John Marshall - "A Short History of Greek Philosophy"

Jessie Graham Flower - "Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods"

Alexander Maclaren - "Expositions of Holy Scripture"

D. H. Lawrence - "Fantasia of the Unconscious"

Editorial
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Fantasia of the Unconscious

D >> D. H. Lawrence >> Fantasia of the Unconscious



FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

by

D. H. LAWRENCE







New York
Thomas Seltzer
1922
Copyright, 1922, by
Thomas Seltzer, Inc.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

FOREWORD

I. INTRODUCTION

II. THE HOLY FAMILY

III. PLEXUSES, PLANES AND SO ON

IV. TREES AND BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS

V. THE FIVE SENSES

VI. FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND

VII. FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION

VIII. EDUCATION AND SEX IN MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD

IX. THE BIRTH OF SEX

X. PARENT LOVE

XI. THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

XII. LITANY OF EXHORTATIONS

XIII. COSMOLOGICAL

XIV. SLEEP AND DREAMS

XV. THE LOWER SELF

EPILOGUE





FOREWORD


The present book is a continuation from "Psychoanalysis and the
Unconscious." The generality of readers had better just leave it
alone. The generality of critics likewise. I really don't want to
convince anybody. It is quite in opposition to my whole nature. I
don't intend my books for the generality of readers. I count it a
mistake of our mistaken democracy, that every man who can read print
is allowed to believe that he can read all that is printed. I count it
a misfortune that serious books are exposed in the public market, like
slaves exposed naked for sale. But there we are, since we live in an
age of mistaken democracy, we must go through with it.

I warn the generality of readers, that this present book will seem to
them only a rather more revolting mass of wordy nonsense than the
last. I would warn the generality of critics to throw it in the waste
paper basket without more ado.

As for the limited few, in whom one must perforce find an answerer, I
may as well say straight off that I stick to the solar plexus. That
statement alone, I hope, will thin their numbers considerably.

Finally, to the remnants of a remainder, in order to apologize for the
sudden lurch into cosmology, or cosmogony, in this book, I wish to say
that the whole thing hangs inevitably together. I am not a scientist.
I am an amateur of amateurs. As one of my critics said, you either
believe or you don't.

I am not a proper archaeologist nor an anthropologist nor an
ethnologist. I am no "scholar" of any sort. But I am very grateful to
scholars for their sound work. I have found hints, suggestions for
what I say here in all kinds of scholarly books, from the Yoga and
Plato and St. John the Evangel and the early Greek philosophers like
Herakleitos down to Fraser and his "Golden Bough," and even Freud and
Frobenius. Even then I only remember hints--and I proceed by
intuition. This leaves you quite free to dismiss the whole wordy mass
of revolting nonsense, without a qualm.

Only let me say, that to my mind there is a great field of science
which is as yet quite closed to us. I refer to the science which
proceeds in terms of life and is established on data of living
experience and of sure intuition. Call it subjective science if you
like. Our objective science of modern knowledge concerns itself only
with phenomena, and with phenomena as regarded in their
cause-and-effect relationship. I have nothing to say against our
science. It is perfect as far as it goes. But to regard it as
exhausting the whole scope of human possibility in knowledge seems to
me just puerile. Our science is a science of the dead world. Even
biology never considers life, but only mechanistic functioning and
apparatus of life.

I honestly think that the great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece
were the last living terms, the great pagan world which preceded our
own era once, had a vast and perhaps perfect science of its own, a
science in terms of life. In our era this science crumbled into magic
and charlatanry. But even wisdom crumbles.

I believe that this great science previous to ours and quite different
in constitution and nature from our science once was universal,
established all over the then-existing globe. I believe it was
esoteric, invested in a large priesthood. Just as mathematics and
mechanics and physics are defined and expounded in the same way in
the universities of China or Bolivia or London or Moscow to-day, so,
it seems to me, in the great world previous to ours a great science
and cosmology were taught esoterically in all countries of the globe,
Asia, Polynesia, America, Atlantis and Europe. Belt's suggestion of
the geographical nature of this previous world seems to me most
interesting. In the period which geologists call the Glacial Period,
the waters of the earth must have been gathered up in a vast body on
the higher places of our globe, vast worlds of ice. And the sea-beds
of to-day must have been comparatively dry. So that the Azores rose up
mountainous from the plain of Atlantis, where the Atlantic now washes,
and the Easter Isles and the Marquesas and the rest rose lofty from
the marvelous great continent of the Pacific.

In that world men lived and taught and knew, and were in one complete
correspondence over all the earth. Men wandered back and forth from
Atlantis to the Polynesian Continent as men now sail from Europe to
America. The interchange was complete, and knowledge, science was
universal over the earth, cosmopolitan as it is to-day.

