On Human Destiny
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Man is a domesticated animal that must think." |
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On Human Destiny is a story by D. H. Lawrence.
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ON HUMAN DESTINY
Man is a domesticated animal that must think. His thinking makes him a little lower than the angels. And his domestication makes him, at times, a little lower than the monkey.
It is no use retorting that most men don't think. It is quite true, most men don't have any original thoughts. Most men, perhaps, are incapable of original thought, or original thinking. This doesn't alter the fact that they are all the time, all men, all the time, thinking. Man cannot even sleep with a blank mind. The mind refuses to be blank. The millstones of the brain grind on while the stream of life runs. And they grind on the grist of whatever ideas the mind contains.
The ideas may be old and ground to powder already. No matter. The mill of the mind grinds on, grinds the old grist over and over and over again. The blackest savage in Africa is the same, in this respect, as the whitest Member of Parliament in Westminster. His risk of death, his woman, his hunger, his chieftain, his lust, his immeasurable fear, all these are fixed ideas in the mind of the black African savage. They are ideas based on certain sensual reactions in the black breast and bowels, that 203
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is true. They are none the less ideas, however " primitive. " And the difference between a primi- tive idea and a civilised one is not very great. It is remarkable how little change there is in man's rudimentary ideas.
Nowadays we like to talk about spontaneity, spontaneous feeling, spontaneous passion, spontaneous emotion. But our very spontaneity is just an idea. ^All our modern spontaneity is fathered in the mind, gestated in self-consciousness.
Since man became a domesticated, thinking animal, long, long ago, a little lower than the angels, he long, long ago left off being a wild instinctive animal. If he ever was such, which I don't believe. In my opinion, the most prognathous cave-man was an! ideal beast. He ground on his crude, obstinate ideas. He was no more like the wild deer or the jaguar among the mountains than we are. He ground his ideas in the slow ponderous mill of his heavy cranium.
Man is never spontaneous, as we imagine the thrushes or the sparrow-hawk, for example, to be spontaneous. No matter how wild, how savage, how apparently untamed the savage may be, Dyak or Hottentot, you may be sure he is grinding upon his own fixed, peculiar ideas, and he's no more spon- taneous than a London 'bus conductor : probably not as much.
The simple innocent child of nature does not 204
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exist. If there be an occasional violet by a mossy stone in the human sense, a Wordsworthian Lucy, it is because her vitality is rather low, and her simple nature is very near a simpleton's. You may, like Yeats, admire the simpleton, and call him God's Fool. But for me the village idiot is a cold egg.
No, no, let man be as primitive as primitive can be, he still has a mind. Give him at the same time a certain passion in his nature, and between his passion and his mind he'll beget himself ideas, ideas more or less good, more or less monstrous, but whether good or monstrous, absolute.
The savage grinds on his fetish or totem or taboo ideas even more fixedly and fatally than we on our love and salvation and making-good ideas.
Let us dismiss the innocent child of nature. He does not exist, never did, never will, and never could. No matter at what level man may be, he still has a mind, he has also passions. And the mind and the passions between them beget the scorpion brood of ideas. Or, if you like, call it the angelic hosts of the ideal.
Let us accept our own destiny. Man carUt live by instinct, because he's got a mind. The serpent, with a crushed head, learned to brood along his spine, and take poison in his mouth. He has a strange sapience. But even he doesn't have ideas. Man has a mind, and ideas, so it is just puerile to sigh 205
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for innocence and naive spontaneity. Man is never spontaneous. Even children aren't spontaneous ; not at all. It is only that their few and very dominant young ideas don't make logical associations. A child's ideas are ideas hard enough, but they hang together in a comical way, and the emotion that rises jumbles them ludicrously.
Ideas are born from a marriage between mind and emotion. But surely, you will say, it is possible for emotions to run free, without the dead hand of the ideal mind upon them.
It is impossible. Because, since man ate the apple and became endowed with mind, or mental con- sciousness, the human emotions are like a wedded wife ; lacking a husband she is only a partial thing. The emotions cannot be " free." You can let your emotions run loose, if you like. You can let them run absolutely " wild." But their wildness and their looseness are a very shoddy affair. They leave nothing but boredom afterwards.
Emotions by themselves become just a nuisance. The mind by itself becomes just a sterile thing, making everything sterile. So what's to be done ?
You've got to marry the pair of them. Apart, they are no good. The emotions that have not the approval and inspiration of the mind are just hysterics. The mind without the approval and inspiration of the emotions is just a dry stick, a dead 206
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tree, no good for anything unless to make a rod to beat and bully somebody with.
So, taking the human psyche, we have this simple trinity : the emotions, the mind, and then the children of this venerable pair, ideas. Man is con- trolled by his own ideas : there's no doubt about that.
Let us argue it once more. A pair of emancipated lovers are going to get away from the abhorred old ideal suasion. They're just going to fulfil their lives. That's all there is to it. They're just going to live their lives.
