to try as
+best he can to bridge the gap between these two sides of human
+nature. We need, it seems to me, to realize a perspective between
+the formal and the inforral, between male and female, between
+west and east, between the philosophy and religion of doing, and
+the non-philosophy and non-religion of being.
+
+It is difficult to write about. The subject is bigger than know-
+ledge. It is as big as life itself, and takes about as long to learn.
+No book about it can reveal very much. About all any book can
+do is perhaps open the door. Just a little way.
+
+This book did not in fact come of that plan. It was an accident.
+It got written as a result of a very unhappy event for me and the
+girl I was engaged to marry. What happened is described later.
+For the moment, all I need say is that it meant the breaking of
+our betrothal. Not because we didn’t love or didn’t fit—we did
+both—but for reasons that seemed, to me at least, terribly wrong.
+
+After this I became filled with despondency. I knew my misery
+was a sort of mixture of fury and self-pity, but there seemed to be
+nothing 1 could do to put an end to it. Despite all my efforts to
+escape its thrall, it held me in a vice-like grip. My friends thought
+I would die. I thought I might. I had to consciously remember to
+eat, sleep, etc. The only thing I could do spontaneously was write.
+
+Looking back on it now, I could perhaps wish the book had
+been produced more calmly. But then, although it might have
+contained fewer faults, it might also have been less entertaining.
+
+We endure with scarcely a tremor the knowledge that the
+universe will eventually collapse. We view with more concern
+the fact that our solar system might one day cease to support life.
+Even less attractive is the thought that the earth may soon be unfit
+to live in. Worse than this, our country might get its balance of
+payments wrong. Even worse, a member of our family might be
+
+12
+involved in some scandal. Worse still, one might sicken and die.
+But what is more terrible than to be parted from one’s love?
+
+In this book I break two unwritten rules. In the first place I try
+to say something positive. In the second, I speak from my own
+experience.
+
+If you read a modern university textbook on, shall we say,
+psychology, you would think the author didn’t have any experi-
+ence of his own. [ know that the reason given for this extraordin-
+ary omission is that, in respect of one’s own experience, one is
+likely to be biased and therefore not ‘objective’. But if you can-
+not be honest about your own experience, how the hell can you
+expect to be honest about anyone else’s. And if you think you
+are likely to be ‘mistaken’ about your own experience, how much
+more likely are you to be mistaken about somebody else’s experi-
+ence of which, by definition, you have no experience.
+
+As for saying something positive, you will find, if you go to
+college these days, that it simply isn’t done. Why? Well, for one
+thing, it is so much easier to be negative.
+
+The joke about modern philosophy teachers who call them-
+selves positivists is that what they have to teach is wholly
+negative. Give one of these ‘positivists’ something that really is
+positive, a poem or some other observation written from experi-
+ence, and what does he do? He tears it to pieces. But search his
+own work, and you will find he has nothing to say. He makes, of
+his own experience of things, nothing whatever. His literary
+activity is wholly predatory.
+
+Of course anything positive can be torn to pieces. What is
+positive is what has made itself vulnerable. It has brought itself
+as far as it can, faults and all, into existence. A lily is positive. So
+is a child. So is love. All three can be very easily torn to pieces.
+None can be so easily put together again.
+
+In the history of this planet, mankind has been in scientific
+
+13
+labour for at least nine thousand years. With what outcome?
+Well, he can make a weed killer. But he cannot make a weed.
+
+Walk down the mainstreet of any big city. Look in people’s
+faces as they pass. What do you see? Four times out of five, you
+see pain. Maybe they are conscious of it, maybe not yet. But it is
+already there, clearly visible.
+
+If we wish, we can take it to the bitter end. We can act out the
+tragedy, right to the final curtain. No one will stop us.
+
+All the same, there really is nothing to prevent us rewriting the
+stage-directions.
+
+James Keys
+Cambridge England
+St Patrick’s day 1971
+Children of the future Age
+Reading this indignant page,
+
+Know that in a former time
+Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime.
+
+William Blake
+St
+
+I chose my seat, as I usually do, opposite a nice-looking girl. I
+remember she was reading Hemingway. She looked up at me,
+and that was it. Flash.
+
+When the train stopped at Liverpool Street we got out and had
+coffee there in the dingy snack-bar.
+
+We didn’t speak. We didn’t even touch. We just looked at
+each other.
+
+I wanted to miss my next appointment. I wanted to say to her,
+‘Don’t catch your next train. Come home with me.’
+
+Fool that I was. Afraid to express my feelings in case they
+frightened her away. Maybe they would have. It was all the same
+anyway. I kept my appointment and she caught her train. From
+Paddington.
+
+All the time I was keeping my appointment I wished I wasn’t.
+When it finished I went straight to Paddington and searched all
+over the station. In case she had missed the train. She hadn’t. I
+knew she wouldn’t. But it seemed right to look for her.
+
+We had swapped addresses, so I wrote. I told her I went to
+Paddington in case she had missed the train. She wrote back and
+said she wished she had. We wrote again. Love letters. I had
+never written one before.
+
+Within a month she decided to leave college and come to live
+with me. A few days later I asked her to marry me and she ac-
+
+cepted. It seemed inevitable.
+
+17
+We never believed in marriage before this. We considered it
+dangerous because it deprives people of the right to live their own
+lives. If married people come adrift their affairs go before some
+finger-wagging magistrate. But now it didn’t seem to matter. We
+felt we had no choice. The decision did not seem to be with us, but
+with heaven, and we thought we might as well please our parents
+and accept the social convenience of doing it the ‘proper’ way.
+
+They say love is blind. What we overlooked was that the first
+concern of a normal family is to ensure that its children are not
+totally lost to the fold. The girl’s family were not so keen on her
+being ‘overwhelmingly happy’ (as she wrote to her parents), they
+were rather more concerned that they should have some say in
+the matter of whom she married and when. Marriage being a
+social contract arranged in respect of the huge personal and
+sexual jealousies of the two parental families, part of the payment
+in the bargain is usually that the new union should not be so close
+that the original families can no longer keep tabs on the offspring
+
+and exercise a certain measure of control.
+
+My mistress’s family felt, and not without reason, that if she
+married me she would be lost to them. They objected to the fact
+that we were living together without being ‘churched’, and at
+the same time did everything they could to prevent the marriage
+ever taking place. Eventually, after a short sharp siege, they took
+the girl away with them. She was sent back to college to finish
+her degree course, and persuaded that it was ‘in her own interest’
+to break off her engagement to me.
+
+If our love was so easily sacrificed to these personal and aca-
+demic ends, then it might as well be published. Others at least
+might profit from our mishandling of it.
+
+Traditionally, there is a place called paradise.
+
+Instead of regarding it as a place, it is equally true, and some-
+times practical, to consider it as a state of mind.
+
+18
+Looking at it this way, it may be easier to see the possibility of
+any being attaining it any where and at any time. Thus, as has
+always been known to the deepest Christian doctrine, a human
+being can attain it on earth.
+
+In the east they look at it slightly differently. They say there
+are many paradises, and that our Christian heaven is one of them.
+But where east and west agree is in the possibility of attaining it
+on earth.
+
+All artists, every where and at every time, are aware of this
+tradition. And each artist, when he has developed his discipline
+far enough, aims to go there himself, and perhaps record, if he
+can, some message.
+
+The state, or the place, whichever you like to call it, is fre-
+quently attained by the artist while alone, removed as far as
+possible from the distracting influences of the world.
+
+What has become clear to me now is that it need not be alone.
+Two people can, but quite a different way, take a trip to paradise
+together.
+
+All right, all right. The well-known magic of love. Well, if
+you know it and wish to stop reading, dear Reader, please do.
+But it is not, I find, so well known, at least in our present grossly
+overinformed society, as you might think.
+
+If you say ‘T love you’ to a girl, she thinks you mean sex. We
+teach sex in schools, but love is a totally unmentionable subject,
+and a totally forbidden object. It is so forbidden that most of us
+have forgotten what it was, or even that it exists.
+
+It is possible to know love and still miss the experience of total
+relationship. When the completeness of love passes a certain
+degree, a change takes place in the relationship of the lovers, and
+what was magic is replaced by what is miraculous. In this book I
+attempt to give an account of the experience, individually, jointly,
+
+19
+and cosmically, where love passes beyond this magic point. I feel
+so inadequate to the task that I ought to apologize for attempting
+it, but I am compelled to relate it and you, dear Reader, are not
+compelled to read it unless you wish.
+
+A man usually approaches a woman through her physical
+attractiveness, normally at its zenith between 14 and 24. If he
+gets no farther than this, he will cease to feel anything for her
+when she loses her figure.
+
+To marry a woman with any success, a man must have a total
+experience of her, he must come to see her and accept her in
+time as well as in space. Besides coming to love through attrac-
+tion what she is now, he must also come to realize and love equally
+the baby and the child she once was, and the middle-aged woman
+and the old crone she will eventually become. This does not
+mean, if he had first met her as a middle-aged woman, for
+example, that he could necessarily have ever found his way in
+from there. Nature has her own reasons for fashioning the
+woman’s time-gate where it is, but once the man comes through
+it, he can and must go beyond it and into the woman’s whole
+being, or there will be no real marriage, it will be only a tempor-
+
+ary affair.
+
+Before this particular encounter [ might have said, if asked, that
+I knew this total experience. After all ’'m a poet, I'd be supposed
+to. But in fact I didn’t know it. And this was not for want of
+previous encounters, instructive and delightful though they were,
+
+with the opposite sex.
+
+In previous encounters, each of us had something particular to
+learn or to unlearn, the commitment did not really go much
+beyond this. Undertaken in the friendliest of spirits, yes, but we
+never expected the relationship to be permanent, and it never
+was. Partings, when they came, were amicable, there was not
+much suffering, and we remained friends.
+
+I used to think this was all there was to it, and that getting
+
+20
+married meant staying together like this, or attempting to, for
+rather longer than usual. After all, when one doesn’t know the
+
+real th_ing, one naturally thinks v w is the real
+
+thing.
+
+But now it was different. Earlier loves, by comparison, seemed
+thin and homosexual. Our culture confines us so much to the
+similarities of the sexual relationship, the all-good-pals-together
+act, that we can easily overlook the magic difference, the differ-
+ence that in fact maEes it impossible for a man and a woman ever
+reaflyibi'figlfl)gg:hei,_but nevertheless gives us the chance
+
+" of being very much more.
+
+Some of us have more to learn, or unlearn maybe, than others.
+Anyway it seems to me to be important for people to have the
+chance to try themselves out, and to try out each other, and learn
+something of the possibilities and impossibilities of living
+together, without immediately plunging into a contract that is
+very difficult to break and, because of the nature of its provisions,
+can hardly ever be undone without extreme nastiness.
+
+Even these days it is still regarded as something of a sin to live
+together without being officially married. The odd bit of sex is
+OK, maybe, but actually living together, well, what will people
+think, etc. Because of this I am sure there are many young people
+today who are living together married, but who should really be
+only living together. The divorce courts at least bear witness to
+the truth of this.
+
+The more advice you get, the less likely you are to realize what
+your relationship can offer. When all is said and done, you are the
+one who marries you partner, not your sister or your father or
+your mother or your brother or your friend.
+
+—
+
+The person who really fits you is always recognizable, but may
+take time to find. The status that such a person confers upon you
+is the status of who you really are. Only you know this, but until
+you meet the right person you may not be fully conscious of it.
+
+21
+
+|
+Meeting a person who actually fits you is rare enough to
+awaken extreme jealousy in other people, especially in those who
+are near and dear to you. So in deference to their feelings, and in
+fairness to yourself, you should never parade the fact.
+
+I can make a song and dance about it now since I lost it. But
+you, dear Reader, should never make a song and dance about it
+when you find it. Not unless you also wish to lose it. You must be
+quieter than a mouse. And so must your partner. It’s your secret,
+and if that’s the way you want it, then that’s the way you have to
+keep it. It is totally unnecessary to inform anyone at all that your
+relationship is anything more than ordinary and humdrum. You
+can marry whom you please. You do not have to give a reason. If
+
+ou must, you can give some daft reason, like you admire his/her
+hairstyle, clothes, intellect, anything fake. Bg_sgms_mgy_b_e_cgm
+hostages, so make sure you give away none that you’d be sorry to
+lose.
+
+All the tragic lovers in literature let on about their love. They
+told. So if you find yourself taking very strongly to another per-
+son, and you know you mustn’t tell, how can you be sure it is
+the real thing? Like this. If you have any doubt about it, then it
+isn’t.
+
+I suppose many people, when they first come to it, lose it again,
+as we did, through indiscretion. And suffer in silence. It is after
+all the practice of the poet to make a song and dance about what
+other people accept with inarticulate reserve. And who is to say
+that their silence is less noble than his song.
+
+Some people express the view that the paradise of total love is
+not a possible state to maintain practically for any length of time,
+at least not for human beings. I am not convinced. It is true that
+to maintain it must require great discipline. But great discipline
+is possible to human beings, even though rare. And we must
+remember that any couple who are maintaining such a state will
+be pretending not to. So it might be a case where the public
+doctrine is always opposed to the private practice.
+
+22
+Of course there are couples living together who are happv
+enough not to have the experience. I don’t think many people I
+know are engaged in total love, and I don’t think many people
+even wish for such an arrangement. To begin with, it is not at all
+an intellectual experience. Analytic discussion either seems in-
+credibly funny or, if taken seriously, is poisonous.
+
+Although more than usually intelligent, both my mistress and
+I happened to feel a distaste for the purely intellectual, so we did
+in fact welcome an involvement that seemed to deliver us from
+some of its worst excesses.
+
+This being so, it appears that onc may, if one wishes, and if one
+is lucky enough, find a partncr and then procecd with him or her
+to paradlse, without first going through the pains of purgatory.
+The main requirement seems to be that the partner must be a
+perfect fit, or as near perfect as makes no matter.
+
+How does it work? Well, the fit, the lock-and-key affinity,
+seems to be the answer. The egos or outer personalities of the
+partners are dislodged by the tremendous affinity of the fit as the
+two inner selves lock together If you go to paradlse alone, vou
+must first go through shocking pain as cach scab of ego is dis-
+lodged But when you go with your partner, your raw new inner
+self is immediately fitted into and accommodated by the equally
+egoless self of the other, where it sustains nourishment, pro-
+tection, and a revitalizing communion with its own image-mate.
+
+Dear Reader, I cannot possibly tell you what goes on in heaven.
+I can only recommend you to go there one day and see for your-
+self. Wangle yourself an invitation. It is incredibly hilarious.
+There are Mr’ Forsytes, of course, and Mrs Grund\s just like
+everywhere clse, onlv much larger and more important and
+multidimensional and’ carefully skirted, and everyone is fully
+conscious of what he, she, it, and everything else is up to,
+because each person and thing, although manifestly scparate, is
+simultaneously, in the unmanifest aspect, one and the same person
+and thing, so nobody can keep up any artitude for any length of
+
+23
+time without bursting into laughter. The whole manifest world,
+with poor serious pompous important little man perched some-
+what totteringly out at the seventh level, counting down from the
+centre, which is everywhere, all comes spinning out of the
+nothingness in the middle of it all in the most indescribably in-
+evitable way which is in fact, in form, and in content the only
+possible way. Nothing is left to chance, precisely because if we
+insist on making nothing into some thing, all this nonsense is the
+only thing nothing can really be.
+
+If not, my dear Sir or Madam, what the hell do you think all
+this huge meaningless universe is, how the devil do you think it
+got here, what the rude word do you think it came from, where the
+even ruder word do you think it’s going to, and why?
+
+The thing that puts poor dear sweet serious pompous little
+man off about heaven is its simply stupendous rudeness. That and
+its illogicality. The same thing really. After all, what is logic but a
+set of polite formalities to hide everything? Imagine Beethoven’s
+fifth symphony, about twenty million times ruder. And that’s
+only the rudeness aspect. There’s all the other aspects to consider.
+All infinity of them. Not to mention the more intimate arrange-
+ments. Punch and Judy. And the completely perfectly carefully
+careless dilettanteliberate infiltremendentitious circular formula
+love-game we are playing in the First Division. Oh, dear, and I
+haven’t even begun. You think it’s in the Bible? The arrangements
+for the Vicarage Garden Party? My dear Sir, you haven’t even
+begun. Whereas you, Madam, you knew it all along. Nearer to it
+all all along, and more patient than your miserable menfolk.
+Quite patient enough to wait several thousand years for it to
+dawn on us again. Mind you we won't accept all the blame. But
+we won't heap it all onto you any more either. We realize how
+unfair it was of naughty old God to make you eat that rotten apple
+and then go on and on at you about it for thousands of years as if
+it was your fault. Just one of his practical jokes, I'm afraid, not in
+
+frightfully good taste, what.
+Honestly, what do you think heaven is? A polite tea party?
+
+24
+Well, I wouldn’t put it past it. It could be. We could get it
+arranged. If this is what you wish. And when we are all tired of
+the tea party, we could arrange something else. There really is no
+limit to what we can arrange, as long as you are willing to take it
+seriously. That’s all we ask. Otherwise you'll see through it. Then
+there won’t be much point, will there? After all, we could save
+ourselves the trouble.
+
+Suppose we divert ourselves for a moment into the appendix
+called history. Down this particular alley we find a peculiar
+blindness that can be traced back to the Jewish Old Testament.
+In this document, God appears without a partner, a Creator
+without a Creatrix. If a god of this magnitude is supposed to exist,
+then what about his corresponding goddess-mistress? If, in His
+houschold, She is never mentioned, it looks very suspicious.
+
+To put it bluntly, it looks as if the male is so afraid of the
+fundamentally different order of being of the female, so terrified
+of her huge magical feminine power of destruction and regener-
+ation, that he daren’t look at her as she really is, he is afraid to
+accept the difference, and so has repressed into his unconscious
+the whole idea of her as another kind of being, from whom he might
+learn what he could not know of himself alone, and replaced her
+with the idea of a sort of second-class replical of himself who,
+because she plays the part of a man so much worse than a man, he
+can feel safe with because he can despise her.
+
+What follows is a typical psychoneurosis, with all its evasions,
+explanations, and paranoid compulsions. Man becomes afraid and
+resentful of the archetypal woman within himself. He begins to
+paint her out, to block off his experience of her. But as soon as he
+loses sight of the archetypal woman, he loses sight of the physical
+woman too. And because it is the man’s business to be articulate,
+not the woman’s, when the man forgets who the woman is, then
+so does the woman.
+
+Heaven knows no fury like a woman scorned. The archetypal
+woman, now deeply unconscious in both sexes, begins to take
+
+25
+her revenge. She starts to destroy, and destroy quite ruthlessly,
+the fabricated civilization that treats her this way. I man will not
+acknowledge her, if she cannot thereby acknowledge herselt, then
+of course she must destroy the negativity of the existence that
+refuses to come to terms with the way she is.
+
+We keep thinking the destruction is coming from the outside,
+from the Russians, from the Chinese, etc. Just as they keep think-
+ing it is coming from us. Really, of course, it is coming from the
+inside. Our insides don’t care for the way we happen to make
+out these days.
+
+All man’s philosophy is a rationalization of his inner experience
+— or lack of it. And a lack of inner experience of the archetypal
+woman is cxpressed in a very obvious manner, by academic
+materialism, or its modern offshoot, logical positivism.
+
+Some logical positivists would not call themselves materialists,
+but they still share the same attitude. They maintain that what is
+real is only what can be described when you look outwards, when
+you look at tables and chairs and suchlike. What you see w hen you
+look inwards, the archetypal pattern, the divine love, the sense
+of how it all fits together, this they say is unreal and ought to be
+ignored. At the same time they manage somehow to suggest that
+it is dangerous and ought to be done away with.
+
+Of course the way they teach it is more sophisticated than this,
+and very effective, I know, when confined to its own discipline.
+But where it carries over to other disciplines, poetry for
+example; or psychology, 1 think, without being unfair, this is
+rather the sort of impression that generally gets across.
+
+The original empiricist philosophers, men like Locke, Hume,
+and Mill, were amongst the people who got this academic
+materialism working for them in a big way. Their philosophies
+were in some respects sadly contrary to normal experience.
+
+Some of them taught a doctrine that the mind of a child starts
+
+26
+by being perfectly blank. All it ever knows, they said, is what is
+imposed or impressed upon it from the outside. Oh yes. Where,
+then, do original ideas come from? What about mathematics,
+what about music, what about poetry?
+
+Well, modern logical positivists have a very slick way of dealing
+with these things. Not to put too fine a point on it, they say they
+are all nonsense.
+
+It is easy to see that the logical positivist, and to some extent
+the modern scientist also, following the empiricists, have come
+to treat only the masculine husk, the outward appearance of
+things, as the reality, and to ignore or pooh-pooh the less
+obvious feminine reality of their inward nature.
+
+The mind, like the body, has an outside and an inside. It has
+a superficial, obvious aspect, but it also has a deeper and much
+more subtle aspect. Each is just as real as the other. Neither can
+exist on its own. To suppose that the mind starts oft perfectly
+blank, without an internal reality of any kind, is not only un-
+warranted : it flies in the face of the evidence.
+
+Anyway, as materialists often tell us, the mind is a reflexion of
+the body. Do they think, then, that the body starts off by being
+perfectly blank (whatever this would mean), and grows into its
+present shape because of what is imposed or impressed upon it
+from the outside?
+
+Of course not. We know that the shape of the body is organized
+and grows from within, and that there is very little we can do to
+it from without except decorate or deform it.
+
+—1.
+At the very least, we have no evidence whatever to suggest
+
+that the realest and most important structures of the mind are
+not formed similarly from within, and that what we can do to it
+from without, in the nature of training and education, is scarcely
+more, by comparison with the body, than impress it with a few
+decoratlons and deformities. ©N
+
+27
+In fact, those of us who have the courage to turn away from our
+obsession with what is outside, which has become with us now a
+sort of racial neurosis, and look back within, find here a whole
+world of tremendous significance and familiarity, which the
+poets of all languages have always kept alive, a world just as
+complete and real and ‘objective’ as the world outside, to which
+it appears intimately related, and without which the outside
+world does not make sense.