Then came the melting of the glaciers, and the world flood. The
refugees from the drowned continents fled to the high places of
America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Isles. And some degenerated
naturally into cave men, neolithic and paleolithic creatures, and some
retained their marvelous innate beauty and life-perfection, as the
South Sea Islanders, and some wandered savage in Africa, and some,
like Druids or Etruscans or Chaldeans or Amerindians or Chinese,
refused to forget, but taught the old wisdom, only in its
half-forgotten, symbolic forms. More or less forgotten, as knowledge:
remembered as ritual, gesture, and myth-story.

And so, the intense potency of symbols is part at least memory. And so
it is that all the great symbols and myths which dominate the world
when our history first begins, are very much the same in every country
and every people, the great myths all relate to one another. And so it
is that these myths now begin to hypnotize us again, our own impulse
towards our own scientific way of understanding being almost spent.
And so, besides myths, we find the same mathematic figures, cosmic
graphs which remain among the aboriginal peoples in all continents,
mystic figures and signs whose true cosmic or scientific significance
is lost, yet which continue in use for purposes of conjuring or
divining.

If my reader finds this bosh and abracadabra, all right for him. Only
I have no more regard for his little crowings on his own little
dunghill. Myself, I am not so sure that I am one of the
one-and-onlies. I like the wide world of centuries and vast
ages--mammoth worlds beyond our day, and mankind so wonderful in his
distances, his history that has no beginning yet always the pomp and
the magnificence of human splendor unfolding through the earth's
changing periods. Floods and fire and convulsions and ice-arrest
intervene between the great glamorous civilizations of mankind. But
nothing will ever quench humanity and the human potentiality to evolve
something magnificent out of a renewed chaos.

I do not believe in evolution, but in the strangeness and
rainbow-change of ever-renewed creative civilizations.

So much, then, for my claim to remarkable discoveries. I believe I am
only trying to stammer out the first terms of a forgotten knowledge.
But I have no desire to revive dead kings, or dead sages. It is not
for me to arrange fossils, and decipher hieroglyphic phrases. I
couldn't do it if I wanted to. But then I can do something else. The
soul must take the hint from the relics our scientists have so
marvelously gathered out of the forgotten past, and from the hint
develop a new living utterance. The spark is from dead wisdom, but the
fire is life.

And as an example--a very simple one--of how a scientist of the most
innocent modern sort may hint at truths which, when stated, he would
laugh at as fantastic nonsense, let us quote a word from the already
old-fashioned "Golden Bough." "It must have appeared to the ancient
Aryan that the sun was periodically recruited from the fire which
resided in the sacred oak."

Exactly. The fire which resided in the Tree of Life. That is, life
itself. So we must read: "It must have appeared to the ancient Aryan
that the sun was periodically recruited from life."--Which is what the
early Greek philosophers were always saying. And which still seems to
me the real truth, the clue to the cosmos. Instead of life being drawn
from the sun, it is the emanation from life itself, that is, from all
the living plants and creatures which nourish the sun.

Of course, my dear critic, the ancient Aryans were just doddering--the
old duffers: or babbling, the babes. But as for me, I have some
respect for my ancestors, and believe they had more up their sleeve
than just the marvel of the unborn me.

One last weary little word. This pseudo-philosophy of
mine--"pollyanalytics," as one of my respected critics might say--is
deduced from the novels and poems, not the reverse. The novels and poems
come unwatched out of one's pen. And then the absolute need which one has
for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in
general makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one's
experiences as a writer and as a man. The novels and poems are pure
passionate experience. These "pollyanalytics" are inferences made
afterwards, from the experience.

And finally, it seems to me that even art is utterly dependent on
philosophy: or if you prefer it, on a metaphysic. The metaphysic or
philosophy may not be anywhere very accurately stated and may be quite
unconscious, in the artist, yet it is a metaphysic that governs men at
the time, and is by all men more or less comprehended, and lived. Men
live and see according to some gradually developing and gradually
withering vision. This vision exists also as a dynamic idea or
metaphysic--exists first as such. Then it is unfolded into life and
art. Our vision, our belief, our metaphysic is wearing woefully thin,
and the art is wearing absolutely threadbare. We have no future;
neither for our hopes nor our aims nor our art. It has all gone gray
and opaque.

We've got to rip the old veil of a vision across, and find what the
heart really believes in, after all: and what the heart really wants,
for the next future. And we've got to put it down in terms of belief
and of knowledge. And then go forward again, to the fulfillment in
life and art.

Rip the veil of the old vision across, and walk through the rent. And
if I try to do this--well, why not? If I try to write down what I
see--why not? If a publisher likes to print the book--all right. And
if anybody wants to read it, let him. But why anybody should read one
single word if he doesn't want to, I don't see. Unless of course he is
a critic who needs to scribble a dollar's worth of words, no matter
how.