And then look at them ! They do all the things that they know people do, when they are " living their own lives." They play up to their own ideas of being naughty instead of their ideas of good. And then what? It's the same old treadmill. They are just enacting the same set of ideas, only in the widdishins direction, being naughty instead of being good, treading the old circle in the opposite direction, and going round in the same old mill, even if in a reversed direction.
A man goes to a cocotte. And what of it ? He does the same thing he does with his wife, but in the reverse direction. He just does everything naughtily instead of from his good self. It's a terrible relief perhaps, at first, to get away from his good self. But after a little while he realises, rather 207
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drearily, that he's only going round in the same old treadmill, in the reversed direction. The Prince Consort turned us giddy with goodness, plodding round and round in the earnest mill. King Edward drove us giddy with naughtiness, trotting round and round in the same mill, in the opposite direction. So that the Georgian era finds us flummoxed, because we know the whole cycle back and forth.
At the centre is the same emotional idea. You fall in love with a woman, you marry her, you have bliss, you have children, you devote yourself to your family and to the service of mankind, and you live a happy life. Or, same idea but in the widdishins direction, you fall in love with a woman, you don't marry her, you live with her under the rose and enjoy yourself in spite of society ; you leave your wife to swallow her tears or spleen, as the case may be ; you spend the dowry of your daughters, you waste your substance, and you squander as much of man- kind's heaped-up corn as you can.
The ass goes one way, and threshes out the corn from the chaff. The ass goes the other way and kicks the corn into the mud. At the centre Is the same idea : love, service, self-sacrifice, productivity. It just depends upon which way round you run.
So there you are, poor man ! All you can do is to run round like an ass, either in one direction or another, round the fixed pole of a certain central 208
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idea, in the track of a number of smaller, peripheral ideas. This idea of love, these peripheral ideals of service, marriage, increase, etc.
Even the vulgarest self-seeker trots in the same tracks and gets the same reactions, minus the thrill of the centralised passion.
What's to be done ? What is being done ?
The ring is being tightened. Russia was a com- plication of mixed ideas, old barbaric ideas of divine kingship, of irresponsible power, of sacred servility, conflicting with modern ideas of equality, serviceable- ness, productivity, etc. This complication had to be cleaned up. Russia was a great and bewildering but at the same time fascinating circus, with her splen- dours and miseries and brutalities and mystery. // faut changer tout cela. So modern men have changed it. And the bewildering, fascinating circus of human anomalies is to be turned into a productive threshing-' floor, an ideal treadmill. The treadmill of the one accomplished idea.
What's to be done ? Man is an ideal animal : an idea-making animal. In spite of all his ideas, he remains an animal, often a little lower than the monkey. And in spite of all his animal nature, he can only act in fulfilment of disembodied ideas. What's to be done ?
That too is quite simple. Man is not pot-bound in his ideas. Then let him burst the pot that contains 209
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him. Ideally he is pot-bound. His roots are choked, squeezed, and the life is leaving him, like a plant that is pot-bound and is gradually going sapless. Break the pot, then.
But it's no good waiting for the slow accumulation of circumstance to break the pot. That's what men are doing to-day. They know the pot's got to break. They know our civilisation has got to smash, sooner or later. So they say " Let it ! But let me live my life first ! "
Which is all very well, but it's a coward's attitude. They say glibly : " Oh, well, every civilisation must fall at last. Look at Rome ! " Very good, look at Rome. And what do you see ? A mass of " civil- ised " so-called Romans, airing their laissez-faire and laissez-aller sentiments. And a number of barbarians, Huns, etc., coming down to wipe them out, and expending themselves in the effort.
What of it, the Dark Ages ? What about the Dark Ages, when the fields of Italy ran wild as the wild wastes of the undiscovered world, and wolves and bears roamed in the streets of the grey city of Lyons ?
Very nice ! But what else ? Look at the other tiny bit of a truth. Rome was pot-bound, the pot was smashed to atoms, and the highly developed Roman tree of life lay on its side and died. But not before a new young seed had germinated. There
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in the spilt soil, small, humble, almost indiscernible, was the little tree of Christianity. In the howling wilderness of slaughter and debacle, tiny monasteries of monks, too obscure and poor to plunder, kept the eternal light of man's undying effort at consciousness alive. A few poor bishops wandering through the chaos, linking up the courage of these men of thought and prayer. A scattered, tiny minority of men who had found a new way to God, to the life-source, glad to get again into touch with the Great God, glad to know the way and to keep the knowledge burningiy alive.