+
+This is of course to be expected. The essential shape of the
+body does not vary from man to man. We should expect the
+essential shape of the mind to be the same. In fact, we can sct
+about to explore this inner microcosm. It takes many ycars, and
+indeed it has been charted in many different ways, badly and well,
+but in all cases quite recognizably in respect of its salient
+features, over many centuries, in many textbooks which our
+civilization now pooh-poohs and ignores. Yet the ‘reasons’ given
+for ignoring these books would apply equally well to our present
+textbooks of chemistry and physics, as being full of unproved
+assumptions (which they are), disagreeing with each other (which
+they do), varying according to what is fashionable (which they
+do), and being full of errors (which they are). Discounting these
+objections which, let’s face it, apply to all textbooks written by
+human beings, we find, provided only that we have first familiarized
+ourselves with the world they attempt to chart, that what they say is
+substantially correct and agreeable. After all, let’s face it again,
+a textbook of physics would be utter mumbo-jumbo to anyone,
+however clever, who had, for some reason, never familiarized
+himself with physical existence.
+
+This is not meant to be a textbook, so I don’t intend to re-
+chart much of the ground that has already been charted else-
+where, except to say that, as all textbooks agree, what we find in
+the microcosm or inner world contains a complete image of what
+we find in the macrocosm, the outer world that the materialist
+thinks is the only reality.
+
+The words ‘microcosm’ and ‘macrocosm’, although they have
+
+28
+to some extent been used as I have just employed them here, are
+not entirely suitable, either from their root-formations or their
+historical associations, for the two aspects of reality that I wish to
+consider further. In the pages that follow I shall use the word
+‘holocosm’ for the aspect of reality that is observed by exploring
+inwards, and ‘merocosm’ for the aspect that is observed by
+exploring outwards. In the familiar Biblical analogy, the acorn
+is a holocosmic aspect of the merocosmic oak tree, because,
+perfected (as it were) within the relatively spaceless and timeless
+compass of the acorn, is the essence or completion or kingdom
+of the oak tree, the signs that, when interpreted, become the
+laws of its being and possibility, irrespective of whether, in the
+merocosmic world, it may emerge stunted or dwarfed or
+diseased or lopsided or otherwisc accidentally identified, or even
+not emerge at all.
+
+These two aspects of being are equally real, but our education
+at present leads us to attribute an excessive degree of reality to
+the merocosm, and practically no reality to the holocosm. As we
+all know, any failure to see a reality can be dangerous, but this
+particular failure is unfortunately not one that can be corrected
+immediately. This is because, even if they would, not many
+teachers could instruct their charges in the holocosmic law. Our
+degree of departure from this reality seems now to be nearing its
+nadir, and although the vacuum of its absence is strongly felt,
+there is not I think one teacher in ten thousand today who has
+found the lonely road that will take him to a sufficient mastery
+of the holocosmic forms to enable him to teach them, and above
+all to relate them to our present inflated, overburdened, and
+sprawling knowledge of the merocosm, with any degree of
+confidence and authority.
+
+It is necessary, I think, to be familiar with both sides of the
+curtain. But it is always difficult to maintain any sensible basis for
+discussion with someone who will keep on insisting that one side
+is ‘the wrong side’.
+
+The merocosmic materialist begins and ends his account of the
+
+29
+world with matter—more or less hard lumps of stuff flying about
+in outer space. But when we try to find out what the ‘matter’ is,
+we find we can’t. Apply the usual scientific tests, and what
+happens? It fades away, dissolves, leaves ‘not a rack behind’.
+
+This is not just a practical difficulty that could be resolved with
+better instruments. It is a necessary and absolute limitation of our
+knowledge of the external world, embodied in what we now call
+the principle of Heisenberg.
+
+The principle of Heisenberg was not clearly understood in
+western science until 192¢, although the Chinese had already
+realized? it as long ago as the fourth century BC, and possibly
+before. It amounts to this.
+
+To observe anything in the outside world, we have to interfere
+with it, for example by shining a light on it. And the more
+sensitive it is, the more the interference changes it. In respect of
+the most sensitive reality, what we actually see can bear no
+resemblance to what it really is.
+
+In any objective investigation, this principle operates at every
+level. The social sciences are perhaps too young to be very
+conscious of its effects in their fields, but it operates here in two
+ways. First, if you publish what you suppose (from your investi-
+gations) people will do, they read it and do something else. Or
+they do it because you suppose they will. Secondly, in any case,
+people (like other things) that are being watched don’t behave
+like people who aren’t being watched. In a very material sense,
+the eye of the investigator alienates whatever it rests on, from the
+electron upwards.
+
+It follows that any sufficiently sensitive reality, of any kind,
+material or otherwise, is completely unavailable to the kinds of
+probing investigation that are, in fact, our only means of identi-
+fving anything in the outside world.
+
+Just supposing (as we might) that the ultimate reality, the
+
+30
+basic ground, as it were, that renders everything exactly as it is,
+is something so incredibly sensitive—like a sort of infinitely fast
+film—that the minutest outside probe, of any kind, obscures it so
+that we cannot see it. If this were so, either we should never
+know it at all, or we should have to find a totally different way to
+approach it.
+
+As it happens, there is another way. It is still possible (although
+the out-and-out materialist of course denies it) to reveal, to our-
+selves at least, what this ultimate reality is by looking not out-
+wards but inwards. This way we do not disturb it because here
+we are it. Indeed the faculty by which we do this is utterly
+familiar. It is called, appropriately enough, insight.
+
+Like any other faculty, the faculty of insight can be developed.
+If you are to become a mathematician, or an artist of any kind,
+you must develop it to a very high degree. And indeed, when we
+have developed our insight far enough, we can begin to see how
+the excessively ‘real’ appearance of the physical world is in fact
+
+brought about.
+
+It comes through a very clever trick. It depends on an elabor-
+ate procedure for forgetting just what it was we did to make it
+how we find it.
+
+Amongst other things, what we have to forget so carefully is
+the fact that we drew up all the hazards ourselves. Indeed the
+principle of Heisenberg ensures that there really is no ‘outside
+world’ other than the one we constructed. It is, in fact and in
+fantasy, a projection of the shape of the instruments we used to
+investigate it. And the instruments (i.e. ourselves) are of course
+an introjection of this projection of this introjection of this pro-
+jection of etc. Our forgetting how it is made up is our way of
+fixing the appearance of the world in just the particular way it
+happens to be. Of course we can’t undo it if we can’t remember
+how we did it, and the less we can undo it the more independent,
+the more beyond our control, it seems.3
+
+31
+In other words, what we forget, partly involuntarily, partly
+deliberately, is that, many levels of existence back (seven, to be
+exact), we (or, as we were at that point, it) made the original
+decision, the original introjection that eventually, like dealing a
+pack of cards, became projected as the distinctions between one
+thing and another.
+
+We only have to do it a different way, and the whole outer
+world looks and sounds and feels and is quite different, although
+the inner world, containing as it does all the possibilities of its
+interpretation, remains always the same. Only from the inner
+world can we see the outer world as one of an infinite variety of
+arbitrary constructions. The magic and the miraculous, of course,
+are the apparition, in the outer world, of a change to the bound-
+aries, a reshuffling of the cards, originating in, or at least con-
+ducted from, the inner world.
+
+In the whole science of physics there is no such thing as a thing.
+Hundreds of years ago we carefully forgot this fact, and now it
+seems astonishing even to begin to remember it again. We draw
+the boundaries, we shuffle the cards, we make the distinctions. In
+physics, yes physics, super-objective physics, solid reliable four-
+square dam-buster physics, clean wholesome outdoor fresh-air
+family-entertainment science-fiction superman physics, they
+don’t even exist. It’s all in the mind. If you separate off this bit
+here (you can’t really, of course) and call it a particle (that’s only
+a name, of course, it’s not really like that, more like waves really,
+only not really like that either, not really like anything really)
+surrounded by space (space is not what you think, more a sort of
+mathematical invention, and just as real, or just as unreal, as the
+particle. In fact the particle and the space are the same thing
+really (except that we shouldn’t really say ‘thing’), the sort of
+hypothetical space got knotted up a bit somewhere, we don’t
+know exactly where because we can’t see it, we can only see
+where it was before we saw it, if you see what I mean, I mean
+even that’s not what it was really like, it was waves (or rather
+photons) of light carrying a message that may well be very unlike
+the thing, sorry, particle (remember this is only an abstraction, so
+
+32
+that we can talk about it (it? sorry, we don’t have an it in physics))
+it (sorry!) came from. After all, we don’t know that a thing
+(pardon!) is telling the truth about itself (would you mind look-
+ing the other way while I change into something formal?) when
+it emits (excuse me!) a blast (do forgive me!) of radiation, do
+we?), THEN (if you have followed the argument so far) this (I
+mean all these mathematical formulae, of course. What did you
+think I meant?) is how it happens to come out. Of course, if you
+start in a different place (no, I'm afraid I can’t tell you what a
+place is, although I could of course draw you a graph) and do it a
+different way (do please stop interrupting, darling, or we shall
+never get done), it (it? What we are talking about, my dear. It is
+convenient to at least pretend we are talking about something
+otherwise there would not bé much point in doing physics,
+would there?) would naturally come out different.
+
+The significance of this way of talking, which, as everybody
+knows, is called modern science,? is maintained by means of a
+huge and very powerful magic spell cast on everybody to put us
+all to sleep for a hundred years, like that nice Miss Sleeping
+Beauty, while the amusements are being rigged up. We don’t
+want people strolling all over the place asking awkward questions
+and making it collapse before it is ready do we? All in good time,
+when we have carefully finished building ourselves this nice big
+house of cards, we can, if we all keep our eyes shut tight and
+hold our breath and wish hard enough, we can all play this nice
+game of houses and all go and live in it before it all falls down.
+Except of course there isn’t enough room there for everybody
+all at once, so we all have to not be too greedy and take it in
+turns.
+
+It is not to everyone’s taste, of course. Some don’t seem to
+care for it much. Others try to change it when they get there.
+But if, for example, you want to change the big dipper, the time
+when you are least equipped to do so is the time when you happen
+to be taking a trip on it. They forget that. Some buy another
+ticket and go round again.
+
+33
+Well, Reader dear, we gota glimpse of the holocosm from the
+merocosm, and now we seem to have managed a squint at the
+merocosm from the holocosm. We have to be a bit careful about
+doing it this way round, the authorities are none too keen on
+letting every tom dick and harry behind the scenes, we built all
+these amusements you see and of course we want them to be
+used. Come along, ladies and gentlemen, gods and goddesses,
+your last chance to visit the Universe, unbelievably realistic,
+have your tickets ready! Our representative on the course is
+waiting to greet you, so hurry along please, stand clear of the
+gates, mind the doors, be good, see you all again soon!
+
+Well, here we are, dear Reader, back in the old physical
+world again, Bridlington pier and the old dip-the-dips, hold
+tight, woops, how’s it feel, you can take your ear-plugs out now
+and I promise not to say anything improper.
+
+There happens to be a whole section of the holocosm that you
+are still quite freely allowed to revisit while you are here as
+guests in the merocosm. It is called mathematics.
+
+Perhaps it never occurred to you that mathematical things such
+as numbers are not in the physical universe ? Search as long as you
+like, dear Reader, you won’t find a single number, not even of
+any kind, down here, although there are, of course, enough
+numbers to go round whenever you want to count things. The
+source of supply just happens to be in a deeper level of existence,
+that’s all. The ancients were well aware of the divinity of mathe-
+matics. The material world and the mathematical world are
+different orders of being, yet we can still see how closely they
+marry and complement and give meaning to one another. It is the
+same in other disciplines.
+
+What we know in the holocosm, we can know for certain.
+That n? = n to modulus p when n and p are natural integers and p
+is prime, is not a matter of opinion.5 A mathematician knows it is
+
+so, without the slightest doubt whatever. How can he be so
+
+34
+certain? Precisely because he does not use his human eyes to see
+it with, he uses his insight to observe it as a spectacle or play
+(theatre and theorem have of course the same root) put on for his
+benefit in the holocosm where numbers exist, and evoked by the
+particular way he learned, through his initiation into mathe-
+matics, to conjure with certain symbols.
+
+The precise secrets of the mathematician’s discipline or craft,
+the cunning$ evocations whereby he calls up, from the depths of his
+being, what can be known with absolute certainty, took him
+many years to acquire, and in history took mankind as many
+thousands of years to establish. This is why they are called secrets
+—the mere telling of them carries little or no conviction, As in_
+all holocosmic arts, the certainty of the truth they display comes
+from the mastery of the Ja they embody.
+
+Our direct vision or insight into the holocosm, once we have
+learnt to use it, is no less certain than our ordinary (and, as
+any neurologist will tell you, extremely indirect) physical vision
+into the merocosmic world of tables and chairs and what we
+are having for breakfast. The main difference, apart from its
+added clarity from directness, is that what is seen in the holo-
+cosm is so much more interesting because it is prior to what is
+seen in the merocosm. ‘Prior to’ means exactly what it says:
+more important. The inner levels strictly determine how the
+outer levels can be, not the other way round. To fly to the moon
+we must know, and strictly obey, amongst other things from
+the holocosm, the mathematical laws of motion. But, to dis-
+cover the laws of motion, it is not necessary to have been to the
+moon.?
+
+Poets and other master artists who visit other places and levels
+of the holocosm observe them with the utterly clear direct vision
+and precision of a master mathematician, and they see how it
+applies with equal rigour to other fields of being and activity in
+the material world, and it is because they are able to speak, how-
+ever obscurely they do it (let’s be fair, even the best mathe-
+maticians are often very obscure indeed), with a certainty equal
+
+35
+to that of a mathematician, that people who cannot see8 the
+reason for their certainty find it so irritating.
+
+' We all adore or hate in another what we have alienated in our-
+i giand . . PV . =0 R -
+/ selves. Adoration is not love, it is hatred in reverse. Those who
+merely adore the Original Male Being in the holocosm, see Him
+as two beings, God and the Devil, as the alternation of the
+opposites, desire and disgust, with which they have polarized
+
+their vision.?
+
+What we have alienated in ourselves is in fact what it is pos-
+sible to know in respect of the complete and universal totality of
+being and non-being. Why do simple discoveries of the obvious
+
+: take so long? Not because man is incapable of seeing them, but
+because he is neurotically preveated from seeing them by his own
+self:imposed alienation from what he knows must be so.
+
+[
+
+Jung has a nice instance of a man who decided to deny the
+existence of his left hand. All the manifestations of his left hand
+had to be explained away as ‘nothing but’ what could be most
+easily sncered at or pooh-poohed, and his speech and manner
+became idealistic, analytic, and doctrinaire in the extreme.
+
+What the artist is offering is to return the stolen left hand—to
+show his auditor something that every whole person possesses,
+and, in particular, something that his auditor might not even be
+aware, until his attention is drawn to it, that he had lost. Thus it
+
+is that any real work of art, in any medium, has this in common
+with cvery other such work ; the way it goes see ints
+
+W and yet at the same time appears utterly astonish-
+
+The compelling nature of an artist’s work that puts it above a
+
+, jmerely personal record is that the artist speaks directly of his
+auditor’s experience. How? Because the artist has learned to clean
+his work of its merely personal elements, leaving behind the
+
+common reality that belongs as equally to his auditor as it does to
+
+himself,
+
+36
+The poet, having found his way to a place in his being ?hm
+universal, undertakes to show us the way to it in ourselves. 1, he l
+learns to go there alone. 2, he masters the formalities of at least |
+one of the arts through which his experience of this place may be ‘
+re presented, i.e. re called and re collected in himself and in
+others. This takes him, for each art so mastered, some seven
+years of devotion in which he must familiarize himself with the
+secrets of his calling, the great and inviolable laws and the lesser and
+breakable rules of his discipline or craft. Having then, by his
+devotion to their disciplines, become a master of his arts, he is
+fledged enough, 3, to take his reader or auditor on a trip with |
+him to a place that is common to them both, but which the
+auditor either could not find on his own, or if he happened to
+stumble across it would be in danger of becoming lost. /
+
+The poet has been lost many times, but, through persistence,
+stamina, luck, guidance, and incredible turns of fate, he has
+somehow survived these dangers and now knows his way around
+well enough not to get lost, and to be able to take another with
+him to and from the strange yet familiar places of the universal
+
+archetypal world.
+
+This is, of course, one of the reasons for the characteristic
+form of a given work of art: being designed as a space-vehicle for
+exploring inner space. A properly designed symphony, for
+example, takes you on a kind of space trip in reverse. Blast off
+with the first movement; first orbit; second orbit; clearance for
+deeper space; arrival at objective; exploration of objective;
+dance or diversion; recapitulation; re-entry; coda or leave-
+taking. In short, a well-constructed work of art will pick you up,
+transport you, show the secrets of your being, return you, and
+plant you back on your feet again wondering what hit you.
+
+God, of course, knows all our symphonies, all our poems, all
+our theorems as the trivialities that, to Him, they undoubtedly
+are. This doesn’t mean that He doesn’t need our formulations of
+them: the holocosm and the merocosm are married to each
+other as completely as any man and woman. Our often laboured
+
+37
+proofs of their evidence represent the ways in which we, as im-
+perfect and highly involuted natural beings, must untwist our
+contortions in order to see again directly what He, being un-
+twisted and uncontorted in the First Place, can already ‘see’
+without even looking. He does not need to perform the antics
+that we have to perform to get our comparatively miserable
+directions pointing towards certainty. But at least when we begin
+to get them straight enough to approach the Godhead, we find
+ourselves doing what is simple and obvious while everyone else
+is still engaged in what is complicated and absurd.
+
+Beethoven, in his insight, reports that he reached so near to the
+Godhead that he experienced music timelessly, all at once. Mrs
+Brown of Balham, when she approaches the Beethoven region of
+the holocosm, reports a similar experience, although she is not
+able to note down so much of the music, being devoid of Beet-
+hoven’s colossal powers of expression. Beethoven reported that
+the music even he had the power to write down was mere riff-
+raff compared with the music he intimately knew.
+
+This noting down of music, or mathematics, or poetry, is in
+fact a more or less huge task of translation from what is practically
+unimaginable and multiformal into son{ething practically imagin-
+able and uniformal, and the earthly music, etc, that is the out-
+
+\ come of this task is in fact very much poorer than the original
+Bpermusic. etc, from which it was translated.
+
+One of the profounder secrets of getting so much of heaven out
+via a mere earthly work of art lies, in fact, in the particular form
+in which the work is cast. The artist, in his translation, not only
+respects the holocosmic content, but he moulds the form in which
+it is to make its earthly appearance so that it itself resembles, in
+some way, the formal balance of the holocosmic place where he
+found the content. The result, if he gets it right, is that the work
+possesses a sort of magical incandescence from the ‘beats’ or
+interference patterns produced when the heavenly light shines
+through the formality of an earthly window or grid that is itself,
+in some appropriate way, also heaven-shaped. The master artist
+
+38
+marries his form with his content to produce this effect in-
+stinctively, and rarely makes a mistake. The would-be artist,
+alas, rarely gets it right, because he hasn’t yet reached the place
+in his knowing where he feels all his powers of expression to be
+so inadequate that he instinctively reaches out for some new
+magic to render the impossible possible.
+
+Although some arts, like mathematics, have obvious physical
+applications, others seem to have no obvious physical application
+at all. Like an extinct species, they end somewhere back, before
+the present existence begins. Take music, for example. By
+material standards, absolutely meaningless. If it were not for the
+standards of another world, which even the dullest of us somehow
+dimly remembers, why on earth should anyone ever bother with
+music, let alone be able to judge that one piece is better than
+another? How could it be better, unless it was a better representa-
+tion of something we already knew? And how could music
+possibly transport us as it does?
+
+Music is an instructive example, because it is so obviously un-
+representative of anything in the material world. Although
+clearly a language, it is utterly undescriptive of anything out here.
+The logical positivist doesn’t kriow what to do with it, except to
+call it meaningless, which he does. And poetry too. He calls that
+meaningless as well. And mathematics. Mathematics, he says, is
+really ‘nothing but’ a set of meaningless truisms, poetry is merely
+‘nothing but’ a set of descriptions of material objects, daffodils
+and things, used emotively in various vague, ambiguous, and
+otherwise meaningless ways, and music, well, music is clearly
+‘nothing but’, er, well, er, he really has no very clear idea
+exactly what it is nothing but, but at least he is quite positive that,
+whatever it is it is nothing but, it certainly is nothing but it.
+
+It is easier to get confused about poetry than about music,
+because poetry makes use of a language whose more usual function
+is to describe the physical world, to talk about tables and chairs.
+In fact the master poet is not using the language like this at all,
+he is making a magic incantation, publishing a secret recipe,
+
+39
+striking a master key to a forbidden door, like the master
+musician and, yes, like the master mathematician. (Let’s get it
+clear once and for all, mathematics is not what you learnt at
+school. That was a technique called computing, boring, mechanical,
+destructive, largely unnecessary, machines can do it better.)
+Whenever a poet is not doing this magic thing, whenever he is
+not striking these master keys, whatever else he is making, it
+ain’t poetry. Verse maybe. After all he does have to practise. But
+a discerning person can tell between a poem and an exercise. An
+exercise may be clever and amusing and even edifying, but it
+takes us nowhere beyond itself. It says no more than its inventor
+intended it to say. It can be as true as you like, but it is not a
+poem unless it also finds that subtle combination to unlock a
+secret door to an other and limitless world.
+
+Every artist, when he speaks as an artist, is speaking from the
+holocosm. The patterns he makes, although in the merocosm,
+are not primarily representative of anything in the merocosm. If
+they are he is not an artist but a craftsman, and although every
+artist must be a craftsman, not every craftsman needs to be an
+artist. The artist is creating artificial patterns in the material
+reality of the merocosm in the likeness of what exists in the non-
+material reality of the holocosm. By this, and by no other,
+criterion is his work, apart from its craftsmanship, truly judged.
+How else, in all conscience, could a work of art possibly make
+sense? Materialist ‘explanations’ of art, regarded dispassionately,
+are impossibly far-fetched. Indeed, the best the materialist can
+do, if he wants to stick to his guns, is to deny the validity of what
+the artist is expressing, to say that people don’t in fact experience
+
+what they palpably do experience.
+
+This is of course an utterly fraudulent trick, a dishonesty so
+brazen that it takes the breath away. What the materialist is
+doing is attempting to dictate to us what we are to call experience.
+Some of our experience is OK, he says, is in fact experience, but,
+on the other hand, some of our experience is incorrect or mis-
+taken, and is therefore not really experience. Oh, very clever!
+See the trick? A calculation can be incorrect, an opinion (i.e. a
+
+40
+judgment or an interpretation) can be mistaken, an argument can
+be wrong. But calculation and opinion and argument are ways of
+processing experience, of acting on it and removing ourselves from
+it: they are not, repeat not, themselves experience. We can no
+more experience an experience incorrectly than we can dream a
+dream incorrectly.
+
+—-
+
+True art is spoken directly from experience. A true poem can-
+not be wrong any more than a dream can be wrong. It can, how-
+ever, like a dream, be clear or obscure, polite or rude, profound
+
+or trivial, fitting or disgraceful, well or badly recorded. And, !
+
+and this is_the really huge distinction between art and other.
+walks of Tife, it never, repeatfiever, expresses an opinion.10
+
+To those who are perhaps trying to feel their way towards it,
+the doctrine that attempts to deny them this way, although it
+may be an inevitable outcome of how we suffer our reality, has
+consequences that are, to say the least, unpleasant, both in-
+dividually and collectively. For by ignoring what is within (what
+is underneath, fundamental, what has to be fished out or divined)
+and concentrating on what is without (what is superficial,
+mutable, fashionable) we tend naturally to replace what is
+important with what is trivial. And the most disastrous effects of
+this trivialization of experience are first apparent in and to the
+people for whom the prevailing fashion has not quite blocked off
+what it was they once knew.
+
+Though I want her back, I do not pretend to want my mistress
+for any other reason than to recreate the experience, to live and
+grow with her for the rest of our natural lives, to satisfy the
+addiction I had formed for her. I do not say to satisfy her addiction
+for me, although it scemed equally strong. The meaning of
+marriage, as [ now see, is that two people become so addicted to
+each other that they cannot live happily, or even live at all, apart.
+The addiction, each equally for the other, is their total security,
+and each renews and redoubles the strength of the other through
+an ecstatic exchange of benefits as long as they both live.
+
+41
+With us this was not to be, I can only record its absence and
+withdrawal. But I don’t think I was mistaken to regard it so
+differently from any other experience I remember. It was not
+like the ordinary ‘living together’ I was used to. It is a more than
+ordinary attraction. I say again, I had not personally experienced
+it before, not in this life, although, even before we met, it was
+as though we were both seeking to recollect it from some earlier
+existence. It is not what is called ‘transference’ in psycho-
+therapeutic jargon. There are no fantasies. Every thing is as it is.
+
+I can say little as to how it happens. It seems to be an outcome
+of an inwardly marvellous fit, a truly compensating balance of
+strengths. There is complete ranging, not of your accidental
+class-conscious straightjacket egos, but of your two original
+responsive and responsible selves, leaving no hostages to chance
+on either side, no loose ends to turn to sourness in the woman,
+or to masculine protest, and no misunderstood area to breed
+pomposity or feminine musing in the man. You feel like an
+instrument that has at last been tuned. The range of your whole
+being—your real being, that is, not the personal accidents that
+are considered so important in ‘planning’ a marriage—jyour two
+ranges respond not just here and there, with a hit-or-miss in-
+accuracy, but somehow miraculously your bumps fit her indenta-
+tions, and hers yours, over the whole range of your joint respon-
+sive scale, resulting in a massive coming-alive of your whole
+potentiality, both jointly and separately, in a way that defies
+description or even comparison.
+
+It is not, to my knowledgc, in the psychological textbooks.
+(Come to think of it, they seldom classify states of mind that
+don’t allow the classifier to feel superior.) Jung does no -
+mention it, although it is true that, in his Answer to Job, he_
+
+vprqPEesies it. Even poets missed it, although some of the seven-
+
+teenth century poets clearly knew it, as my mistress was quick
+to point out. Earlier still, Dante seems to have found it with
+Beatrice. And, of living poets, Robert Graves clearly seems to
+speak of it, and I am sure there must be others.
+
+42
+It remains true that, as from the grace of any paradise, the fall
+must be hard to bear. From the paradise of total love, the fall is
+long and steep. But we do not get evicted, I think, unless we fail
+in some way to pay the rent.
+
+I keep this book, and other trinkets, as a reminder of what I
+once knew, but neither the state of grace nor the fall from it can
+be adequately described, even with talents much greater than
+mine. You must know, dear Reader, that compared with what
+was really taking place, this book is no more than a worthless
+scrap of paper blown away by the wind.
+
+43
+Love consists in this, that two solitudes
+protect and touch and greet each other.
+
+Rainer Maria Rilke
+e el
+
+Lovely girl
+
+What am I to say? You are testing me. I can only tell you what
+you already know. What you and I have taken millions of lifetimes to
+find out for ourselves.
+
+You know this. Two people are struck in heaven, different sides
+of the same being. They are scattered on earth, and must seek until
+they find each his[her other side, over many lifetimes if necessary.
+The search seems endless, often they think they have found each other,
+but it is not so. When they do, they know it is so because heaven
+opens to receive them back. The male and the female become as a
+single one. The fields, the trees, the waters, the animals, the people
+all rejoice, and happiness and beauty flowers all round them, because
+they are content. Their relationship is without limit. The poetry of its
+creation passes from this time forth for ever.
+
+Love is acceptance. It is the highest discipline on earth. Anything
+Iess is not love, but tyranny. In love, two people free each other. In
+what passes for love, they bind each other. The key cannot correct
+the lock, nor may the lock mould the key. If they do not fit, there is
+only grinding pain and breakage, and the door is not opened. All
+this we both know.
+
+You know also this. I can make no decision for you, nor you Sor
+me. That is your freedom and mine. Somewhere back along the line
+someone has _fooled you into thinking you don’t have this freedom, and
+you_feel guilty about using it. The amount of pain in the world is
+constant, you cannot add to it or subtract from it, much as it might
+boost your ego to think that you could. You are free to choose
+pleasure or pain, as it suits your need of the moment.
+
+45
+Lovely girl, in heaven you are a Goddess and I am a God, but on
+earth we are both weak and helpless and need endless patience and
+understanding. Marry heaven and earth, and strength comes.
+
+In becoming conscious of our divinity we lose nothing of our
+humanity. In love I am human, with all the agonized and heightened
+sensibility qf a human being in love. 1 sqfl'kr agonies when you do not
+write, I look for the slightest sign of reproach, I wonder if I have
+displeased you in some way. Any sign of affection is nectar to me, |
+cannot have enough of it. I dwell on it, I read it all ways up, I try
+to make it look more than it really is!
+
+And yet, all the time, I smile above myself, knowing us to be but
+two sides of one being—as well might one pull the daisy to pieces—
+the dear day’s eye—in a frenzy of ‘She loves me! She loves me not!’—
+knowing that the North Pole cannot feel the attraction of the South
+Pole without the South Pole feeling the attraction of the North Pole,
+that your own sweet beauty is also in the eye of the beholder, and
+that if I sometimes see you at fault it is because I also feel myself so.
+
+46
+Had we but World enough, and Time,
+This coyness Lady were no crime.
+
+Andrew Marvell
+Once every 500 ycars
+The gates of heaven are opened
+Just a little way
+
+Just a little light
+
+Just a little
+
+Just enough
+
+Soon
+
+They will close again
+Bang
+
+Clang
+
+Missed it
+
+Ah well
+
+Another goo vears
+
+49
+2.
+fu Acidout—
+
+My love, would you not come to me if
+1 was wounded?
+
+Would you not arrive to comfort me if
+I had had a serious accident?
+
+Well, I have had a serious accident.
+
+I have been born.
+
+5o
+3
+o (i
+
+The biggest pet
+
+I ever kept
+
+Was a girl
+
+With whom I slept
+I never found
+Another yet
+
+So satisfactory
+
+As a pet
+
+A polar bear
+
+Just isn’t there
+
+A dog or cat
+
+Is hardly that
+
+A doggie might
+Know how to fight
+He don’t know how
+My girl can bite
+
+A pussy may
+
+Know how to play
+She don’t know how
+My girl can stay
+
+I would not let
+
+My girlie loose
+
+And go and get
+Myself a goose
+
+A herd of cows
+
+As well might browse
+Among my books
+And take the vows
+Of marriage to
+
+A kangaroo
+
+As think to make me
+
+g1
+Change my view
+Nor would I wish
+To keep a fish
+When I can keep
+My little dish
+
+A clever dick
+
+Who took the mick
+And came between
+Me and my chick
+Would soon be sent
+To where he went
+With all his members
+Broke or bent
+
+I don’t prefer
+Another more
+
+Than the her
+
+With whom I snore
+Other women
+
+I hear coming
+Might as well be
+Bathroom plumbing
+And there ain’t
+Another that
+
+I slecp more zz with
+Than my cat
+
+What female partner
+Anyhow
+
+Could be more passive
+Than my cow
+
+And who are you
+To say that moo
+
+[s better than
+
+My kangaroo
+
+And let’s be fair
+Just what is there
+To hug me closer
+Than my bear
+
+52
+Or make me sick
+Or take the mick
+Or love me like
+My clever dick
+
+I could not wish
+For any dish
+That’s quieter than
+My little fish
+
+And for intelligent
+Abuse
+
+Come and listen
+To my goose
+
+And anyway
+
+My dog can play
+And gets more faithful
+Every day
+
+So as a pal
+
+Take my advice
+An animal
+
+Is very nice
+
+I never found
+Another yet
+
+So satisfactory
+
+As a pet
+
+A dog or cat
+
+Or come to that
+A better beast
+
+Or bird or bat
+
+Or other creature fit
+To keep with
+Than the
+
+One
+
+I go to sleep with
+
+53
+14409041'3 ((d\k
+
+Wot d’yer fancy then, luv?
+
+Bit of termorrer’s new, then?
+Or a bit of old yesterday’s 'ad it?
+Wot we got, then?
+
+Old )estcrda)’s you,
+0Old \nsterda) s stew,
+Old yesterday’s old fashioned mixture everyone knew!
+Old yesterday’s chew,
+Old \esterdav s view,
+Old yesterday’s little old modern young yesterday’s you'!
+
+Wot we got today then, luv?
+Well, let’s see, we got
+
+Wot we 'ad yesterday
+
+Done up a bit
+
+Wiv a lick an’ a freshener
+An’ we got
+
+Just come in today
+
+To go wiv it
+
+We got
+
+All yesterday’s news,
+All yesterday’s views,
+And guess w! that’s for yesterday’s crossword—) esterday’s clues!
+All yesterda) s blues
+In yesterday’s shoes,
+Who's dancing through all my tomorrows? Yesterday’s yous!
+
+54
+Wot’s new then, luv?
+
+Wot we got today, then?
+
+Well, today we got somefing speshul like
+Today we got a real breakfroo
+
+Today we got
+
+Old yesterday’s you,
+Old yesterday’s woo,
+Old yesterday’s old fashioned pussy cat’s old fashioned mew!
+Oh, what shall we do!
+Let’s try something new!
+How about little old modern young yesterday’s you!
+
+58
+5
+
+b Con bl
+
+Flame
+My love is like a sun for you
+To warm you, melt you, let you free,
+It lights on every one for you
+And what it melts returns to me.
+
+Wax
+My love is like a fuel to you,
+You burn me up to fire your sun,
+I only could be cruel to you
+To stop the way my love would run.
+
+Wick
+I am the thread that comes between
+To bind you and to let you part:
+What could be, is, and might have been,
+I am the cord that cleft your heart.
+
+56
+o
+Quer Upm. (:T_WL
+
+Once upon a time to go to bed now, there lived a very good
+man. His name was Sir George Pig, or St George for short.
+
+Everybody was very sorry for him, being called Pig, so
+everybody was specially nice to him to make up for it. They
+all used to say, behind his back, what a dreadful thing to be
+called Pig, how awful for him, how brave of him to bear it
+like a man and not change his name to some other animal,
+such as Fox for example, or Rat. No, perhaps not Rat.
+Anyway, how brave of him not to, and what a thoroughly good
+man he must be.
+
+And of course, being called Pig, everybody used to visit him
+to see what he looked like. But you can’t just visit people to
+see what they look like, so they used to bring him things.
+
+‘I've called to bring you this cauliflower,’ they used to say,
+or
+
+‘I've just dropped in with this chicken.’
+
+Which was very nice for Sir George, because it meant that
+he could get on with his work, or enjoy himself as he pleased
+and not bother with the shopping.
+
+And of course, all the people who called were on their best
+behaviour, being so sorry for Sir George being called Pig. And
+they would do little jobs about the house for him, and go
+away saying
+
+‘That man is more than a Sir. He is a Saint.’
+
+§7
+And this was how Sir George came to be called St George.
+
+Now it happened that in the Neighbourhood of Pigsty House,
+in the village of Pigsney, County Snout, where St George
+lived, there lived a Monster. And this Monster was very fierce
+and fiery, with smoke coming out of its nose, so that everybody
+said it must be very evil and bad, to have smoke coming out
+of its nose. Really it was just like everybody else, only bigger.
+The smoke coming out of its nose was due to the fact that it
+smoked.
+
+Now this Monster lived quietly with its Monstress at a place
+which, as I have already said, was called the Neighbourhood.
+But for some reason people thought that the Monster and the
+Monstress ought not to live there, they would rather have
+somebody else living there, not a Monster and a Monstress
+who gave the Neighbourhood a bad name. It already had a bad
+name, of course, being called the Neighbourhood, but they
+never thought of that. Indeed, the County Council of County
+Snout had decided to have the Neighbourhood pulled down,
+so that it could be rebuilt and modernized according to a large
+Plan drawn up by the County Planner, a very small man called
+Doctor Worthwhile Whitewash. And, as soon as it was
+replanned, the bad name of the Neighbourhood would of
+course be changed to a good name. And the good name
+Doctor Whitewash had thought of was to call it the Vicinity.
+
+This Plan was very acceptable to the Snout councillors, who
+
+all agreed that the sooner the old Neighbourhood was pulled
+down, and the sooner the modern Vicinity was erected,
+
+§8
+When you have finished telling your family
+
+How we make love
+
+When you have finished being cducated
+
+By men who know nothing
+
+When you have finished being fucked
+
+By men who risk nothing
+
+When you have finished listening
+
+To men who say nothing
+
+When you have finished thinking
+
+You have to finish an unpalatable meal
+
+Because you paid for it
+
+When you have finished supposing
+
+You need a mark on a bit of paper
+
+To open a door that is already open
+
+When you have finished approaching marriage
+
+So determined to make it fail
+
+That vou have already decided what to do when it does
+When you have finished wanting to prove your greatness
+When it is already accepted
+
+When you have finished trying to display your brightness
+When it has already lightened my darkness
+
+When you have finished seeking to show off your beauty
+When it is already noted
+
+When you have finished adding to your worth
+
+When it is already enough
+
+When you have finished looking for something better
+Come back to me
+
+Come back to me
+
+Because you are my wife and I cannot let you go.
+
+60
+Without you
+
+The house is silent and I cry
+Without you
+
+The house howls although my eyes are dry
+Without you
+
+The tree guards no kingdom
+Without you
+
+There is no meat
+
+Without you
+
+There is no drink
+
+Without you
+
+There is no slecp
+
+Without you
+
+There is no waking
+Without vou
+
+There is no play to be plaved
+Without you
+
+There is no work to be done
+Without you
+
+I cannot know
+
+Without you
+
+I cannot say
+
+Without you
+
+I cannot feel
+
+Without you
+
+I cannot be
+
+Without you
+
+I cannot live
+
+Without you
+
+I cannot die
+
+Without you
+
+There is no star
+
+Without you
+
+There is no sky
+
+Without you
+
+The sun cannot run
+Without you
+
+61
+The world cannot fly
+
+Without you
+
+Thou art no state
+
+Without you
+
+No prince am |
+
+Because you are my wife
+
+Because you are my wife
+
+Because you are my wife and [ cannot let you go.
+
+62
+A great treasure, my love, cannot be guarded without some
+deceit.
+
+Before I came to vou, my love, I did not know how great
+my treasure was.
+
+I told you the truth, my love, so you left me. You told me
+lies, so I still love you.
+
+I remember now that you told me to tell you lies. In my
+pride I thought I knew better. Now see how my pride is
+humbled.
+
+Pray God if you return to me I shall lie to you always. This
+much I owe you.
+
+The truth is in my being and yours. We do not need words
+to confirm it. We need words only to deny it, when necessary,
+
+to hide it so that it may not be taken away from us.
+
+A man does not put all his most valuable possessions on the
+pavement outside his house.
+
+63
+Q
+1 ME&M
+
+Tell me lies to make me come
+Tell me lies to keep me
+
+Tell me lies to wake me up
+Tell me lies to sleep me
+
+Tell me lies to tempt me
+Tell me lies to have me
+
+Tell me lies to catch me
+Tell me lies to love me
+
+Tell me lies to marry me
+Tell me lies to take me
+
+Tell me lies to let me love
+Tell me lies to make me
+
+Tell me lies to father me
+Tell me lies to grow me
+
+Tell me lies to mother me
+Tell me lies to know me
+
+Tell me lies to cherish me
+Tell me lies to lay me
+Tell me lies to nourish me
+
+Tell me lies to play me
+
+64
+Tell me lies to sew me up
+Tell me lies to sleep me
+
+Tell me lies to enter me
+Tell me lies to reap me
+
+Tell me lies to comfort me
+Tell me lies to ease me
+Tell me lies to bear with me
+
+Tell me lies to please me
+
+Tell me lies to make me laugh
+Tell me lies to tease me
+
+Tell me lies to buy me up
+Tell me lies to lease me
+
+Tell me lies to let me cry
+Tell me lies to blind me
+
+Tell me lies to fish me
+Tell me lies to land me
+
+Tell me lies to frighten me
+Tell me lies to shake me
+
+Tell me lies to lighten me
+Tell me lies to wake me
+
+Tell me lies to make me come
+Tell me lies to let me
+
+Tell me lies to cover me
+Tell me lies to get me
+
+65
+Tell me lies to carry me
+Tell me lies to have me
+
+Tell me lies to let me be
+Tell me lies to love me
+
+66
+10
+e Toat—
+
+My life is entirely at your disposal
+
+You may kill me for sport if you wish
+
+I'accept it in you because I know it with me
+
+You accept me when you accept who you really are
+
+Your idea of yourself is what you think is acceptable
+
+You accept me when you accept more than that
+
+I ' know your reservations
+
+Because I know mine
+
+Image to image
+
+Mine are dissolving
+
+In yours
+
+I'am yours as you please
+
+If you accept it
+
+I enjoy it
+
+I was charged with a great task
+
+I did not know what my reward was to be
+
+It is the greatest
+
+It has been granted to me to be able to accept you
+
+Complete
+
+The task was my test
+
+No other man woman child animal plant or inanimate thin
+passed the test
+
+No other being in earth or heaven has been or ever will be
+
+Granted this privilege
+
+67
+1
+
+You like I
+
+One day
+
+Wwill die
+
+The wind
+
+Will circle
+Birds will cry
+The world
+Continues
+
+And is gone
+Where this emblem
+Sun once shone
+
+All the trinkets
+Of your worth
+Tokens of your
+Infant birth
+Will become
+Like mine
+Again
+Recollections
+Of our pain
+
+68
+Only two
+Can play
+This game
+One can
+Play it
+
+Just the same
+None
+
+Can play it
+Otherwise
+Minus one’s
+The one
+That dies
+
+I like you
+Shall die
+
+One day
+Circling
+
+The other way
+Where the wind
+Will take
+
+This chance
+
+A bird
+
+Of paradise
+Will dance
+
+69
+Take me
+
+To your
+Ancient place
+Take me
+Where |
+
+Saw your face
+Sun
+
+And moon
+Shone
+
+On what
+When you
+Are gone
+The world
+
+Is not
+
+Can
+
+The cold moon
+Love
+
+The less
+
+Can
+
+The emblem
+Sun
+
+Unbless
+
+All his
+Planets
+
+In
+
+Their groove
+And
+
+Eclipse
+
+The way
+They move
+
+70
+Can
+
+The wedding
+Bells
+
+Unring
+
+Can
+
+The winging
+Bird
+
+Unwing
+
+Can
+
+The marriage
+of
+
+The earth
+Miscarry
+Heaven
+
+In
+
+Your birth
+
+You like I
+
+One day
+
+Will die
+
+The wind
+
+Will circle
+Birds will cry
+Where this emblem
+Sun once shone
+The world
+Continues
+
+And is gone
+17—
+Bm&i&{m
+
+And now to god the father god the son and holy ghost
+
+And now to goddess mum and goddess daughter with the most
+And now to godhead being and unbeing in the Place
+
+That I am ever seeing and unseeing in your Face
+
+To desarts of eternity without a night or day
+
+Beyond through every being through beyond what men can say
+Beyond and ever inward to the way it all began
+
+Beyond and ever outward to the fallen works of man
+
+And on beyond all this to that unpromising recess
+
+That last familiar secret what not nobody can’t guess
+
+72
+“Tut, tut, child!’ said the Duchess. ‘Everything’s
+got a moral, if only you can find it.’
+
+Lewis Carroll
+< baducian
+
+Perhaps it was my refusal to share, with her, the destructive in-
+vasion of my mistress’s family, to take it in, Judo-wise, even to
+jolly it along, to be superficially destroyed by it myself, as she is,
+and then, somehow, to learn to transcend it, to come through it,
+as I did the destruction wrought by my own family. Perhaps this
+way, with wisdom and patience, I could have taken her with me.