That is the essential history of the Dark Ages, when Rome fell. We talk as if the flame of human courage and perspicacity had, in this time, gone out entirely, and that it miraculously popped into life again, out of nowhere, later on. Fusion of races, new barbaric blood, etc. Blarney ! The fact of the matter is, the exquisite courage of brave men goes on in an un- broken continuity, even if sometimes the thread of flame becomes very thin. The exquisite delicate light of ever-renewed human consciousness is never blown, out. The lights of great cities go out, and there is howling darkness to all appearance. But always, since men began, the light of the pure, God-knowing human consciousness has kept alight ; sometimes, as in the Dark Ages, tiny but perfect flames of purest God-knowledge here and there ;
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sometimes, as in our precious Victorian era, a huge and rather ghastly glare of human " understanding." But the light never goes out.
And that's the human destiny. The light shall never go out till the last day. The light of the human adventure into consciousness, which is, essen- tially, the light of human God-knowledge.
And human God-knowledge waxes and wanes, fed, as it were, from different oil. Man is a strange vessel. He has a thousand different essential oils in him, to keep the light of consciousness fed. Yet, apparently, he can only draw on one source at a time. And when the source he has been drawing on dries up, he has a bad time sinking a new well of oil, or guttering to extinction.
So it was in Roman times. The great old pagan fire of knowledge gradually died, its sources dried up. Then Jesus started a new, strange little flicker.
To-day, the long light of Christianity is guttering to go out and we have to get at new resources in ourselves.
It is no use waiting for the debacle. It's no use saying : " Well, I didn't make the world, so it isn't up to me to mend it. Time and the event must do the business." — Time and the event will do nothing. Men are worse after a great debacle than before. The Russians who have " escaped " from the horrors
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of the revolution are most of them extinguished as human beings. The real manly dignity has gone, all that remains is a collapsed human creature saying to himself : " Look at me ! I am alive. I can actually eat more sausage."
Debacles don't save men. In nearly every case, during the horrors of a catastrophe the light of integrity and human pride is extinguished in the soul of the man or the woman involved, and there is left a painful, unmanned creature, a thing of shame, incapable any more. It is the great danger of debacles, especially in times of unbelief like these. Men lack the faith and courage to keep their souls alert, kindled and unbroken. Afterwards there is a great smouldering of shamed life.
Man, poor, conscious, forever-animal man, has a very stern destiny, from which he is never allowed to escape. It is his destiny that he must move on and on, in the thought-adventure. He is a thought- adventurer, and adventure he must. The moment he builds himself a house and begins to think he can sit still in his knowledge, his soul becomes deranged, and he begins to pull down the house over his own head.
Man is now house-bound. Human consciousness to-day is too small, too tight to let us live and act naturally. Our dominant idea, instead of being a 213
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pole-star, is a millstone round our necks, strangling us. Old tablets of stone.
That is part of our destiny. As a thinking being, man is destined to seek God and to form some con- ception of Life. And since the invisible God cannot be conceived, and since Life is always more than any idea, behold, from the human conception of God and of Life, a great deal of necessity is left out. And this God whom we have left out and this Life that we have shut out from our living, must in the end turn against us and rend us. It is our destiny.
Nothing will alter it. When the Unknown God whom we ignore turns savagely to rend us, from the darkness of oblivion, and when the Life that we exclude from our living turns to poison and madness in our veins, then there is only one thing left to do. We have to struggle down to the heart of things, where the everlasting flame is, and kindle ourselves another beam of light. In short, we have to make another bitter adventure in pulsating thought, far, far to the one central pole of energy. We have to germinate inside us, between our undaunted mind and our reckless, genuine passions, a new germ. The germ of a new idea. A new germ of God-knowledge, or Life-knowledge. But a new germ.
And this germ will expand and grow^ and flourish 214
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to a great tree, maybe. And in the end die again. Die like all the other human trees of knowledge.
But what does that matter ? We walk in strides, we live by days and nights. A tree slowly rises to a great height, and quickly falls to dust. There is a long life-day for the individual. Then a very dark, spacious death-room
I live and I die. I ask no other. Whatever proceeds from me lives and dies. I am glad, too. God is eternal, but my idea of Him is my own, and perishable. Everything human, human knowledge, human faith, human emotions, all perishes. And that is very good ; if it were not so, everything would turn to cast-iron. There is too much of this cast- iron of permanence to-day.
Because I know the tree will ultimately die, shall I therefore refrain from planting a seed ? Bah ! it would be conceited cowardice on my part. I love the little sprout and the weak little seedling. I love the thin sapling, and the first fruit, and the falling of the first fruit. I love the great tree in its splendour. And I am glad that at last, at the very last, the great tree will go hollow, and fall on its side with a crash, and the little ants will run through it, and it will disappear like a ghost back into the humus.
It is the cycle of all things created, thank God. Because, given courage, it saves even eternity from staleness.
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Man fights for a new conception of life and God, as he fights to plant seeds in the spring : because he knows that is the only way to harvest. If after harvest there is winter again, what does it matter ? It is just seasonable.
But you have to fight even to plant seed. To plant seed you've got to kill a great deal of weeds and break much ground.