+Perhaps even, if I humbly repent before her now, I still will. I
+know, anyway, that I need a similar service of her, and that, if
+she comes back to me, she will perform it without having to be
+asked. She is made that way. Most women are.
+
+I am not. I need to be taught. Only a woman can teach me.
+
+Lawrence was rifiht when he wrote that a woman can say
+nothing that a man has not taught her to say.
+
+‘What he omitted was that a man can know nothing that a woman
+has not taught him to know.
+
+7§
+She hath left me here alone,
+All alone, as unknown,
+
+Who sometimes did me lead with herself,
+And me loved as her own.
+
+Sir Walter Raleighll
+Jellac ofjer
+
+I know there is nothing wrong with your taking your degree if you feel
+you must. Remember I always left this one to you, love. All I ever
+
+did was to make myself available for you to come to, a sort of second
+string as it were (though I hope one day to be your first), and if you
+ever find yourself unwilling or unable to go on with what you are
+doing now, well, here I still am.
+
+I have experience of both learning and teaching in universities,
+and I have seen many degrees failed or abandoned for archetypal
+reasons, amid consequent and quite unnecessary shame and misery.
+
+Don’t think that meeting me has made any difference. If you
+hadn’t been seriously considering failing or chucking your degree
+you wouldn’t even have answered my letters. You are not a fool, love,
+although you may find it convenient to pretend to be one when you
+play the family game. You know perfectly well that all my letters
+were love-letters, and that all yours were come-on signals. Your
+Sfamily, your sister in particular, seems to have drilled into you the
+idea that there is something wrong in this. But, if you consider it,
+the world would be a really terrible place, even more dreadful than
+it is now, if it were not open to any person, irrespective of class, age,
+occupation, nationality, or other accident of birth, to express, as
+kindly and as beautifully as he can, his love to another person, and
+for that other person to respond as she finds herself responding,
+without let or hindrance from any third person.
+
+1 cannot change your archetype, my dear. Nobody can. It is there,
+and it will determine, in its way, your whole life. It is there, and
+if you allow yourself to be guided by it, you go to heaven, and if you
+resist it, you go to hell. Not in some future state. In this life. That
+is the law. I didn’t make it.
+
+77
+I cannot change your archetype, I can only reveal it to you, as
+others try, for their own ends, to conceal it from you. It is true that
+I seek o reveal it for my own ends too, but that, if you think of it,
+is your true security. You just cannot be secure with anyone, however
+much he tries, however dutiful and undoubtedly good he may be,
+whose own ends do not, in the final analysis, tally with yours. Not
+your accidental, personal ends. Your archetypal ends.
+
+I cannot change your archetype, but I can give it I!'fe. I can
+cherish, nourish, and husband it so that what you are now will seem
+poor, wizened, and wretched by comparison with what you will
+become. And you, too, my love, would perform the same service for me.
+Not out of duty, not because you felt obliged to, but because it is the
+
+way you are made. What greater security can a mere human being
+have than this?
+
+Please note I am not attempting to tell you what your archetype
+is, no one can do that. You are always queen of your own domain,
+Jou are fiee to serve your archet)’pe or betm)' it as you wish, and it
+is no business of mine, unless asked, to say what I think you are doing.
+Maybe finishing your degree is serving your archetype, maybe not.
+Unlike your family, I do not presume to judge, much less to force you,
+by violent and disruptive pressures, into making decisions when your
+mind is least composed. I know that they, and consequently you,
+project these faults onto me. But please ask yourself, love, since when
+has openness, honesty, and loving-kindness been called pressure? It is
+true that love allows us all to press to be what we really are, to
+overthrow the confines and limitations of our breeding and education.
+You are ambitious, my dear, which means that you wish to be as
+great as you know you really are. There is, if you think of it, no
+other being for you. Either your greatness is already real, now, or
+you will never be it. You cannot fool the world, my love. Nobody
+
+can. Either way. If you settle for less than you really are, the world
+will despise you.
+
+All creative people, my love, all those with an unusually extended
+range and depth of responsiveness, are troubled with their families.
+
+What their families have to offer, in advice, education, etc, is
+
+78
+designed, however well-meaningly, for someone within a comparable
+range to theirs. A family never accommodates to the  fact that one
+
+of its members is out of their range. It is the story of the ugly
+duckling over and over again.
+
+1 love my family, but I never follow their advice. Not any more.
+You only follow the advice of people you wish to be like. And even if
+you wish to be like your Sfamily, my love, you cannot be, any more
+than I can be like mine, however hard I try. Your family’s advice is
+suitable only to someone who is conditioned as they are. So is mine.
+
+There is a place for you here, if you wish to take it up. Can you
+accept that an offer of marriage is not trivial? In making it, I offer
+you all I have to offer. It might not be much. But it is all. In
+accepting it, you gflrer an equal return. I make it without reservation,
+Jou accept it so. Whether you go on to take your degree is immaterial
+to me, always has been, you made the issue of it, not me. An offer
+of marriage, and its acceptance, is an undertaking to another person
+as they are, it is not subject to conditions and reservations. Put the
+tribal bargaining to work on it, and it is lost. Look at all the
+miserable ‘marriages’ you see around you. Why are they so miserable?
+Because each partner went into it with reservations. With certain
+moral, tribal, social, idealistic, or humanitarian principles, if you
+like. And the reservations, in the end, are all that is left of the
+marridge. Just a couple of reservations sharing a house, with a
+number of small preserves to bind their non-union.
+
+I cannot abrogate my function as a man, just because it has through
+Jyears of neglect become obscured. I have to find it again. I cannot
+save you if you throw out the baby because the bathwater is dirty.
+
+To save you, I must tell you who you are. To save me, you must
+show me who you are. To save you, I must tell you who I am. To
+save me, you must show me who I am. This is the law. The fact that
+it is being ignored does not make it any less the law. The law of
+gravity is not weakened by ignoring it and falling over a cliff or
+under a bus. The fact that the law of co-operation of the male and
+the female is being ignored, the fact that our fundamentally
+
+79
+different functions are being falsely identified, is why the world is
+breaking up and falling apart with an ever-increasing momentum
+towards its very own self-guided self-destruction. It is now all systems
+go. Towards destruction.
+
+In bringing us to this place, our families had no choice but to
+perform their difficult and thankless tasks. To be contained until its
+time of usefulness, a great force must be greatly opposed. The
+glinder opposes the force of the steam, without which its power is
+dissipated uselessly. This is the reconciliation between the Jewish
+Christ’s saying that one cannot come to Him without hating one’s
+father and one’s mother, and the Mosaic law that one should also
+honour them.
+
+Equally, the world now has no choice but to destroy itself, to make
+way for the new world that will rise_from the ashes of the old. We,
+being the creatures who bridge both worlds, must be able to master
+both sets of laws and use them appropriately. It is no good living in
+one world, as I sometimes do, and stubbornly acting as though it is
+the other. I need your help here to distinguish them. Our task is
+great enough. We have, if we will, to survive in the old world, to
+survive in the new world, and to survive the holocaust that stands
+between the two. Neither of us could achieve it alone, but together
+we can. As Wells said, men are slower and stupider, women are
+quicker and sillier. To survive alone I am too stupid, and you are too
+silly. Exchange these between ourselves, and your silliness becomes
+the very quickness of the eternal life-spring that infuses the secure
+_foundation and formality of my stupidity that gives it permanence
+and prevents it from being dissipated into nothingness before it has
+served its due time. Only you, a woman, give life to my form, only
+1, a man, give form to your life.
+
+So whenever you wish to take it up, there is a place _fl)r you here,
+in the university of my being and yours. Just so long as the door
+between us can be kept open. Because, and | found this totally
+impossible to explain to your father, always always always it is the
+woman who chooses. However much tradition may have it otherwise,
+all we men can do is make ourselves available. And once a man has
+
+8o
+thus made himself available, once the King has exposed himself to
+the mating net, he will be tdken by the first Queen who considers
+him a fair catch. And, whoever she is, he will love her. If he has
+lived a short time, he will love her for a short time. And if he has
+lived a long time, he will love her for a long time. How could it be
+otherwise?
+
+Can you see that, in this message, there is no imposition. You, and
+you only, show me what to say. Before I met you, I did not know it.
+I say only what you teach me to say. I do only what you teach me to
+do. I love only what you teach me to love.
+When we remember we are all mad,
+the mysteries disappear and life
+stands explained.
+
+Mark Twain
+?odth
+
+I posted this letter with the poems, and got no answer. | rang
+her up. She said she would not answer. She thought she was
+having a breakdown.
+
+I reckoned I could reach her by train the same day, and went.
+She was out, so I didn’t in fact see her till the next day.
+
+Meanwhile her flatmates entertained me, and when she didn’t
+return, let me slecp on the floor. They were all extremely con-
+cerned about her and, because of what had happened, a bit
+awkward with me.
+
+When I finally saw her the next day, she was cold and distant.
+She did not look happy and I, after a long journey and a night on
+the floor, felt miserable.
+
+She had gone back to the boy she was with before she met me.
+Her omitting to tell me this was, I realized, a way of keeping her
+options open with me.
+
+I also realized now that if she wouldn’t close them, I must. I
+felt myself to be bleeding to death. I had to cut off.
+
+Whether she, in her turn, will cut herself off from me, whether
+she will survive to marry another man, and whether she will be
+able, in the end, to justify the course she has taken, I do not
+know.
+
+There is a game children play when the tide is coming in, sur-
+rounding themselves with an ‘impenatrable’ wall of sand, keeping
+the water out as long as possible. Of course the water seeps in
+underneath, and eventually breaks through and floods everybody
+out. It is a good game. Adults play a similar game, surrounding
+themselves with an ‘impenatrable’ wall of argument to keep out
+
+83
+reality. Reality seeps in underneath, of course, and eventually
+breaks through and floods us all out.
+
+When a man takes a woman he becomes prince of all her
+states. Or rather, he is prince of all the states in which she
+allows him to ride and in which he is able and willing to ride. By
+coming into each state, he puts and keeps it in order, defends it
+with his body, and in return is allowed to reap his share of the
+benefits.
+
+Some women reserve some of their states, and do not allow
+even their husbands to enter. Some men reserve some of their
+talents, which they offer elsewhere, or keep to themselves,
+instead of employing them in the service of the woman. To the
+extent to which there are these reservations, a marriage is
+incomplete.
+
+My mistress reserved no state from me, and I reserved no
+talent from her. To this extent our marriage was complete. But
+amongst the states of which she was princess—amongst the
+heritage of which, by marriage, she would become queen—
+were certain strong but unruly states, notably her father, her
+mother, her elder sister, and their internalizations in her. What
+I said to her, in effect, might have been this.
+
+‘I see, my dear, that you possess certain unruly states and that
+you have thrown open the gates of these, also, to me. But when
+I ride there the population throw eggs in my face and try to
+knock me off my horse. 1like to be popular, it is unpleasant bei
+unpopular, and I am not sure that I wish to be the ruler of states
+such as these. Besides, if the truth were known, I am a little
+afraid of the people in these states, I do not know how to defend
+myself against them, and you know as well as I do, my dear, that
+a king cannot rule subjects of whom he is afraid.
+
+‘I suggest, my dear, since you allowed these states to get into
+such a mess, that you rule them yourself, or better still, that we
+cut them off from our kingdom and allow them to go their own
+
+way.
+
+84
+To which she perhaps replied, ‘I have considered your pro-
+posal, and although I am naturally interested in a prince who
+enters parts of my domain that no man entered before, and who
+has brought to order, husbanded, and reaped the most abundant
+and satisfying harvest from them, the fruits of which we have
+shared together, I find that, for sentimental and other reasons, I
+cannot offer to abandon my unruly states just because you are
+afraid, or do not know how, to be king there also, and to hus-
+band these as you have husbanded those states of mine with more
+fertile soil and a pleasanter climate.
+
+‘Thus, though I appreciate your truly wonderful work else-
+where, I regret that I cannot accept your offer of marriage that
+does not extend itself to these states, in some ways more in need
+of your help than the other states, which you already found in
+fairly good order, although uncultivated.
+
+‘Since you are, in other respects, all that I always wanted, it is
+with great sorrow that I must now take my leave of you and
+return to my former suitor. He may not be so clever as you, but
+at least he knows his way around these states and is not afraid of
+the people there. He might do something to help, which is more
+than you offered to do. You offered to do nothing.
+
+‘Perhaps later I shall consider these states to be less important
+than I consider them now, and perhaps, also, you will learn not
+to be so afraid of the people there, so that you can enter and ride
+there without being knocked off your horse. Maybe if you would
+get off your horse and go to meet the people they would not feel
+the need to knock you off. At such a time, perhaps, I may be free
+to reconsider your offer to be my husband.’
+
+If this was our archetypal conversation, then whatever we had
+said to one another at the time would not have touched the issue,
+it would have been like clanging dustbin lids outside the house.
+If I could not bring such a state of affairs to consciousness, how
+could she be expected to?
+
+8s
+The Chinese gamut consists of the notes
+d f d
+6
+i T
+
+and presents serious difficulties to Christian missionaries, it being im-
+possible to adapt the ordinary Western hymn tunes to the musical
+H Gossin
+
+[MFS
+NIW »
+
+r
+2
+8
+
+system of the country.
+Ot Bools
+
+In a way, paradise is who we are irrespective of what the nexus
+takes us to be. Practically the whole of our breeding and edu-
+cation is devoted to fitting us in, and binding us to, the nexus.
+
+Where the tragedy overreaches itself, is comedy. Where the
+comedy forgets itself, is tragedy.
+
+We leave the education of the young to serious high-minded
+persons. This fits them only for tragedy. High-minded seriousness
+is confused with responsibility. In fact it is irresponsible, failing
+as it does to respond to the other side of human nature.
+
+We do not have to take the nexus of our culture so exclusively
+from high-minded ancient Greeks and humourless ancient Jews.
+Both, in their ways, produced highly homosexual and thus
+strongly warlike cultures. There are, both before and since,
+wiser, more mature, less aggressive, less painful windows
+
+through which to look at the world and relate with it.
+
+Beware of the expert, the specialist who knows all about very
+little and very little about it all. Remember he is a mercenary,
+somebody pays him to dress up an opinion and show it off in the
+most flattering light. Put him in another stable, find him another
+paymaster, he might well have to say the exact opposite, he has
+a wife and kids to support. Why do you think estimates of Govern-
+ment expenditure, etc, are always so hopelessly wrong? Because
+they are prepared by experts. You and I, dear Reader, can always
+guess nearer the truth than the expert will ever calculate it.
+
+If a man cannot get there by virtue of being a man, where can
+he get by qualifying himself so as to become something less than
+a man? People are made to forget the meaning of ‘qualify’—if
+
+87
+you qualify something you make it less than it was originally, not
+more. A man qualified in any way is less than whole. Only by
+abrogating his qualification and cultivating his self, by returning
+from the outpost of his ego to the kingdom of his archetype, and
+by ruling the pretence of his ‘I’ from the reality of his ‘me’, can
+a man return to wholeness.
+
+Speaking for my sex alone, I can say that every man is poet,
+lover, actor, sculptor, builder, explorer, fighter, navigator, map-
+maker, mathematician, orator, juggler, thief, liar, beggar, story-
+teller, painter, soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, farmer, hunter,
+traveller, priest, doctor, saint, angel, devil, and god. For a start.
+And all this he is, or can be, by virtue of being a man, not at the
+expense of being a man. And, if it were not for so many expert
+sneerers, all these things, in their proper places and at their
+proper times, is what he would be. To the best of his ability.
+Also singer, composer, player, dancer, teacher, learner, St
+George, the Dragon, sinner, penitent, tradesman, prostitute,
+athlete, brother, son, good boy, bad boy, slave, master, oracle,
+visionary, healer, magician, king, prince, nobleman, servant,
+fool, philosopher, refugee, minister, critic, celibate, profligate,
+and when, but not before, he has finished separating himself out
+into all this, and rolled it all back into himself, he can make a
+present of it all (yes, I said all, there is no holding back) to some
+nice young girl and become her devoted husband.12 And she, on
+her side, can equally give all she has, whatever it may be, to
+become his devoted wife,12 and at that moment they complete
+the cycle. They find they still have what they gave away, and
+
+infinitely more. They are neutralized and liberated. They are it.
+
+What the hell13 is this so-called identity anyway? Just what is
+it that is supposed to keep us all imprisoned in what we happened
+to look like yesterday? So, yesterday I wore a blue suit. So
+today I am expected to wear a blue suit. So tomorrow they can
+call me Mr Bluesuit. The well-known personality. Have we all
+gone utterly crazy? We seem to have this childish obsession with
+personality, with the merely superficial, with what is material
+only for communication with other material. We are conned like
+
+88
+sheep, driven into the idiotic. We thought it clever to live in
+our personalities. As well might a nation obliterate itself and
+maintain only its foreign embassies.
+
+Sneer go the sneerers, the qualified people, the people who
+have decided ‘what’ they ‘are’ (de = down, off, caedere = cut:
+decide = cut down, cut off). Sneer sneer they go, having cut
+themselves down to such hobbledehoy half-creatures, must they
+sneer, sneer, sneer, cut, cut, cut everyone else down to their
+size, anything to make what they did to themselves appear less
+awful, to avoid seeing, for the price they had to pay, what a lot
+of grot they got.
+
+The communications media all connive in it. What is your
+opinion, Dr Pigstein, as an economist? Instead of what is your
+response as a man. Oh, no, that’s not good enough. Man is
+invalidated, nobody listens to men any more, we are expected to
+listen to economists, ontologists, sociologists, and other such
+idiots. The final indignity has arrived, and the part is given
+
+precedence over the whole.
+
+This is, of course, the ultimate, irredeemable sin. Havelock
+Ellis once defined corruption as the breaking up of the whole for
+the benefit of its parts. Put the parts first, ignore the whole, and
+you’ve had it. The world flies to pieces, just as the body falls
+apart when you give it over to the microbes. And the microbes
+don’t survive either, you get no gratitude from them. That’s it,
+mate. Put the world in the hands of the experts, and you’ve had
+it, you might as well start looking for another world right away.
+You’ll get no more joy from this one.14
+
+What is so wrong with the expert is that he is such an ac-
+complished processer. We have all become so terrified of reality.
+We want it canned, dehydrated, defused, made safe, shredded,
+made up into convenient labour-saving dispensable packets.
+Reality in the raw is something we imagine happening only to
+other people, where we can watch it on the telly from a safe
+distance. At all costs don’t let’s let it happen to us!
+
+89
+An aunt of mine, when she was dying, said ‘Why should this
+happen to me?” My dear Aunt, it happens to happen to us all. You
+have not been personally singled out for some unique and
+specially unpleasant experience called dying, and if that is the
+way it appears to you, those who made it appear that way were
+grievously at fault. 1 don’t care how heartless it sounds, I am
+prepared to maintain against all comers that it is vilely wrong,
+fiendishly evil, and fraudulently inhumane to play these pretending
+games about death, to make out that it is a sort of faux pas that
+only happens to other people, something that no one in his right
+mind would consider. It is, in my view, a most presumptuous
+conceit on anybody’s part to attempt to invalidate and trivialize
+and hush up one of the realest and most important and meaningful
+and necessary experiences any of us is ever going to have, and to
+make it scem somchow shameful and belittling. A dying person
+has enough to suffer without having his experience invalidated
+and sterilized. He has reached the end of this life, he is as wise
+as he ever can be, he has nothing more to learn, he is taking his
+departure. The occasion is momentous, whether we think he is
+going to heaven, hell, purgatory, limbo, nirvana, the first bardo,
+to another world, or just plain nowhere. Could we not just put
+our opinions in the background for once, they are no use to him
+now, and pay our respects to his experience, whatever it may be, and
+so perhaps help him to come to terms with it and to validate it
+for himself? And hope to God, or whatever it is we hope to, that
+someone might be kind enough to do the same for us when our
+turn comes.
+
+What has happened to us? We seem to have become so scared,
+so terrified of anything real, and so much at a loss that we seek to
+take our reality from outside, to steal it from others, to come to
+it vicariously so that we shall not be responsible to it. We prefer
+to sit masturbating in the stalls while a sex-act is performed on
+the stage. An invalid sex-act at that, because it did not happen of
+its own accord, it was not done for its own sake, it was done with
+a view to being watched and criticized, to provide a talking-point.
+We have constructed a culture of voyeurs, we have become a
+civilization of investigators.
+
+90
+Mrs Brown of Balham, an ordinary not very musical housewife
+with no expert training in the art of composition, started to write
+marvellous music, quite comparable in form and content to that
+of Liszt, Chopin, Brahms, and other composers who, she says,
+provide her with inspiration and guide her through technical
+difficulties that would otherwise be beyond her. So what do we
+do? Instead of publishing and recording as much as we can for
+our instruction and delight, we send round experts to investi-
+gate, without the least success, how she does it. And a famous
+pianist, on the telly, instead of playing it to us, looks embarrassed
+and says he hopes there is some rational explanation. Does he
+want a rational explanation for Bach, Mozart, Beethoven? Does
+he only play, at his concerts, music for which there is a rational
+explanation? Music with the stamp of logic and the blessing of
+the computer? If so I don’t think many people will listen to it.
+
+No poet, of course, needs to investigate Mrs Brown’s ability.
+He already knows exactly the secret she has discovered in herself.
+It is not a secret that opens itself to investigators.
+
+Thanks to expertise, we have already managed to investigate
+nearly everything out of existence. Animals have become extinct,
+it’s OK, we have films and tape-recordings. Whole peoples, with
+diffeient, self-contained modes of life, have been invaded,
+exploited, corrupted, and destroyed, it’s OK, we made anthro-
+pological studies of them. The earth is polluted and made barren,
+it’s OK, the Encyclopaedia Britannica will tell us what it used to
+look like.
+
+We have invented a dangerous and predatory way of life, that
+cannot be self-contained because it consumes faster than it
+replenishes, multiplies itself faster than it dies, an ethnologically
+lunatic way of existence that even infects, with missionary zeal,
+its own disease upon hitherto stable and self-contained com-
+munities. Plain arithmetic, and indeed everything else in the
+holocosm, shrieks out that it is so, yet mankind, once infected
+with this disease, becomes deaf to any voice, however loud,
+blind to any lighf, however bright, frenzied and delirious, madder
+
+91
+than the maddest Gadarene swine. Very shortly, when he has
+devoured or infected or polluted all that is otherwise in the
+world, he will have only himself left to prey upon. An agonized,
+dying, self-eating cancer.
+
+Our very social and economic policies read like a textbook
+written for cancers on how to make a tumour. Get dangerously
+busy rather than remain harmlessly idle. Increase your rate of
+productivity above your rate of decay. Make your exports
+bigger than your imports, and at the same time do everything
+you can to boost your consumption of raw materials. Increase
+your population. Standardize your units. And above all, send
+working-parties and missions to all the poor fools in regions
+where they have not yet learned to do these things, and regale
+them with the advantages of an ambient philosophy that en-
+courages expansion, mechanization, productivity, and growth
+over whatever ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’ gospels they might
+have enjoyed before you arrived on the scene.
+
+You just can’t have a world where every country exports more
+than it imports. Why? Because the arithmetic doesn’t add up.
+This and dozens more insane shibboleths are all the product of the
+expert mentality, paid to exploit a sectional interest and never
+mind the whole.
+
+O expert man, you have much to answer for. And yet how can
+we fairly blame you? You are as much the product as the cause.
+We have devised a system in which anybody who is not an expert
+is left out in the cold, considered useless, left to starve, things
+proceed from bad to worse at an accelerating rate, and suddenly
+all the kettles and pots begin to scream at one another how black
+they are. And all the experts get together and come out with the
+answer: more experts!
+
+It is not so much the people who are skilled at making or
+moving things, who master a trade or do a job, and mind their
+own business, that take us so far from reality. It is the people who
+do nothing but talk.
+
+92
+There is so much talk going on, so many words flung around,
+that nobody can see a thing. We send a child to school, and then
+university, and then a postgraduate course. Twenty years of talk
+talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk
+talk talk talk talk talk. With the result that, at the end of it all, the
+child knows nothing whatever, and can do nothing at all. Except
+talk.
+
+You leave the university. You go to a dinner party. There is a
+lull in the conversation. Quick, somebody, say something, any-
+thing, before some terrifying reality begins to intrude. Quick,
+blot it out, distract us from it, get the talk going again.
+
+Talk becomes the rule. Talking is polite. Not talking is rude.
+Talking is the game. Anyone for talking? Sorry, Sir, Madam, the
+rules do not permit other games to be played in this club.
+
+Dimmed by years of talking, your reality ceases to be what you
+see, hear, feel, taste, and smell, it becomes what you are told,
+what you read in the newspapers, what the commentators say.
+
+You don’t believe me? One day my car caught fire on the motor-
+way. 1 stopped it on the hard shoulder, rescued as much of my
+luggage as I dare, climbed up the grass embankment, sat down,
+and watched it blazing away. The police arrived. The fire-engines
+came. Other motorists stopped their cars, got out, climbed up
+the embankment to where I was sitting. The first thing they said
+was, ‘Is it on fire?’
+
+Careful, like, you see. OK, so it looks on fire, but we’d better
+make sure, we’d better get someone to tell us, we’d better get it
+on some authority what it is. We’d better ask the owner. It’s his
+car. He should know if it’s on fire or not. If he says yes, that’ll be
+all right, we can go home and say we saw a car on fire.
+
+Leave the car. You feel ill. You don’t know what you’ve got.
+You go to the doctor. He says you’ve got fantibular incubolitis.
+
+That’s better. At least you know what you’ve got.
+
+93
+Leave the doctor. Go home. Look at your cat. It despises you.
+Why? Because it hasn’t been blinded by science, it hasn’t got
+fantibular incubolitis, but it can see you have, very badly, and it
+feels obviously superior about it. It can see straight into you,
+straight past all your talk, it knows who you are, how you are,
+and what you are thinking. Not what you are thinking in your
+talk-factory, not how you are adding up the milk-bill, but how
+you are motivated, where your peculiarities and complexes are,
+what you are thmkmg of domg next, what your feelings towards
+it happen to be now, how it can get round you to get what it
+wants. It has to know these things, itis not gifted (or handicapped)
+with your intellect, it has to get you to feed it, look after it, and
+give it shelter by studying your responses and relating with you
+in a real and primitive way, without all that talk-twaddle that
+occupies so much of your time and energy. It feels superior
+because it knows it is superior, it knows it knows so much better
+than you do what is really going on between you and it. But if
+you come out of your talk-twaddle for a change, if you go into
+your own primitive reality, you can see directly what the cat is
+thinking. You now know what it knows. And it immediately
+knows you know what it knows, and that you know that it knows
+what you know. You stop trying to communicate with it, and
+start to commune with it, and it stops despising you.
+
+Babies are the same. A mother sometimes sees her baby just
+watching her coldly and dispassionately, sizing her up. Some
+mothers can’t stand it.
+
+I picked up a girl’s baby, two or three months old, sat it on my
+knee and told it a story. It listened with rapt attention. Without
+changing the tone of my voice, I started talking nonsense. The
+baby stopped paying attention, looked round the room, fidgeted
+and started to cry. I stopped talking nonsense and started talking
+sense again, and the baby stopped fidgeting and started to pay
+
+attention again.
+
+I do the same for my cat. It listens with the most respectful
+attention when I tell it something, or explain to it what I am
+
+94
+doing. It doesn’t understand the language, of course. That is
+foreign to it, as it is to the baby. But, provided you are not just
+talking, provided you mean what you say at a deep enough level,
+the cat (or the baby) will pick up your meaning at that level, and
+this is why it will direct its attention to you. It is repaying you the
+compliment you pay it when you direct your attention to its
+own level of being.15
+
+People who have momentarily been there all say how de-
+lighted their animals are to greet them in this condition. The
+animals simply grin at you. So, my dear human being, they say,
+at last you have come to meet us! At last you have taken off
+your blinkers, you have come out of your complicated language,
+and you are now privileged to see what we see and know what
+we know. You have come to your senses, and we are pleased
+to accept you.
+
+Naturally, when we go back into our complicated linguistic
+egos, the animal is nonplussed. It cannot follow us there, nor
+can it get through to us any more. It knows that we are now
+utterly blind to its own reality, that we have replaced our vision
+of it with a sort of projected cardboard image of an animal, not a
+real animal any more, which doesn’t fit into language, but a sort
+of explanation of an animal, which does. It feels meaningless and
+shrivelled up. And it can’t help itself, it actually begins to be like
+how we project it.
+
+Man’s linguistic ego is both destructive and self-confirming.
+Animals start behaving according to biological theory, people
+start behaving like sociological doctrine. But externally. Intern-
+ally, somewhere, they still have their reality. But it gets harder
+and harder to find. It is all covered up under thicker and thicker
+layers of language, theory, doctrine, clothes, fashions, ideals,
+politics, religion, respectability, decency, and humanity.
+
+Yes, I did say humanity. In particular, one’s merely human
+nature is ignorant, proud, superficial, conceited, and didactic.
+
+These are specifically human characteristics, they don’t belong \
+
+95
+to animals or gods. They are, in fact, precisely what distinguishes
+a human being from an animal or a god.
+
+Surprise? Not if you consider it. We get confused, obviously
+enough, if we fail to make the distinction between a man and a
+human. Man alone contains the Godhead, which belongs in all
+things that are whole. But the human part of man is precisely his
+non-divine nature, it is exactly, because definitively, the part of
+him that is without the Godhead. Who would think of replacing
+“To err is human’ with ‘To err is manly’?
+
+A pretence that human nature is of itself the greatest value,
+that it alone is our proper standard, leads inescapably to trouble
+and strife in the beginning, and to disorder and disaster in the end.
+Only by what is divine in man can we safely bring order to what
+is human. If we rule by humanity alone, we replace what is just
+by what is expedient, awareness and order give place to fear and
+tyranny, authority is degraded and people fall prey to tricksters
+and racketeers.
+
+A man’s humanity is largely concerned with his social life, and
+his social life is necessarily undertaken in respect of precisely what
+is most superficial to his being. And to me, at least, it is axio-
+matic that you cannot safely import what is superficial to order
+what is fundamental. If you do, then the whole thing explodes.
+That is why I am neither a socialist nor a humanist. I am not any
+kind of ist. I refuse to be driven into corners. I speak as a man.
+
+Don’t go thinking that I'm offering some sort of religion.
+Divinity was never a monopoly of the church, although all
+churches have, in their time, established and maintained funda-
+mental divinities. And obscured them, in the end, with the
+inevitable incrustation of doctrine. What is divine, as the word
+tells us, is simply what is underneath: what is, therefore, not
+apparent on the surface, but has to be divined.
+
+You know what a water diviner is. There is nothing fishy about
+the word ‘divine’, other than that it is to do with fishing. Diving
+
+96
+in, going underneath to find what is fundamental, to review the
+foundations on which it all rests. The humanist, the man who
+tries to govern on merely social principles, is like a man who
+builds a house without first looking to the foundations, and then
+is surprised and hurt when it falls down.
+
+The word ‘divine’ is rooted in Diana, the original goddess
+mother. If you wish to explore her divinity, dear Reader, it is a
+mistake to think you can get there instantly. We expect so many
+instant miracles these days, instant potatoes, instant sex, instant
+explanations, instant government. Just add water, words, or
+what have you, and the whole thing puffs up most lifelike.
+
+Not so. Can’t be done. After all, if you wished to do something
+superficial, like climbing Everest, would you expect to be up
+there in a jiffy? Well, then. Be serious. Remember you have been
+brainwashed into thinking the holocosm is unreal. Suppose some-
+one had conned you into thinking Everest was unreal. [ wouldn’t
+give much for your chances of reaching the summit.
+
+It is a commonly accepted theory, but one which I don’t see
+how anyone but a thoroughly educated person could possibly
+believe, that animals are without minds and not conscious. I sat
+down in Richmond Park and a squirrel trotted up to within a few
+yards of where Isat. It looked at me. I looked at it. It leapt in the
+air and did a backward somersault. It looked at me carefully to
+see if it was appreciated. [ grinned. It did it again. Not conscious?
+
+This animal meeting is of course one of the joys that lovers
+rediscover, the revelation of endlessly spinning out the hours and
+the days and the months without talking, the new, fresh, pristine,
+enchanted world that grows so miraculously in its own space and
+time, free at last from the bonds and fetters of all those words.
+
+The job of us poor poets, dear Reader, is so much harder than
+it looks. Words were made to bind you. We have to use them to
+do exactly the opposite. You are a bird trapped in a net. We are
+sent to set you free. And what do we have to do it with? Another
+net. No wonder we nearly go off our rockers.
+
+97
+It’s not so bad for the psychotherapist. You pay him to keep
+quiet while you talk. Mind you, he’s got to listen, so it may not
+be so good for him. On and on you go, years and years, explaining
+it all to him while he sits there and never says a word. This
+is just too good to be true. I can say what I like. Anything I
+please. And at last (or at least we hope so, for this was the
+object of the exercise) you see what a lot of twaddle it all
+was, and that you had better stop talking and sit quiet for a
+
+change.
+
+We poets can’t do this. If I left all these pages blank, which is
+what I really should do, then you, dear Reader, would be un-
+likely to buy the book. I have to buy food and shelter, same as
+you, and I know that you are much more inclined to pay good
+money for a lot of twaddle than for a lot of blank pages. So you
+see, dear Reader, I am doing what I can to give you value for
+your money. Thank you.
+
+You may look at the world any way you please, through any
+window you choose. Nor does it always have to be the same win-
+dow. Naturally how the world appears, what you see and what
+you miss, and the angle on what you see, depends on which win-
+dow you are using, but how can a window be right or wrong? A
+window is a window. I elaborate on what can be seen through
+various windows, not to say that you should look through them,
+more to point out that there are other windows that sane, sen-
+sible, responsible, able, amiable, and otherwise normal people
+can and do look through, and it is perfectly OK to try another
+window if what you see through yours seems meaningless
+or inadequate. Naturally if you enjoy the view, there is no
+need to change it. Alternatively, if you come to another window,
+it may take time to adjust to what you see. If you are used
+to a box camera, your first efforts with a 3gymm may be
+disappointing.
+
+The number of different windows is endless. The unbridled
+conceit16 of the western nexus is to say that only certain windows
+
+are ‘sound’, and that the others are wrong, misleading,
+
+98
+hallucinatory, etc. So be warned. If you look through a window
+that is disallowed for any of these reasons, be very careful whom
+you tell, and how you tell it. If in doubt, keep quiet. Above all,
+don’t blurt it out to people who haven’t been there and wouldn’t
+go there, however much you might like them to accompany you.
+It will only upset them, and they will feel that they have to attack
+you, to invalidate you in some way. Of course looking out of a
+window cannot really damage you, after all what you see was
+there all the time, but if you tell other members of your nexus,
+they may feel that they have to say that it is damaging, they may
+indeed feel that it is damaging to them, that their carefully pre-
+served ‘identity’ will be spoiled by what you see, unless they and
+not you choose the window through which it is to appear.
+Naturally they will return tit for tat, projecting the damage they
+feel is being done to them, or rather to their public image of
+themselves, back onto you. Furthermore, if you fail to look
+damaged after this, they may feel justified in damaging you
+personally, of course under the guise of ‘helping’ you, so as to
+keep up the pretence.
+
+At this point they play their trump card. Having damaged you
+(under the guise of ‘helping you’, ‘setting you straight’, etc, ‘for
+your own good’, etc), they must (to preserve, this time, their
+private image of themselves) somehow shift the cause of the
+damage from themselves to that ‘wrong’, ‘dangerous’, etc
+window you were misguided enough to look out of and let on
+about, and so they now have to say something like ‘There, what
+did we tell you, you went to that evil window and look what it
+did to you!’
+
+Such is the power of hypnosis welded to violence that an other-
+wise quite sane person will actually come to believe that it was
+what he saw through the window that did the damage, whereas
+of course it was only the people who caught him at it. It was they
+who damaged him for ‘selfishness’, ‘ingratitude’, ‘antisocial
+behaviour’, ‘deviation’, ‘defection’, ‘schizophrenia’, or any of
+the other meaningless formulae by which some people justify
+wounding, incarcerating, and killing other people.
+
+99
+Don’t complain. It is the way of the world. It is at least a
+partially forbidden window through which one sees that it is the
+way of the world. The world doesn’t tell you that if you make
+discoveries you will be punished. It says you will be rewarded,
+and then punishes you. Artists, engineers, inventors, all of us
+some time or other get this shock, and serve us right for being so
+naive,
+
+No being in earth or heaven, who is seen at a disadvantage, will
+welcome your making the fact public. This is why, if you look
+through forbidden windows, you must learn, when the occasion
+demands it, to keep quiet, to tell not another soul, not even
+your best friend or your beloved wife or husband. To talk point-
+lessly, to be incontinent with the truth, is tactless and destructive.
+Measure your words in respect of their consequences: remember
+that to describe how things are comes quite low in the list of
+priorities that words serve. As Mark Twain said, truth is valuable,
+let us economize it.
+
+One of the great joys of being with my mistress, of being made
+whole by her, was that I was for the first time absolved from the
+curse of being an artist. I knew this. So did she. The irony of it
+was that she left me partly because of an ambition to be an artist
+herself, not fully realizing that this is a condition one should
+avoid if one can. An artist is homeless and wanders from window
+to window. When he finds a window where the view is so
+marvellous that he doesn’t wish to change it, he is home, he dis-
+appears as an artist. Thank God.
+
+By returning from our long separation as sexes, what we do is
+put an end to the art that bleeds through a muse. A muse is the
+absence of a complementary being, and of course the outline of the
+muse is identically that of the complementary partner. But since
+the partner is in fact absent, the art is to this extent negative. I
+suspect that the return of the sexes to wholeness, although put-
+ting an end to our traditional muse-type art, may give rise to a
+more positive kind of art of which we have as yet little concep-
+tion.
+
+100
+The typical western artist bleeds music rather than radiates
+contentment. He is a christ rather than a buddha. And the un-
+creative many, who feed parasitically upon the blood of the
+creative few, conspire to keep the wound open so that the
+bleeding may not stop.
+
+If you like the view through any of these ‘wrong’ windows in
+this book, you might like to try other ‘wrong’ windows. There
+are many hundreds of books, good, bad, and indifferent, all of
+which, in the eyes of some in-group or other, are considered
+wrong. Here’s a score for a start.
+
+Eedy—
+
+1. A H Cuapman, Put-offs and come-ons, PUTNAM
+
+A classification by a psychiatrist of some of the unpleasant
+things people do to one another while pretending they are
+reasonable.
+
+2. ALAN WarTrts, This is it, PANTHEON
+
+A group of essays on holocosmic experience. The aspects he
+touches are sometimes quite advanced, but he writes so lucidly
+that I put the book in the easy bracket. He is one of the few
+writers who can write about very non-western states of mind with
+a very western style and focus of interest.
+
+3. Kantir GiBRAN, The prophet, KNOPF
+
+Perhaps the best-known of his many similar works. He tends
+to write from one level only, which makes it easy for the reader
+to stay in the groove. Very, but tactfully, non-western in outlook
+and approach.
+
+Node,
+
+4. SHELLEY, A defence of poetry
+Even if you cannot bring yourself to like any of Shelley’s poems,
+as I confess I cannot, this marvellous essay is beyond price in the
+
+101
+understanding of what poetry is. You must read the original, every
+secondhand account kills it dead.
+
+5. PauL FosTer Cask, The tarot, MACOY
+The tarot is a book of life disguised as a pack of cards. Paul
+
+Case’s is the best simply-written account I know of the symbol-
+ism they embody.
+
+6. Wu CH’ENG-EN, Monkey, GROVE
+
+A translation by Arthur Waley of the 16th century Chinese
+novel. The story may be compared (to its advantage) with those
+of Tolkien, to which it bears a superficial resemblance. But
+whereas Tolkien is remembering what happened on earth during
+(I think) one prehistoric existence, Wu Ch’éng-&n is remember-
+ing a series of perhaps 1000 existences, including heavenly and
+other interludes between, and presenting them, like a cinemato-
+graph, so that they appear as one hilarious biography. The jokes
+come in all sizes. Some of them are enormous.
+
+7- C G JuNg, Answer to Job, WORLD
+
+The great Dr Jung at last gives his talents their due scope and
+undertakes to psychoanalyse God. The result is very penetrating
+and extremely funny.
+
+8. R D Laing, The politics of experience, PENGUIN
+
+Dr laing, also a psychiatrist of great distinction, adduces
+powerful reasons for considering the view that going ‘mad’ is in
+fact a perfectly normal reaction to being put in an impossible
+position by a nexus of people who are supposed to be ‘sane’. The
+book is a series of essays written around this theme, and the
+writing contains more than meets the eye at a first reading.
+
+9. D H LAWRENCE, Fantasia of the unconscious, VIKING
+
+The book contains two essays, first published in 1923, and by
+common consent among the best Lawrence wrote. The theme is
+yet another aspect of what I have been plugging away, that one’s
+deep unconscious is not, as Freud made out, a mere cesspool of
+unacceptable memories and repressed desires, but rather (as
+
+102
+Jung later began to discover) the very life-spring of one’s corpor-
+ate %)eing and reality.
+
+1o. JOHN JOCELYN, Meditations on the signs of the zodiac,
+THE NAYLOR COMPANY, SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
+This is not a book about astrology, but about the deeper mean-
+ings of the twelve signs. I was at first put off by the style, but its
+discursiveness can make it easier to read. It contains an unusual
+degree of divinity together with some humanity. It mentions the
+total love-experience.
+
+Hend
+
+11. BEETHOVEN, Piano Sonatas 28, 30, 31
+
+‘No evil fate can touch my music. He who divines its secret is
+freed from the unhappiness that haunts the whole world of men.’
+
+Beethoven read the poets. It is time poets paid the composer a
+similar compliment. I willingly confess to having learned more
+of the poet’s art from this single poet who wrote in another
+medium, than from any one writer in my own.
+
+In music the poet’s meaning is stripped and stark : the composer
+must get it right: if he fails to do so, there is no secondary meaning
+that can come to his aid.
+
+I choose three compositions for the piano because they are
+perhaps casier to read than quartets or symphonies, although if
+you read music as badly as I do I would recommend that you
+listen to recordings of a professional pianist playing them first.
+
+It is not so generally known that the last five piano sonatas are
+of the same transcendental order as the last five string quartets,
+and can blow the fuses of your mind equally effectively. The three
+I have chosen are perhaps the least characteristic, not like the
+well-known public tragic ego-y Beethoven everybody expects to
+hear. Apart from the haunting theme for the variations in
+number 30, which is perhaps the simplest and most moving
+expression of this artist’s deepest unfulfilment, the music is
+hardly recognizable as from Beethoven’s pen.
+
+As a boy Beethoven detested the study of fugue, and seldom
+
+103
+used it in his compositions until towards the end of his life. Apart
+from a few early exercises, his first great essay in this formality
+was the last movement of the third Rasoumowsky quartet, surely
+one of the most astonishing fugues ever published. But in the end
+he seemed to find that the fugue was often the only formality
+capable of carrying the intimacy of the relationships or of sus-
+taining the colossal climaxes of which he was now capable, and
+his last works are in fact studded with fugues.
+
+In these three sonatas the final movements all use fugues to
+introduce or to sustain climaxes which, if you stay with them all
+the way, are almost unbearable. The composer, who was by this
+time deaf, never heard them played.
+
+12. The Gospel according to Thomas
+
+The secret sayings of Jesus of Nazareth, many of them so much
+deeper and stronger than what we find in the canonical gospels as
+to make it a different order of book. For example, it says much
+more clearly (gives an exact recipe, in fact) what you actually
+have to do to enter eternity. I think the best English translation
+is the one published by Collins.
+
+13. The Tao Te Ching
+
+This deep, quiet book has perhaps suffered even more trans-
+lations than the Bible. I possess some half-dozen or so of the
+forty-odd translations into English alone. They differ widely
+because the Chinese language is so powerful that any ‘translation’
+into a western language provides only one of the many possible
+interpretations of the original. Chinese is a pictorial language,
+very poetical and mathematical, with no grammar and no parts
+of speech. If your mind is not trapped in the ways of the literal
+languages, it is the easiest of languages to learn. It is also highly
+economical, to write anything in Chinese requires fewer strokes
+than it does in a western language.
+
+A well-known scientist of my acquaintance once showed me
+an ingeniously efficient language he had invented for computers,
+etc. On examining it I was able to say that he had invented a
+form of Chinese, and that since the invention had proved its
+
+104
+worth over the past seventy-odd centuries or so elsewhere, he
+might well be able to sell it as a new gimmick over here.
+
+To get back to the book. It divides into two parts, the Tao
+Ching, or Book of the Way, and the Te Ching, or Book of Virtue.
+Like most eastern texts it is atheistical, or rather pretheistical,
+rooting itself in the metaphysical Zero, or Female Principle,
+rather than the physical One, or Male Principle. This does not
+of course prevent such texts from telling how Male Principles,
+or Gods, are constructed. The Tibetans, for example, worked
+out before we did that the First God must be a Trinity.1 But this
+book spares us these exercises. Briefly the Tao Ching, comprising
+the first 37 stanzas, says something of how it all is, what it’s all
+about, and how we can know it must be so, and the Te Ching, in
+the other 44, gives examples of the application of this knowledge
+in everyday life. The text is of great beauty and simplicity.
+
+One of the better versions in English is contained, together
+with other material of great interest, in A Source-Book of Chinese
+Philosophy, compiled and translated by Wing-Tsit Chan and
+published by Oxford University Press. Another that runs it close
+is that of Arthur Waley, under the title The Way and its Power,
+published by Allen and Unwin. And for anyone who wishes to
+check with the original Chinese, as one eventually must if one is
+not content to miss nine tenths of the sense, there is a version by
+Dr John C H Wu, published in New York by St John’s University
+Press, with English and Chinese texts side by side.
+
+As the Chinese measure time, the book is comparatively
+recent. It is thought to be about twenty-three centuries old.
+
+14. DANTE, La divina commedia
+
+I am not keen on epic poems, and I cannot pretend to like this
+one, although I have no doubt of its greatness and authenticity.
+I possess copies of the original Italian and several translations, I
+use mostly the one in English verse by thriller writer Dorothy
+Sayers (it is in Penguins).
+
+The poet recounts, with mountainous detail, his being in hell,
+followed by his passage through purgatory and his attaining of a
+paradisal state through his total love for Beatrice.
+
+I have long felt that epic poems are not really poems, but
+
+10§
+stories written in verse. The verse may be of the highest order,
+the story may be great and poetical literature, and the author
+may be a poet of true calibre, but this still doesn’t seem to me
+to make it a poem. I also think it is perhaps not a true function of
+poetry to describe heavenly states, any more than it is to
+describe carthly states. It is not, I think, a correct interpretation
+of the poet’s musc to operate at a purely descriptive level, like
+science, or even to explain the world like philosophy, although
+the poet, by tradition and for the adequate performance of his
+task, must possess a working knowledge—theory alone is not
+enough—of the major disciplines of his age, and a fair smattering
+of minor ones besides. In fact all the great poets have been
+natural philosophers of the highest order, and when Coleridge
+made his famous optical blunder, the error went howling
+through the corridors of time, where it still simpers, greatly
+detracting from his credibility as a poet.
+
+In this respect Dante was a poet. He knew the world inti-
+mately, he understood his disciplines, he suffered his purification,
+and he wrote of it immortally. T don’t feel happy about calling
+what he wrote a poem, although I am equally not sure what else
+to call it.
+
+A poem, as I see it, reminds us of what we once knew, but in
+a rather unusual way. What it says does not end at its face-value.
+It illumines one level of existence in the exact observation of
+another. It says something beyond its literal sense, its meanings
+flash from level to level. In Dante’s composition the meaning,
+though sublime, seems to me to stay so often with the literal
+description, as if it were a textbook of inspired psychology.
+
+I realize that through this view, much literature of great value
+must be excluded from the realm of poetry, even though it is
+usually accorded this rank. Some of the compositions of St John
+of the Cross, for example, in which he describes very genuine
+beatific states, though of course to exclude them by this test
+does not make them inferior.
+
+Whatever view we take (and I admit my view is impossible to
+stick to, it is too inconvenient. There ought to be another word),
+the Divine Comedy contains, for those who will look for them,
+truths of the highest order, as well as at less exalted levels. It
+
+106
+reminds me, in some respects, of the paintings of Hieronymus
+Bosch. As for the poet’s final vision of God Himself, there is no
+doubt, to my mind, that Dante was privileged to be called to
+stand witness to the First Presence, and that his description in
+the final canto is a true account, in so far as any such account can
+be true, of his divine experience in respect of It.1
+
+It is worth considering, I think, how this huge account of the
+whole creation, tragic, painful, blissful as it may be, is neverthe-
+less designated, above all, as a comedy, and we may note how
+often the whole formality of being and existence appears this
+way to those who seck to interpret it. Among Beethoven’s last
+words, when he had received the extreme sacrament, were
+‘comoedia finita est’—the comedy is over.
+
+15. ROBERT GRAVES, The white goddess, F. s. & G.
+
+Another huge book, and a mountain of learning. The author
+writes of the total love-experience thus.
+
+“True poetic practice implies a mind so miraculously attuned
+and illuminated that it can form words, by a chain of more-than-
+coincidences, into a living entity—a poem that goes about on its
+own (for centuries after the author’s death, perhaps) aficctlng
+readers with its stored magic. Since the source of poetry’s
+creative power is not scientific intelligence, but inspiration—
+however this may be explained by scientists—one may surely
+attribute inspiration to the Lunar Muse, the oldest and most
+convenient European term for this source? B\ ancient tradition,
+the White Goddess becomes one with her human representative
+—a prlestess a prophntcss a queen- -mother. No Muse- -poet
+grows conscious of the Muse except by experience of a woman
+in whom the Goddess is to some degrce resident; just as no
+Apollonian poet can perform his proper function unless he lives
+under a monarchy or quasi-monarchy. A Muse-poet falls in love,
+absolutely, and his true love is for him the embodiment of the
+Muse.’
+
+He goes on to say that she usually leaves the poet because she
+is embarrassed by the spell she casts over him. I find myself in
+
+107
+complete agreement with this, but 1 am saying that her embarrass-
+ment is not itself inevitable, other than in the context of our
+peculiarly narrow-minded culture. The spell the poet casts over
+his Goddess-mistress is equally magic, and this she finds deeply
+disturbing until she ceases to identify herself with the cultural
+nexus, which strictly forbids the indulgence in a magic experi-
+ence.
+
+Since a culture, by definition, affects more deeply those who
+have suffered more than the usual dose of its educational processes,
+the pressures it mounts against people who are articulate enough
+to write and read poetry are in many ways more effective than
+they are against those who, by these standards, are comparatively
+mute. There must, I think, be many inarticulate ‘poets’ and
+hidden ‘muses’ who, when they find each other, marry and
+remain spell-bound for life. Nobody knows much about them,
+because they are wise enough not (or perhaps lucky enough not
+to be able) to tell their secret.
+
+16. DioNYSIUS THE AREOPAGIT, The divine names, translated
+by C E Rolt, MACMILLAN
+
+A more or less descriptive account of the archetypes in western
+religion. I recommend this particular edition for the translator’s
+spectacular introduction, without which I find the text almost
+unreadable.
+
+Much of what is in this book is confirmed, with a very different
+method, in the next book. The reader’s attention may be drawn,
+for example, to the parallel accounts of the emergence of time,
+i.e. the statements of what we have to do to construct an element
+that doesn’t exist in any of the five orders of eternity.l We
+attempt to recount, in other words, what are the essential magic
+spells for creating a temporal existence, just as books such as The
+Gospel of Thomas aim to give the essential magic whereby these
+spells may be reversed.
+
+A historical fact of some interest in this connexion, which we
+cannot afford here to touch more than briefly, is that the founder
+of any religion is the man who tells how to undo the spells: but
+the church that establishes the religion, being so to speak its
+material embodiment, must, to maintain its worldly existence,
+
+108
+present the founder’s knowledge essentially in reverse, so that
+within its corpus the original knowledge becomes secret.
+
+A relatively superficial and uncomplicated illustration of this
+is furnished through the teachings of the German philospher
+Ludwig Wittgenstein, who may for the purpose of this example
+be considered as a minor christ. He taught that all philosophy,
+including his own, is nonsense, and that any order of existence
+other than the physical, although not unreal, is unspeakable.
+
+For the purpose of this example we may take the philosophical
+school of linguistic analysis, or logical positivism, as Wittgen-
+stein’s established church. The teachings of this school at least
+suggest, if they do not actually say, that philosophy is the only
+way to talk sense, and that any order of existence, except the
+physical, is not unspeakable, but unreal.
+
+Its method, by the way, of dealing with books such as The
+Divine Names is to ignore them. It can adopt no other course
+because its philosophy, as I am sure those who adhere to it would
+be the first to agree, has no equipment for discussing the ideas in
+
+such books.
+
+17. G SPENCER BrowN, Laws of form, JULIAN
+
+An account of the emergence of physical archetypes, presented
+as a rigorous essay in mathematics.
+
+Starting with nothing and making one mark, we trace first of
+all the eternal forms. From these we obtain two axioms, and
+proceed from here to develop theorems.
+
+The word angel, as we find if we look it up, means messenger,
+and the algebraic consequences that spring from any mathe-
+matical system are always the ‘angels’ through which the mathe-
+matics, which is basically structured in the eternal regions,5 may
+be interpreted or applied in everyday life. In this particular
+system, the consequences enable us to construct logic and to
+build computers.They turn out to be, in other words, the prin-
+ciples underlying Boolean algebra. It thus appears that accounts
+of the creation of the world, from Genesis back to Yin-Yang and
+beyond, turn out to be more or less evident, if incomplete,
+accounts of certain fundamental properties of Boolean mathe-
+matics.
+
+109
+Having arrived, then, at a point where we have reconstructed
+Boolean algebra, we then proceed to take it considerably further
+than the ordinary textbooks, into equations of the second and
+higher degrees, which Boole found no way of doing. What in fact
+we do now is extend the disciplines of Boolean algebra, as in the
+ordinary numerical algebras, to include both real and imaginary
+values, thus introducing into Boolean mathematics what turns
+out to be an exact analogue of the arithmetical i = y/(—1). In
+the Boolean form, of course, the imaginary value is not in any way
+numerical, but does behave in all other essentials like its numerical
+counterpart, enabling us to solve equations and to reason in ways
+we could not manage without it.
+
+Most astonishing of all, the use of this imaginary value re-
+produces, in the forms necessary to represent it, rccognizable
+archetypes (what I call ‘precursors’) of particle and quantum
+physics, thereby constructing, without any outside help, the
+ground of what we call material existence. It is constructed from
+nothing other than an unbroken sequence of argument whereby
+we see that, if we distinguish anything at all, then ‘all this’—
+including in the end the physical universe—is how it must
+eventually appear. In short, what I prove is that all universes,
+whatever their contents, are constructed according to the same
+formal principles.
+
+It might be helpful if, with the reader’s leave, I break off my
+task of reviewing for a moment to make a more general comment.
+In Laws of Form [ attempted to state as far as [ could the masculine
+side of thmgs just as in the present book I try, again as far as my
+limited talents allow, to say something of the feminine side. The
+two books are thus in some respects companion volumes.
+
+Because they look from different sides, they cannot fairly be
+assessed from the same side. In dealing with the form, it is the
+argument that matters, however absurd or inadequate the sub-
+stance of it may seem. But in dealing with the content, it is the
+substance that matters, even though the argument may seem
+inadequate or contradictory. Any man with the least experience
+of the world should know by now that it is inappropriate to
+argue with a woman.
+
+110
+The poct, when possessed of the muse, may contradict himself
+in every breath, and still reflect a reality that the most meticu-
+lous argument might never approach. Only the male principle
+represents itself in the perfection and penetration of eitherfor, the
+method of all argument. The female principle is in the reception
+and completeness of bothfand, the embodiment of all life. It is a
+measure of our colossal cultural bias towards maleness that we
+tend to think we can invalidate any ‘serious’ piece of literature
+by faulting the argument.
+
+The really awful joke is that women thought they could be
+‘liberated’ by going to universities and learning to argue like men.
+They only fell further into the man-trap, becoming still more
+alienated from the knowledge that what they have to offer of their
+own accord is at least as important, and very much other than all
+this masculine shouting.
+
+The male who has become related to the female no longer
+shouts, even when he is presenting the masculine side of things.
+And the female who is related to the male no longer feels the
+need to ape him, although she will relay his views with hers
+because she will have come to see that he is, in this respect, her
+looking-glass.
+
+The trouble starts when the man begins to reflect something
+else. He may not be entirely to blame. The woman may be with-
+holding something. But once it starts, it is vicious. The woman no
+longer trusts the man’s knowledge that does not reflect her
+experience, so withholds more and more. The man finds the
+woman morc and more sccretive and eventually stops trying to
+get through to her. He goes off and sets up shop with his male
+cronies, where they crack dirty jokes about females. Meanwhile
+the woman arranges tea parties with her female friends where
+they gossip about male inadequacy. And so the dismal pattern we
+all know so well becomes established.
+
+It is as if the woman were the body to the man’s breath: the
+dispirited body cannot speak:: it can only gossip: the disembodied
+spirit cannot know: it can only shout: marry them, and the
+body knows and speaks, and the spirit speaks and knows.
+
+The man being the voice in the partnership, he speaks from and
+for the woman in all things, whether male or female. Thus the
+
+111
+man is still speaking from the woman, even when he speaks of
+the form.
+
+18. The Graphic Work of M C Escher, HAWTHORNE
+
+The techniques of graphic art, the laws of line, balance, and
+perspective, are so obviously concerned with the geometry of
+formal projection, that there is a temptation for the artist to use
+them to represent, in the 2-space of his planar medium, some-
+thing that he has fetched no farther than from the ordinary
+3-space of physical existence. His difficulty, being denied one of
+the space dimensions and the whole of the time dimension, is to
+represent anything at all from the holocosm, where there are
+more spaces and times than in physical existence.
+
+The problem is not resolved, as some artists attempt to resolve
+it, by disregarding some of the techniques at hand. In all art, the
+problem is to do what we can with the already inadequate re-
+sources available, and the task is not lightened by overlooking one
+or more of these resources, although the artist can and must
+deliberately discard one or another of them when it is not de-
+manded by what he has to say.
+
+An artist who has failed to master a particular formality can
+seldom be fully confident in respect of whether it might be
+demanded in the context of what he has to express. It is like a
+rule of etiquette: you may break it with perfect confidence
+provided you know it: and it is apparent, to anyone who knows
+it, whether another person has broken it deliberately or through
+ignorance of its existence or purpose. Hence Bismarck’s defini-
+tion of a gentleman: a man who is never unintentionally rude.
+
+In each art there are, as it were, certain acid tests, certain
+formalities that are so difficult to fulfil adequately that, when an
+artist is seen to be able to fulfil one of them, you know he has
+made it. For example in mathematics there is the statement and
+proof of a theorem. In drawing there is the naked human form,
+in music there is the fugue, in poetry there is the sonnet. Each
+of these formalities demands of the artist an unusual degree of
+maturity in its handling and of technical skill in its execution.
+And each leaves him more than usually exposed to critical
+comment.
+
+112
+If we reexamine these formalities in search of a common
+element, we find, when we review them in depth, that each such
+formality can be seen, in its way, as an illustration of the marriage
+contract. I mention5 in the notes how this applies to the proof of
+a mathematical theorem. In the Petrarchan sonnet the same test
+is evident in the union of the octave with its resolving sestet.
+And so on through the other disciplines. Readers familiar with
+other formalities will I think immediately see how it applies to
+them all.
+
+But I digress, although not without point. The point is that
+this artist has mastered the formalities of his medium so superbly
+that he is able to use it with a magic that is, as far as I know,
+unique to his discipline. Even the absence, in the medium, of the
+temporal dimension that the composer and the poet find so use-
+ful, becomes, under his hand, another blessing, for it compels him
+to record the clear, flat, ancient, and tremendously familiar
+scenes that project themselves between temporal regions.
+
+19. The Tibetan Book of the Dead
+
+An English edition of this remarkable classic, together with
+outstanding (and necessary) commentaries by able and dis-
+tinguished commentators, is published by Oxford University
+Press. It is exceedingly advanced and difficult, but I would
+recommend it very strongly if you feel you can take it.
+
+There are so many ways an unprepared westerner is unfitted
+to take in the subject matter of books such as this, one of them
+being our strong desire to persuade or ‘convert’ other people to
+our way of thinking. The eastern policy is generally the opposite,
+it is considered wrong to disillusion or ‘trouble’ people with
+knowledge they do not seek of their own accord, and to attempt
+to force knowledge of any kind upon others is regarded as
+harmful.
+
+It is obvious enough, if we think of it, that knowledge must be
+shaped to the vessel that is to hold it. If we try to force in more
+than the vessel will hold, the vessel breaks. Thus a teacher may
+say to one pupil what he may not say to another.
+
+Equally, the whole field of doctrine, considered to be so
+‘important’ in western politics that people have always been
+
+113
+prepared to murder one another in respect of it, is regarded in
+the east as in a sense worth no more than the paper it is written
+on. You are not encouraged to believe what you are told, but to
+experience it for yourself. The doctrine, other than as a guide to
+the experience, is considered literally worthless.
+
+What is fully true cannot get away, cannot be lost, is at all
+times evident, is always here to be appreciated, and only what is
+fully true remains thus safeguarded by its own indestructibility.
+It is not dependent on what you or I say about it. What is false,
+on the contrary, is utterly dependent on what is said, and to
+maintain it we have to keep on saying it.
+
+The book is difficult because it gives an account of what is
+perhaps the highest form of Buddhist doctrine. In reviewing it I
+think 1 should affirm that I am neither a Buddhist nor not a
+Buddhist.17 As I have already said, I am not any kind of ist, for
+that would be fixative of partiality and incorpleteness. But by
+not being a particular ist, one does not thereby discard or deny
+oneself the way of being it holds. An ist is a person who main-
+tains, for example, that reality is only ‘nothing but’ what can be
+measured, shall we say, with a thermometer. He might call him-
+self a Thermometist. By saying one is not a Thermometist, one
+does not thereby deny oneself, for ever after, the use of a thermo-
+meter, and nor does being caught employing a thermometer in
+any way brand one as a Thermometist, although I regret to say
+that this is the way we all do learn to argue. The game we call
+Debate depends for its effectiveness upon the constant use of just
+such misleading tricks. Until we recall that games of this kind
+are in fact only games, to be invested with whatever significance
+we write into the rules, we cannot even begin to follow, much
+less to understand, this highly sophisticated book relating how
+death regards life.
+
+To gain from such a book we have first to learn how to put on
+a doctrine, a way of presenting things, and then take it off again
+like a suit of clothes. If you wear the same suit all your life, you
+can very easily forget what is underncath. Most people spend
+most of their lives imagining they are their clothes.
+
+A colleague tells me there was once a crow who, being of a
+
+114
+religious turn of mind, flew off (as crows fly) in search of the
+Great Crow. After many vicissitudes (whatever these may be) he
+finally came to one or more crows (I forget exactly) who could
+tell him, so he asked them. Why, they said, surprised, you are
+the Great Crow.
+
+20. The I Ching
+
+The I Ching, or Book of Changes. The Richard Wilhelm
+translation (into German) has been rendered into English by
+Cary F Baynes, and is published by Routledge and Kegan Paul.
+This, in spite of the double translation, is the only edition I
+know that retains the magic. Others claim greater accuracy, but
+in fact miss much of the deeper significance. Chinese being what
+it is, a translation from it is virtually restricted to the wisdom of
+the translator himself, and this disbars almost any translator in
+the world from attempting this book.
+
+The Book of Changes is a magic oracle. You may ask it a question
+for help, but never out of curiosity. The psychologist Carl Jung,
+who writes a preface to this edition, asked the Book to help him
+write it, and this it did with great cunning.
+
+Recorded in the Book are 4096 ways the world can change for
+better or for worse, and even if you don’t use it as an oracle,
+what it advises each time is generally considered to be very wise,
+and seems so, also, to me.18
+
+1t
+The Angel that presided o’er my birth
+Said, ‘Little creature, form’d of Joy & Mirth,
+Go love without the help of any Thing on Earth.’
+
+William Blake
+(,jeo@%flhp
+
+Well, here we go, dear Reader, together for one last trip. First
+we must take off into space. Inner space, outer space, it is all
+the same this time. Wherever you go in outer space, your image
+goes in inner space, so you can look at it from either side as you
+please.
+
+So then, are we all ready? Fasten your seat-belts, Ladies and
+Gentlemen! If anybody has cold feet, now’s the time to own up.
+Unfasten your seat-belt, and get out while you still can. What,
+Madam, you get travel-sick? Then please don’t come! And you,
+Sir, I see that your ego is your only means of support. You had
+please better stay at home.
+
+So then, all those not coming stop reading this paragraph, put
+the book down, and snap out of it.
+
+So now (no, Madam, you cannot come and not come at the same
+time, not on a single ticket), now, the rest of us, are we all
+ready? We are? Then off we go.
+
+Swoosh!
+
+This is Commander Girth, your Captain, speaking. Your
+Navigator, Lieutenant Calculus, has prepared a flight-plan, which
+your Stewardess, Miss Terylene, will be passing round to all
+passengers in due course. There is no need for alarm. You may
+unfasten your seat-belts and start smoking. Orders for duty-free
+drinks will now be taken by Miss Terylene.
+
+As you will see Ladies and Gentlemen from the flight plan, we
+aim to station ourselves at a medium distance from Galactic
+
+Planct Number 587902613, known to you as Earth, from where,
+
+117
+Ladies and Gentlemen, you have just come. Shortly we shall be
+on station.
+
+We are now on station, Ladies and Gentlemen.
+
+Ladies and Gentlemen, in the pockets of the seat in front of you
+you will find your wide-angle time lenses. They have the property
+of condensing a span of 200 years into the space of two minutes
+or so. Please put on your wide-angle time lenses, Ladies and
+Gentlemen, and observe the earth.
+
+On your right you will see the Summer of 1770. Beethoven,
+you will observe, is in his mother’s womb, but he is, as you can
+see, already very well aware of himself. Later on you can observe
+how he will forget himself, in almost every department except
+his music. Look farther left, Ladies and Gentlemen, towards his
+death, and see how he begins to remember himself again, to fit
+the pieces together. By this time, you will notice, God has
+already struck him deaf, and rendered him ill and nearly blind
+and almost friendless. This is because He (God) wishes to observe
+how the music of the spheres might appear when squeezed out
+through the involutions of a stricken and suffering human.
+Although omniscient, God cannot of course experience how the
+realities of heaven are expressed in the illusions and suffering of an
+carthly existence, without twisting himself up into such an
+existence, so as to look out of human eyes, to hear through
+human ears, to feel with human nerves, to particularize and chop
+himself up into a human brain. From our present vantage point,
+Ladies and Gentlemen, we can see clearly that any human impres-
+sion or expression is a record of how God feels and appears after
+being forced through a sort of material mincing machine.
+
+Adjust the focus of your space-reducing attachment, Ladies
+and Gentlemen. You will now observe that the earth herself is a
+living creature, and that what you have called men are the
+microbes on her skin. You can see clearly the spots that the
+microbes call towns, and the larger eruptions or boils that they
+call cities. T am sure you can imagine, Ladics and Gentlemen,
+
+118
+how itc,hy the spots are, and how painful the boils must be to the
+poor earth.
+
+Pan left, Ladies and Gentlemen, towards the sun, now setting
+on the part of the earth we are examining. Observe that he also
+has spots. They are caused by microbes much more powerful and
+virulent than men.
+
+Pan right again to Earth, Ladies and Gentlemen. You will
+notice that on the parts of her skin that the microbes call
+‘civilized’, the boils are so large and close together that they are
+beginning to merge into one another in great blotches, and the
+rash of spots round these blotches is almost continuous. You will
+observe, too, that the pus from these sore places is spreading over
+the surface and running down rivers to infect other areas. Adjust
+your time-lenses, Ladies and Gentlemen, and observe how rapidly
+the infection is spreading, and how quickly the microbes are
+
+multiplying.
+
+Adjust your fine screws, Ladies and Gentlemen, and you will
+see amongst the microbes some that are smaller than the others.
+These are viruses, and their cell-structure is incomplete so that
+they are only fully operative when they become part of other
+cells. In their own language, you may remember, they are called
+Experts.
+
+Observe if you will Ladies and Gentlemen the operative cycle
+of an Expert. You will see one of them entering a normal,
+differentiated cell. Observe that it goes straight to the nucleus.
+It has the power to do this because it is incomplete, and when it
+gets to the nucleus it starts to rearrange the structure there.
+Remember, Ladies and Gentlemen, the well-known law that
+only what is partial can change what is complete. Your physicists
+split the atom, you may remember, by bombarding it with parts
+of atoms, because whole atoms leave it unchanged.
+
+Observe how, shortly after the entry of the Expert, the normal
+cell becomes larger and squarer, less like its neighbours, and
+
+119
+starts to multiply very rapidly into what are called (down there)
+production plants and office blocks. You will also notice that
+many of these large square cells break down and, instead of the
+one Expert that went in, they release hundreds of new Experts, all
+identically constructed, which rapidly disperse to infect more cells.
+
+We are very sorry to have to tell you, Ladies and Gentlemen,
+that these huge square cells have been diagnosed as malignant. I
+regret to say that the planet Earth is suffering the terminal stages
+of a virulent and rapidly spreading cancer of the skin.
+
+Through the other port, Ladies and Gentlemen, you can use
+your long-distance attachment to observe a more advanced
+planetary world, Number 1213602. There you will see that the
+microbes have evolved far enough to use Experts without
+destroying their host planet. We can go there shortly and pay
+them a visit, Ladies and Gentlemen, although I must warn you of
+the strict quarantine regulations with which you will have to
+comply. You will be housed with other beings on the planet
+somewhat like yourselves, all specialist trained, who act as
+slaves to the more evolved inhabitants. In this planet they use
+education as a means of making people insensitive and confining
+them inwardly, thus producing beings who remain at the same
+task, however irksome, without needing physical chains to hold
+them there. So in this planet, Ladies and Gentlemen, you will
+find that only the underprivileged are forced to suffer the indig-
+nity of education. This is to brand them with an identity called a
+profession, and to cripple them internally so that they will be
+incapable of doing anything else. You will note that the children
+born of these slaves are also made slaves, not by any external
+imposition, but because the slaves themselves are taught to
+despise the free people, and are proud of the brands of their
+qualifications, and make sure that their children are similarly
+crippled and branded from an early age.
+
+What’s that you say, Sir? Madam? Did you say how much older
+is this planet than the earth? Not older, Ladies and Gentlemen.
+
+t is about 300,000 earth-years younger.
+
+120
+What'’s that Sir? Mr Want, isn’t it? What was your question,
+Mr Want? Well, yes, of course we can, if you wish. How does
+everybody else feel? Yes, certainly, Mrs Wish. We aim to please
+everybody. Yes, Miss Desire. Of course. Naturally. We quite
+understand about your boy friend Mr Lust.
+
+Quick, Miss Terylene, the sedatives. Ladies and Gentlemen,
+there is no need to be alarmed. We are returning to Earth. We
+hope you enjoyed your trip with us. Please fasten your seat-belts.
+The re-entry may be just a little bit bumpy but Miss Terylene is
+on her way with a free drink that will enable you all to forget it.
+
+What'’s that, Mr Lust? Your council house in Harbury? Well,
+I’m afraid, yousee . . . Yes, Miss Desire, I quite understand your
+feelings, but yousee . . . No, Mrs Wish, I'm afraid not, but . . .
+No, of course not, Mr Want, we do the best we can.
+
+Now Ladies and Gentlemen, no more questions please, is
+everybody ready for the re-entry? All drunk your sedatives?
+Good. All in a hurry to get back, sure we understand. People
+down there waiting for you, wondering where you are. Naturally.
+Of course. Miss Terylene will be passing round Customs
+Declarations Forms which you are to fill in stating your desired
+destination and nature of business. Meanwhile Mr Calculus will
+be calling base and making the necessary bookings. It depends to
+
+some extent on vacancies.
+
+Vacancies where, did I hear you say, Madam, Sir? Where? In
+the maternity wards, of course!
+
+121
+[}
+
+[
+
+ol
+
+I relegate to the notes matters that, for any reason, might
+interrupt the flow of the narrative. Sometimes, but not
+always, they deal with topics too advanced to be suitable to a
+narrative text. In any case, although each note is latched to a
+certain point in the text, it is not necessarily meant to be read
+at that point.
+
+This not being a textbook, the deepest matters are touched
+only lightly, and I make no claim to any kind of textbook
+thoroughness in the coverage of such matters. My only hope
+is that the few simple remarks I do make might serve as a
+guide to give some perspective to what is covered more fully
+in other books.
+
+As Robert Graves records (p 256) in The White Goddess, the
+Genesis story is archetypally false, having been corrupted by
+some early enemy of women. That Eve should be produced
+out of Adam is patently absurd.
+
+Rival religions have produced different terminologies, and
+what was in any case difficult has become almost impossible to
+follow through a multiplication of names. Let me try to do
+some sorting out.
+
+Space is a construct. In reality there is no space. Time is
+also a construct. In reality there is no time.
+
+In eternity there is space but no time.
+
+In the deepest order of cternity there is no space. It is
+devoid of any quality whatever.
+
+This is the reality of which the Buddhas speak. Buddhists
+call it Nirvana. Its order of being is zero. Its mode is complete-
+ness. Its sex-emblem is female.
+
+It is known to western doctrine, sometimes as the Godhead,
+sometimes as IHVH, or that which was in the beginning, is
+now, and ever shall be. This way of describing it, like any
+
+123
+other, is misleading, suggesting that it has qualities like being,
+priority, temporality. Having no quality at all, not even
+(except in the most ‘degenerate sense) the quality of being, it
+can have none of these suggested properties, although it is
+what gives rise to them all. It is what the Chinese call the
+unnamable Tao, the Mother of all existence. It is also called
+the Void.
+
+In a qualityless order, to make any distinction at all is at
+once to construct all things in embryo. Thus the First Thing,
+and with it the First Space and the First Existence and the
+First Being, are all created explosively together.
+
+This does not of course mean that the ‘big bang’ theory that
+cosmologists suggest for the creation of the universe is the
+true one. The ‘explosion’ into existence does not take place
+in time, and so from the point of view of time is a continuous
+operation. Thus the ‘big bang’ theory and the ‘continuous
+creation’ theory, like all famous ‘rival’ theories in western
+culture, are both equally true.
+
+This First Creation, or First Presence, is the order of which
+the Christs speak. Christians call it God. Its order of being is
+unity. Its mode is perfection. Its sex-emblem is male.
+
+It is known to eastern doctrine, as it is to western, as the
+Triune God or Trinity. In western books of magic it is called
+The One Thing. In China it is called the namable Tao. In
+Tibetan Buddhism it is called the densely-packed region.
+
+This last name is most vividly expressive, it being the region
+of the creating or seeding-out of all qualities from no quality:
+it is, in other words, the place where every blade of grass and
+every grain of sand is numbered, the place where nothing is
+forgotten. It is the place where all is still ‘small’ enough to be
+reviewed together.
+
+The quality of being in nascent existence, and as yet without
+any size, is what makes the densely-packed region the region
+of omniscience. Unlike the Void, which is the place without
+quality, the densely-packed region is the place where all
+qualities can be seen at once to be capable of infinite variety
+and extension. How they may become extended is of course
+how, in some universe or other, they actually are extended. It
+
+124
+is here that every universe is worked out from first principles,
+except that the ‘working out’ does not take place mathematic-
+ally step by step, as it is done on Earth, or at the physical level
+of one of the other universes so constructed, but is all at once
+obvious and immediate, as there is no time. Hence the
+omniscience.
+
+In Laws of Form, by the way, I took just the tiniest thread of
+one of these ‘calculations’, and teased it out laboriously step
+by step just far enough to give some inkling of how the
+material of our own universe is created. It took me, down
+here on Earth, some ten years of the most unremitting and
+painstaking labour to get it right. Up in the densely-packed
+region it is all done in a jiffy, and this and every other
+possible universe are all constructed, maintained, known,
+and every feature docketed before you can say ‘flash’.
+
+Human beings who have entered this region, and then
+found their way back from it to the region of their ordinary
+humanity, report that in it one is indeed omniscient, but the
+knowledge one knows there cannot all be carried in a human
+frame.
+
+A Buddha, of course, has to go through this region to reach
+the void. Other human beings who reported, like Dante, to
+seeing It from a distance, without actually entering into Its
+being, describe It as a point of the most dazzling brightness.
+The reasons why It must appear this way, although not com-
+plicated, are unsuitable for inclusion in a book of this
+informal character.
+
+The Christian mystics, although they knew through simple
+insight that the One Thing, or First God, is a Trinity, were
+not, as far as I am aware, able to say why. The doctrine thus
+remained a mystery and a weakness in the armory of Christian
+apologists. I am not sure whether the Buddhists were able to
+explain it, although they knew it, of course, before the
+Christians did.
+
+The explanation of the Trinity in fact turns out to be simple
+enough. When you make a distinction of any kind whatever,
+the easiest way to represent its essential properties mathe-
+matically is by some sort of closed curve like a circle. Here
+
+125
+the circumference distinguishes two sides, an inside and an
+outside. The two sides, plus the circumference itself, which
+is neither the inside nor the outside, together make up three
+aspects of one distinction. Thus every distinction is a trinity.
+Hence the First Distinction is the First Trinity.
+
+We can even go so far as to identify, in this mathematical
+representation, which aspect represents what. The inside
+represents the aspect where the Void or IHVH remains un-
+disturbed and undistributed. It is, in other words, the aspect
+of the Godhead in the God, and is called, when considered as
+an aspect of the Trinity, God the Holy Ghost. It is thus the
+senior member of this colossal triple partnership, and this is
+why, in Christian doctrine, -a sin against the Holy Ghost is
+regarded as the most unforgivable.
+
+Next we have the ‘line’ of distinction itself—the circum-
+ference of the circle in the mathematical representation. This
+line (it is only a line in mathematics, of course, not in reality :
+like a line that exists in a drawing, but not in the thing drawn)
+—this line is actually the ‘seeding’ of the densely-packed
+region, the embryonic outline of all things. In the Christian
+Trinity it is what is called God the Father: first in creation,
+second in seniority.
+
+Finally we have the outside. The first distinction may be
+regarded as cleft into and projected out of the Void, and this
+outer projective region, before it becomes further differen-
+tiated, as it does in the rest of creation, is the aspect known to
+western doctrine as the Word or First Message. In the Trinity
+it is the junior partner, God the Son.
+
+At this point, before we carry the story further, it is I think
+appropriate to recall Blake’s couplet to God, which runs,
+
+If you have made a Circle to go into,
+Go into it yourself and see how you would do.
+
+The story of creation can of course be protracted in-
+definitely. To cut a long story short, it turns out that there
+are five orders (or ‘levels’) of eternity, four of which are
+
+126
+existent (although not of course ‘materially’ existent, this
+comes later) and one of which is non-existent.
+
+The non-existent order is of course the inmost, the one the
+Greeks called the Empyrean. In the mathematics of the eternal
+structure the five orders are plainly distinguishable, and it is
+a fact of some interest that the early Greek explorers, who
+were not so well equipped mathcmatlcallv as we are today,
+nevertheless confirmed, from observation alone, that the
+number of eternal regions or ‘heavens’ stands at five.
+
+At the next level, travelling outwards from within, an
+extraordinary thing happens. As we come into the sixth level
+(i.e. the fifth order, recollecting that the first level is of order
+zero) by crossing the fifth ‘veil’—mathematically speaking a
+‘veil’ is crossed when we devise an ‘outer’ structure that
+embodies the ‘rules’ of the structure next within—when we
+cross this fifth veil, a strange thing happens. We find that we
+cannot in fact cross it (i.e. it is mathematically impossible to
+do so) without creating time.
+
+The time we create first, like the first space, is much more
+primitive and less differentiated than what we know in
+physical existence. The time we set our watches by is actually
+the third time. The first time is much less sophlstlcatcd Just
+as the regions of the first space have no size, so the intervals
+of the first time have no duration. This doesn’t mean, as it
+might suggest in physical time, that the intervals are very
+short, so short that they vanish. It means snmp]y that they
+are neither short nor long, because duration is a quality that
+has not yet been introduced into the system. For the same
+reason, all the heavenly states, although plainly distinguishable
+from onc another, are in reality neither large nor small,
+neither close together nor far apart..
+
+Everything reflects in everything clse, and the peculiar and
+fundamental property of the fifth order of being reflects itself
+all over the universe, both at physical and metaphysical levels.
+An interesting reflexion of it in mathematics is in the fact that
+equations up to and including the fourth degree can be solved
+with algebraic formulae. Beyond this a runaway condition
+takes over making it impossible to produce a formula to solve
+
+127
+equations of the fifth or higher degrees. A similar ‘runaway’
+condition applies, as we shall see in a moment, when we cross
+the fifth ‘veil’ outwards into the first time.
+
+It requires only a moment’s consideration to see that what
+we call time is in fact a one-way blindness, the blind side
+being called ‘the future’. Once we proceed into any time, no
+matter how primitive, we come out of heaven, i.e. out of
+eternity, out of the region where there is no blindness and
+where, therefore, in any part of it, we can still see the whole.
+And as we proceed further and further out into each succes-
+sive and less primitive time and space, our blindness at each
+crossing is recompounded. It is thus easy to come out, hard to
+find one’s way back in.
+
+For those who do find their way back in, the procedures
+and the crossings all have to be reversed.
+
+When in my review of the Commedia I stated that I thought
+Dante’s vision of God was genuine, this was not irresponsible
+guesswork on my part. It was the result of a careful checking
+of his account with the known holocosmic principles.
+
+For example, before arriving at a place where he could see
+God, Dante reports to suffering two successive ‘deaths of the
+eyesight’. Actually there are three, but the first is not
+usually experienced so noticeably as the other two.
+
+On the first stage of the journey inwards, we cross the
+seventh veil, arriving in what is known as the subtle world.
+By the way, when going inwards the veils are usually counted
+the other way, so that the seventh veil becomes the first, the
+sixth the second, and so on. The subtle world is in fact another
+material world, although the material is not physical. It looks
+very like the physical world. Going there is what is known to
+many people as learning to see with ‘the third eye’.
+
+Perhaps I should say a little more about this closest of all of
+the non-physical existences, as so many people these days are
+familiar with it. Mediums generally learn to see it as part of
+their discipline. Things in it look much the same only
+brighter and sharper. People appear very much brighter and
+sharper. Most people appear roughly the same age, shape, etc,
+as their physical appearance, but some appear different. For
+
+128
+example a physically young man might have the subtle body of
+a very old man. This is not an illusion. Everybody else using the
+‘third eye’ sees exactly the same. Some women, although this
+is comparatively rare, have the power to assume whatever age
+and shape they please. This accounts, of course, for the well-
+known cases of witches who approach young men looking as
+hideous as they know how, and proposing marriage. When the
+young man demurs, they promise that, when married, they
+will change into whatever shape he likes. The story makes sense
+because when in love or closelyrelated with a person, we tend to
+see the subtle body rather than the physical, and this is often
+why lovers are unable to describe the physical appearance of
+the loved one. Love is, indeed, the most powerful of all
+agencies that can transport us to the deeper levels. And what
+better example of it than Dante?
+
+In the subtle world you see things in whatever direction you
+turn your physical eyes to look at them, and so it may be some
+time before you realize that you are not using your physical eyes
+to see them with. The first time I learned to use subtle vision, it
+took me about an hour, and several experiments, to convince
+myself I wasn’t using my eyes. Dante himself could well have
+missed noting this first and subtle ‘death of the eyesight’.
+
+But not the next two. They are much more striking. For
+example St Paul was physically blinded for several days after
+unintentionally crossing the next veil but one.
+
+Dante’s description of God is consistent, it seems to me,
+with that of someone who has found his way, or been guided,
+to one of the outer heavens.
+
+Both naturally and supernaturally, space is female and time
+male. It is indeed the intercourse of a multidimensional space
+with the always singular dimension of time that brings about
+the conception of the lower (i.e. more outward) orders of
+existence.
+
+That space is female and time malg is a fact (not a fancy or a
+speculation or a theory or a tradition or a guess) so obvious to
+a poet that he may forget that it is something that ordinary
+educated people have to be told. The process of western
+education consists of so coarsening the inner sensibilities that
+
+129
+one becomes almost entirely dependent on the outer (i.e.
+physical) senses, and the spectacle of the man of science
+demonstrating with huge, lengthy, and costly experiments
+what may have been quite obvious in the first place, is part of
+the price we all have to pay if we are to enjoy the undoubted
+material advantages that such science brings in its service.
+
+I remember not so many years ago, when the sexedness of
+all things was just beginning to dawn on me, finding it con-
+firmed in Blake. What he says is again worth recalling.
+
+‘Allegories are things that Relate to Moral Virtues. Moral
+Virtues do not Exist ; they are Allegories & dissimulations.
+But Time & Space are Real Beings, a Male & a Female.
+Time is a Man, Space is a Woman, & her Masculine
+Portion is Death.’
+
+Eternity does not of course mean ‘going on for ever’, which
+is a mere extension in time, but is simply the place where time
+does not exist. The male elements here are not temporal : they
+are formal.
+
+We see from all this that at every level of being, eternal or
+temporal, the male element emerges from the female, rather
+than the other way round. So if the Genesis account of the
+birth of Eve were true, something would indeed have gone
+very wrong with the universal archetypal law, As above, so
+below, and its particular reversal, As below, so (in some
+respect) above. How things are is a strict result of how things
+can be, and the knowledge of how things can be has never been
+denied to mankind, although he frequently chooses to cut
+himself off from it.
+
+As I point out in the text, the reason why this innate
+knowledge of how things can be is called divine, is because it
+has to be dug for or divined. It is not what is apparent on the
+surface. In respect of the question, how deep is divine, the
+answer is, as deep as you care to go. As far as Nirvana, that is.
+There is no place deeper than this.
+
+By way of comparison, the Freudian unconscious consists
+largely of personal elements that must be made conscious and
+
+130
+purified before it is safe to proceed deeper. Jung’s racial
+memories and archetypes constitute the next stage, although
+their initial manifestations are still outside the eternal regions.
+The deeper we go, the more they are the same for everybody.
+The deepest level is the same for all.
+
+How long does it take to get there? Well, counting only
+from the year when he dropped out, it took the Prince of
+Kapila a total of six years to find Nirvana.
+
+I know of no safer way of exploring the divine than through
+the experience of total love. The cleft of the First Distinction
+can see its own outline as male on the one side and female on
+the other. By pretending successively to be one side of itself
+and then the other, it can make out to itself that its one out-
+line is in fact two persons, thus engineering the huge love-
+partnership that is Heaven’s First Family Joke. It is a very happy
+joke, and one which is quite available to human lovers who
+proceed far enough into themselves to find the place where
+they meet. It is available in any total love-experience between
+a male and a female.
+
+I think I should warn the reader that there are two major
+confusions she, or he, is likely to meet in other books. The
+first is a serious one.
+
+In many western texts, be they of magic, occult science,
+religion, or the most profound theological doctrine, there is
+some confusion, and often gross confusion, between the two
+original orders of being, i.e. between the Zero and the Unity,
+the Godhead and the God, the Female Constant and the Male
+Constant, the Yin and the Yang. In eastern texts there is
+seldom such confusion, they either get it right or don’t get it
+at all. But in western doctrine God and the Godhead are
+frequently mixed up, and the sex of the Godhead is often
+" omitted, or even mistaken, thus making out God to be homo-
+sexual. Most frequently, of course, the Godhead is just not
+mentioned at all. In other books the confusion extends over
+unity and zero, such books often speaking of ‘the One’ when
+they mean ‘the Void’. This, I think, is partly a failure to
+distinguish between ordinal and cardinal numbers. Order
+
+131
+zero (the Void) is the first order we count. Just as note zero
+is the first note in this book. But the confusion over sex, or the
+missing out of the female reality altogether, I put down to our
+severe cultural neurosis, especially in Christianity and Judaism,
+concerning women.
+
+The other confusion, though just as prevalent, is not so
+serious. Because the heavens are supposed to be exalted, but
+we have to dive deep to find them, there is confusion in all the
+literature as to whether the divine is up or down. It is, of
+course, in every direction and in no direction at all, because
+it is here with us now at the very centre of things, as well as
+everywhere else which, when we get there, we find is the
+same place.
+
+If we imagine this ‘centre’ of it all surrounded with layers
+like a pearl or like an onion (‘onion’ and ‘union’ are the same
+root, as you might have guessed), then in this analogy the
+divine is what is relatively deep and the mundane is what is
+relatively superficial. This way there is no confusion. ‘Above’
+as in ‘heavens above’ properly refers to the order of priority of a
+given office in the total residence of the divine family and its
+kingdom, just as we say on earth that one rank is hlgher than
+another without meaning that its office is higher up the build-
+
+mg
+
+‘What a man desires to know is that (i.e. the external world).
+But his means of knowing is this (i.e. himself). How can he
+know that? Only by perfecting this.’—Kuan Tsu.
+
+Considering this ancient doctrine with relation to modern
+physics, we can note that the analysis of either view amounts
+to this: that the universe we se€ is the equivalent of a measure
+of the instrument we use for looking at it: in other words it is
+itself the consequence of the capacity of its particular observer:
+and thus we have only to change our own fundamental
+capacity, and this is sufficient to change, in any desirable way,
+the universe we actually experience.
+
+‘In short, the world must then become quite another. It
+
+132
+must so to speak wax or wane as a whole. The world of the
+happy is altogether different from the world of the unhappy.’
+—Wittgenstein.
+
+The fact that a ‘normal’ person can recollect little, if any-
+thing, from the first five years of his or her life, and in
+particular from the first three, is not irrelevant to this discus-
+sion. His or her early indoctrination or brainwashing requires,
+to give the illusion of necessity, permanence, and, above all,
+a characteristic exclusiveness to the ‘reality’ that is to be
+imposed on the child as ‘the only sensible’ interpretation of
+its experience, that the child shall forget that such an in-
+doctrination ever took place. Those upon whom the in-
+doctrination didn’t properly ‘take’, can eventually find that the
+content of their first five years is as readily available as that of
+any other five years, and can see in what ways the usual for-
+getting of these important years, although ‘normal’ to our
+culture (it is not I think normal to every culture), is un-
+healthy and unnecessary, and how it in fact prevents the
+development of our insight and fixes our view of the outside
+world.
+
+Why the form of the indoctrination, once started, perpetu-
+ates itself is obvious enough: no ‘normal’ adults, who have
+lost so much of their reality because of it, are able to bear the
+thought of any child possessing, in its understanding of the
+world, what would amount, if they didn’t do something about
+it, to a huge advantage over themselves, and so they take steps,
+self-protectively and instinctively, and practically from the
+moment of its birth, to make the child into ‘one of us’, i.c. to
+put a stop to what it knows that we now don’t know. More-
+over, the really telling part of this procedure takes place at an
+implicit level, not overtly, so that no one who doesn’t know
+what to look for can see what is really going on.
+
+This is, of course, a process by which the basic ground of
+any culture is automatically transmitted from one generation
+to the next, and generally there is no need to interfere with it.
+But when a culture somehow reaches a point in its history
+where its own built-in values will inevitably lead it to disaster,
+
+133
+as is now obvious, in our case, even to people who are still
+operating from within the nexus of these values, it becomes
+necessary, for as many of us who can do so, to take the lonely
+road out of it as fast as we can, to see what the alternatives are.
+There are quite a few of us, in every level of society and from
+all walks of life, who are doing just this, and what we have in
+common is that we all feel, now, that there is no solution
+(other than its total self-destruction) to be found within the
+values of the culture itself.
+
+When we drop out, it is not from any wish to ‘wash our
+hands’ of our native culture, or to ‘escape’ from it, as its
+obtuser adherents so interminably and so vociferously com-
+plain, but as a necessary, difficult, and dangerous operation to
+save what seems to us to be worth saving from a fate they either
+cannot see coming or haven’t the remotest idea what to do
+
+about if they can.
+
+The reader who thinks I am having her on would do well to
+glance at some not-too-difficult summary of the development
+of quantum physics between the two world wars. A glance, for
+example, at A History of Science by W C Dampier (he was
+originally called W C Dampier Dampier-Wetham but
+dropped the Wetham and one of the Dampiers on the under-
+standable ground, I imagine, that it was too much. I confess I
+never think of him without great concern for his problem of
+what to do with his name. He is dead now so he won’t mind
+this), a cursory glance, as I was saying, at p 396 onwards, will
+show what I mean.
+
+Very briefly, after thousands of years of investigation,
+physicists have found no ‘solid matter’ at all. Only little
+‘storms’ of ‘waves’, of which we can somehow perceive a few
+side-effects, although we can’t see them, feel them, or sense
+them in any way with any outward-probing sense or instru-
+ment. We don’t know what they are or where they are, in
+short, the only ‘reality’ they possess is the mathematical equation
+that predicts not what they will do, but what we might
+experience.
+
+This is what led physicists like Eddington and Jeans to say
+
+134
+that the universe is made entirely of mathematics. But the
+elements of mathematics, although we know they exist, don’t
+in fact exist in any physical form. The numerical elements, for
+those who are interested in such things, exist in the Fifth
+Order with the first time, i.e. two levels deeper than the
+physical. It is, I think, what is called the astral plane in magic.
+As we travel inwards, it is the last of the material existences.
+Its structure is transparent and crystalline. In the middle ages
+it was projected out and called the crystalline heaven, although
+it is not, technically speaking, an eternal region, It is where
+the eternal regions are first plotted and counted, for there are
+no numbers in eternity itself. You cannot count without time.
+When we proceed from here into the heavens themselves, we
+lose all numbers in a blinding flash as we return through the
+fifth veil into the outer heaven. From here on, if we are to
+survey what we sec mathematically, we have to use Boolean
+elements, which are not numerical.
+
+Eddington and Jeans thus secem in a way to be right, al-
+though the view they present is somewhat too narrow. For
+example we can’t take the mathematics in with us into any of
+the eternal regions, any more than we can bring it out with us
+into physical existence. We can use it only in its own place,
+either to formulate what we can observe of its own and other
+temporal structures, or to relate, from a temporal existence,
+what we can remember of the eternal structure. In the next
+note I shall hope to illustrate this.
+
+If you raise a number n to the power of a prime number p, and
+divide the result by p, there will be a remainder of n. For
+example
+47T =4 X 4 X 44X 4X4X4X 4=16384.
+
+Dividing this by 7 leaves a remainder of 4. It doesn’t matter
+if we make p smaller than n because the theorem doesn’t say
+that the remainder has to be the smallest. It just says that one
+of the possible residues remaining after taking p from n? an
+appropriate number of times will in fact be n. And it says it
+is 5o, not only in the cases we have actually tried, but in all of
+the infinity of cases we haven’t tried and can’t because we
+
+13§
+haven’t time to try them. In other words, it says something not
+merely about temporal existence, but about eternity.
+
+Certain particulars of this theorem were known to the
+Chinese in goo Bc, but a more general statement of it appears
+in the private correspondence of Pierre de Fermat, a French
+lawyer, in 1640 AD, and the theorem usually bears his name.
+
+A proof that it is true can be found in any university text-
+book of elementary arithmetic. You will find if you examine
+such a proof that it has two parts, a numerical part and a
+Boolean part, a calculation and an argument, and that it is the
+marriage of these two, the temporal form with the eternal,
+that bestows upon the theorem the gift of certainty.
+
+Old English cunnan, whence keen, ken, know, can, and con
+= steer, navigate, as in conning tower.
+
+In celebrating these great journeys into outer space, we tend
+to overlook the colossal and equally heroic journeys in the
+opposite direction undertaken, for the occasion, by men such as
+Isaac Newton. Without the extremely difficult, disciplined,
+and equally dangerous journeys into inner space, no journey
+into outer space could ever succeed.
+
+‘Here blinded with an Eye: and there
+Deaf with the drumming of an Ear.’
+
+This has long been a sore point between heaven and earth.
+God, by which I mean the first manifestation of the IHVH, and
+not the moralizing father-figure we project for the purpose of
+worship, has practically no understanding of good and evil,
+and is constantly amazed by our apparent preoccupation with
+‘objects’ of which He, as Himself, has no experience what-
+ever.
+
+‘A poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions
+of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and
+time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither.
+By this assumption of an inferior office of interpreting the
+
+136
+11
+
+12
+
+effect, in which perhaps after all he might acquit himself but
+imperfectly, he would resign a glory in the participation of
+the cause. There was little danger that Homer, or any of the
+eternal poets, should have so far misunderstood themselves as
+to have abdicated this throne of their widest dominion. Thosc
+in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as
+Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a
+moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in
+exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to
+advert to this purpose.’—Shelley.
+
+As Robert Graves has it in The White Goddess. What Sir
+Walter Raleigh (or Rawleigh or Ralegh) actually wrote was
+
+She hath lefte me here all alone,
+All allone as vnknowne,
+
+Who somtymes did me lead with her selfe,
+And me loude as her owne.
+
+Sentiments never change, but rhythms of speech do. A skilful
+editing in respect of its rhythm can give an ancient poem the
+appearance of being contemporary.
+
+One of the troubles of our civilization is that we have lost our
+roots. We use words without the least idea what they mean.
+I would advise anyone to get a good dictionary of roots, and
+look up every word he has ever used. He will be astonished. There
+are many such dictionaries, Eric Partridge has written a very
+readable one called Origins. Learn to read it, and you will
+know what God and man is.
+
+Just for a start. Husband, from hus = house, bond (for
+buandi) = a person dwelling. The latter root is the same as for
+bond, band, something that holds together, a boundary. Thus
+a husband is a man who gives a woman meaning by providing
+order, law, form. Derivably we have husbandman, a farmer
+(farm, firm, firmament, and throne are all akin) who cultivates
+his farm or estate or kingdom, tends her in sickness, reaps her
+in health, enters her, rides in her, works for her, mends her
+
+137
+fences, protects her, plays with her, and so on for ever and
+ever.
+
+Now wife. From vibrare = vibrate. So literally a man’s
+wife is his vibrator! She is the life that completes his form. Just
+as he makes the law of the household, so she makes the run-
+ning of it. She is what makes it go, she is the inner principle
+that makes it all work. He is the case, the design, and the
+hands of the clock, and she is what is making it tick. She
+doesn’t know what the time is without the hands to tell her.
+But the hands have no idea what to tell her unless she is there
+ticking away inside making them go. From here we spread out
+into a galaxy of words like wave, waver, weever, wiper, viper,
+whip (through the German of course), woman, waif, and so on
+for cver and ever.
+
+This is so colossal that my pencil refuses to come to rest. It
+wants to say it again. And again. Very well.
+
+A clock without a tick, without a pendulum or balance-
+wheel to regulate it, is utterly stupid. Unrepresentative.
+Irresponsible. Mischievous. No idea what it’s about. It
+hasn’t lost count, there just isn’t anything to count. Wheels
+and works, cogs and gears and hands all over the place, but
+no pendulum or balance-wheel ticking away for all this
+machinery to interpret.
+
+While all this is going on, or rather going off, somewhere
+far away is a tick without a clock, a balance-wheel that has
+nothing to count how many ticks it has ticked since eternity,
+a pendulum without works or hands, without anything to
+measure and interpret and display what it is up to, a regulator
+with nothing to regulate, a solitary thing ticking itself silly.
+Tick-tick-tick gabble-gabble-gabble.
+
+Man, your sole purpose on earth is to house and interpret
+woman. Nothing else matters. Without you she is homeless
+and meaningless. Only you can provide what she lacks. What-
+ever you do that is not thus entirely devoted to her is an
+infidelity, and you both will suffer for it. Woman, your only
+meaning on earth is to occupy and motivate man. Without
+you he is purposeless and moribund. You are his sole occupa-
+tion, his only motive and regulator. Nothing else is. Any part
+
+138
+13
+
+of your being that is not so placed at his disposal is misplaced,
+and you both will suffer for it.
+
+In short, man’s every talent is for woman’s delight, and her
+whole being is his playground.
+
+Corny ain’t it? Ever so soppy. Still, there it is. If you want
+it another way, nuclear bombs, fall-out, specially prepared
+nerve gas, specially cultured plague viruses, not soppy, who
+am I to say you can’t have it that way, as far as I am concerned
+you are welcome to it that way, I wish you good luck and I
+hope you will profit from it. It’s your trip.
+
+Our tribal structure, our family nexus, takes us to hell, and
+keeps us there, by the simple expedient of rewarding pain and
+punishing pleasure. Every time the child hurts itself it is
+comforted, fed, cuddled, rewarded in countless ways. If it
+does not hurt itself it is ignored, if it pleases itself it is
+punished.
+
+After twenty years or so of such conditioning, overlaid and
+reinforced by a continuous sanctimonious hypnotic verbal
+commentary, it is no wonder at all that the child, now sup-
+posedly grown up to ‘independence’ and confronted with the
+choice we all have to make between a pleasant life and a pain-
+ful one, unerringly chooses the painful one. And goes to hell.
+
+The usual way from hell back to heaven is via purgatory, and
+in one respect purgatory is worse than hell. It is worse because
+in hell one becomes so inured to it that one learns not to feel
+it. In fact one learns not to feel anything much. One becomes
+a sort of zombie, a science-fiction automaton. One fulfils, in
+fact, the form of the technocratic propaganda continuously
+droning on and on to the effect that this is really all one is
+anyway.
+
+Purgatory is worse than hell because, having realized,
+slowly or suddenly, that one is in hell, that one’s so-called
+life is without meaning or direction, that one has been conned
+and cheated out of one’s real experience of one’s self, well,
+one starts to get one’s feelings back, one begins to come out
+of the hypnosis, to wake up from the anaesthetic. And Christ!
+It hurts.
+
+139
+14
+
+15
+
+Heaven’s way of recalling us back to heaven is as simple as
+our parents’, our family’s, our tribe’s, our country’s, our
+humanity’s way of calling us out of heaven into hell. It
+reverses the polarity. It rewards pleasure, and punishes pain.
+Try the permutations as you may, there is no other way.
+Utterly simple, utterly obvious, yet realized so rarely that its
+realization is generally taken to be a miracle, and the resulting
+passage through purgatory is called a deliverance through grace.
+
+When it happens, although both pain and pleasure are re-
+doubled, it is mostly pain that has to come first. Indeed, the
+greater the damage, the greater the pain. There is little
+pleasure in beginning to come round after a terrible operation.
+
+But the pain of purgatory is compensated by the knowledge
+that at last we have started to do something about our
+condition. In the end, after a definite period of being punished
+for having allowed ourselves to be punished, we are rewarded
+with the pleasures of the paradisal state, and further rewarded
+for allowing ourselves to be so rewarded.
+
+I am not of course denigrating the specialist as a specialist. He
+set up his shop, and must promote his trade like anybody else.
+What [ am trying to say is that we must put out of our minds
+the idea that we can ever be led by specialists. Except, of
+course, to disaster.
+
+There is nothing more dangerous, to my mind, than the mod-
+ern craze for professionalism in politics. A leader needs qualities
+that are universal and intuitive, not partial and calculating. He
+must know how to be right, not how to reason wrong. He
+must, above all, have come to his own authority, and not be
+acting on somebody else’s. He must have come to his senses.
+
+How could a baby ever learn something so complicated as a
+language were it not for this deeper route (and root) to its
+meaning. We try to teach it the wrong way round. If you want
+your baby to speak as you do, don’t begin with daft baby-talk.
+Talk to it naturally, as you would to a colleague, don’t simplify
+what you say because it is a baby. It is more perceptive than
+you are. It models itself on your inner expectations, so above
+
+140
+
+-
+16
+
+all don’t think of it as a baby. If you follow this procedure
+from birth, any normal child, by the age of about three,
+will be perfectly capable of discussing anything you wish to
+discuss with it. The only trouble is that in two years’ time
+you will be required by law to send it to school, where it must
+now either adopt a mask of common idiocy or be isolated as
+a freak. I saw this happen to a little girl with parents who let
+her be herself without imposing their fantasy of what she
+‘should’ be. At three she was a most marvellous companion,
+especially since she was still fully conscious in the holocosm,
+and could impart or confirm much that we wanted to know
+about it, and she was, as babies and animals are until they
+have it dinned out of them, fully telepathic and clairvoyant. At
+five, when she went to school, she opted, wisely I think, for
+the mask of common idiocy expected of children of that age.
+Her speech became babyish to the required degree, and she
+cannot remember what she used to talk about, she cannot
+even recollect talking about it. She has lost her capacity for
+direct vision.
+
+Normal people of our cultural background have children
+for the purpose of fulfilling certain fantasies. They wouldn’t
+have them otherwise. But since fantasies are fantasies, every-
+one in the end is disappointed. Really onc is not fit to have a
+child unless one is prepared to go to one’s front gate and take
+in the first stranger that happens to come by, offering him, or
+her, the astonishing gift of free board and lodging and other
+attentions for the next sixteen years or so.
+
+The fact that many people wouldn’t have children if they
+knew in advance that this is what it meant, could only be to the
+general good. This planet is already overpopulated beyond
+danger limits, and will, in not many years from now, be over-
+populated beyond disaster limits.
+
+There are certain commentators who propound, in respect of
+the arts, what I shall call the shufflebottom theory. For example
+they accept the work of Shelley, Beethoven, and Pythagoras,
+to name but three, as sound, representative, eminently com-
+petent, and sane. But although Shelley, Beethoven, and
+
+141
+Pythagoras, to name but three, all substantially agree in
+respect of how and why they produced their work, the same
+commentators, shuffling from one buttock to the other, now
+pronounce Shelley, Beethoven, and Pythagoras, to name but
+three, to be utterly insane, and therefore not competent to
+say how or why they produced their work. This, they now say,
+is a matter for the decision of experts, who, although utterly
+incapable themselves of producing such work, are supposed,
+by some miracle they do not specify, to be able to say exactly
+how it is done.
+
+I personally should not feel competent to judge how
+Beethoven composed his music, and so I am perfectly willing
+to accept his account of the process, since his experience in this
+matter is so much greater than my own. I am naturally
+interested to see that his reports of how and why he composed
+music substantially agree with my experience of how and why
+I compose poetry. But even if he had said something different,
+I should not consider that I knew better than he.
+
+What the shufflebottom theory fails to account for is the
+fact that the poet is the first enjoyer of his work. He finds it
+just as astonishing as if it had been written by somebody else.
+In presenting it to the public, he acts in the capacity of editor.
+But in actually recording it, he feels himself only as the
+instrument. As Beethoven sums it up, the spirit speaks to me and
+I compose something.
+
+To ignore or pooh-pooh the implications of Beethoven’s
+remark, even in the so-called interests of science, seems to
+me to be simple-minded and unscientific. The theorist who
+thinks he knows better has not, it seems to me, learned any-
+thing beyond the way he was taught to do ‘composition’ at
+school, i.c. as something ‘thought out’ and ‘made up’.
+Naturally if you ‘think out’ what you are going to say in
+advance, the result, when you say it, is not in the least
+astonishing. And nor, since it has already been decided in
+advance, can it appear, when produced, to fit the occasion. A
+thought-out statement must always be irresponsible, because
+it is made regardless of the circumstances, instead of in
+response to them.
+
+142
+17
+
+18
+
+In fact the whole discipline of art begins where the thinking
+theorist left off. He is perfectly within his rights not to under-
+take it. But having exercised these rights, and not paid the
+price, to make a public claim to know the nature of the out-
+come must surely rebound to his discredit in the end.
+
+I once complained to a friend that I found the idea that a
+person might have more than one incarnation incredible. ‘Do
+you not find it incredible,’ he said, ‘that you should have even
+one incarnation?’
+
+It may be instructive to see how a book written today can
+appear to a critic who lived some twenty-seven centuries ago.
+When I came to the end of writing this book, I asked the I
+Ching if it would be so kind as to review it. It gave hexagram
+54, and I quote from the commentary.
+
+‘Above we have Chen, the eldest son, and below, Tui, the
+youngest daughter. The man leads and the girl follows him in
+gladness. The picture is that of the entrance of the girl into
+her husband’s house.’ It ‘shows a young girl under the guid-
+ance of an older man who marries her.’
+
+‘While legally regulated relationships evince a fixed con-
+nection between duties and rights, relationships based on
+personal inclination depend in the long run entirely on tactful
+reserve. :
+
+‘Affection as the essential principle of relatedness is of the
+greatest importance in all relationships in the world. For the
+union of heaven and earth is the origin of the whole of nature.
+Among human beings likewise, spontaneous affection is the
+all-inclusive principle of union.’
+
+‘Thunder stirs the water of the lake, which follows it in
+shimmering waves. This symbolizes the girl who follows the
+man of her choice. But every relationship between individuals
+bears within it the danger that wrong turns may be taken,
+leading to endless misunderstandings and disagreements.
+Therefore it is necessary constantly to remain mindful of the
+end. If we permit ourselves to drift along, we come together
+
+143
+and are parted again as the day may determine. If on the other
+hand a man fixes his mind on an end that endures, he will
+succeed in avoiding the reefs that confront the closer relation-
+
+ships of people.’
+
+It also gave a change, but this, although equally penetrating,
+and equally tactfully put, was a matter of personal advice to
+the author, and thus meant for my eyes alone.