TAORMINA

October 8, 1921




FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION


Let us start by making a little apology to Psychoanalysis. It wasn't
fair to jeer at the psychoanalytic unconscious; or perhaps it _was_
fair to jeer at the psychoanalytic unconscious, which is truly a
negative quantity and an unpleasant menagerie. What was really not
fair was to jeer at Psychoanalysis as if Freud had invented and
described nothing but an unconscious, in all his theory.

The unconscious is not, of course, the clue to the Freudian theory.
The real clue is sex. A sexual motive is to be attributed to all human
activity.

Now this is going too far. We are bound to admit than an element of
sex enters into all human activity. But so does an element of greed,
and of many other things. We are bound to admit that into all human
relationships, particularly adult human relationships, a large
element of sex enters. We are thankful that Freud has insisted on
this. We are thankful that Freud pulled us somewhat to earth, out of
all our clouds of superfineness. What Freud says is always _partly_
true. And half a loaf is better than no bread.

But really, there is the other half of the loaf. All is _not_ sex. And
a sexual motive is _not_ to be attributed to all human activities. We
know it, without need to argue.

Sex surely has a specific meaning. Sex means the being divided into
male and female; and the magnetic desire or impulse which puts male
apart from female, in a negative or sundering magnetism, but which
also draws male and female together in a long and infinitely varied
approach towards the critical act of coition. Sex without the
consummating act of coition is never quite sex, in human
relationships: just as a eunuch is never quite a man. That is to say,
the act of coition is the essential clue to sex.

Now does all life work up to the one consummating act of coition? In
one direction, it does, and it would be better if psychoanalysis
plainly said so. In one direction, all life works up to the one
supreme moment of coition. Let us all admit it, sincerely.

But we are not confined to one direction only, or to one exclusive
consummation. Was the building of the cathedrals a working up towards
the act of coition? Was the dynamic impulse sexual? No. The sexual
element was present, and important. But not predominant. The same in
the building of the Panama Canal. The sexual impulse, in its widest
form, was a very great impulse towards the building of the Panama
Canal. But there was something else, of even higher importance, and
greater dynamic power.

And what is this other, greater impulse? It is the desire of the human
male to build a world: not "to build a world for you, dear"; but to
build up out of his own self and his own belief and his own effort
something wonderful. Not merely something useful. Something wonderful.
Even the Panama Canal would never have been built _simply_ to let
ships through. It is the pure disinterested craving of the human male
to make something wonderful, out of his own head and his own self, and
his own soul's faith and delight, which starts everything going. This
is the prime motivity. And the motivity of sex is subsidiary to this:
often directly antagonistic.

That is, the essentially religious or creative motive is the first
motive for all human activity. The sexual motive comes second. And
there is a great conflict between the interests of the two, at all
times.

What we want to do, is to trace the creative or religious motive to
its source in the human being, keeping in mind always the near
relationship between the religious motive and the sexual. The two
great impulses are like man and wife, or father and son. It is no use
putting one under the feet of the other.

The great desire to-day is to deny the religious impulse altogether,
or else to assert its absolute alienity from the sexual impulse. The
orthodox religious world says faugh! to sex. Whereupon we thank Freud
for giving them tit for tat. But the orthodox scientific world says
fie! to the religious impulse. The scientist wants to discover a cause
for everything. And there is no cause for the religious impulse. Freud
is with the scientists. Jung dodges from his university gown into a
priest's surplice till we don't know where we are. We prefer Freud's
_Sex_ to Jung's _Libido_ or Bergson's _Elan Vital_. Sex has at least
_some_ definite reference, though when Freud makes sex accountable for
everything he as good as makes it accountable for nothing.

We refuse any _Cause_, whether it be Sex or Libido or Elan Vital or
ether or unit of force or _perpetuum mobile_ or anything else. But
also we feel that we cannot, like Moses, perish on the top of our
present ideal Pisgah, or take the next step into thin air. There we
are, at the top of our Pisgah of ideals, crying _Excelsior_ and trying
to clamber up into the clouds: that is, if we are idealists with the
religious impulse rampant in our breasts. If we are scientists we
practice aeroplane flying or eugenics or disarmament or something
equally absurd.

The promised land, if it be anywhere, lies away beneath our feet. No
more prancing upwards. No more uplift. No more little Excelsiors
crying world-brotherhood and international love and Leagues of
Nations. Idealism and materialism amount to the same thing on top of
Pisgah, and the space is _very_ crowded. We're all cornered on our
mountain top, climbing up one another and standing on one another's
faces in our scream of Excelsior.

To your tents, O Israel! Brethren, let us go down. We will descend.
The way to our precious Canaan lies obviously downhill. An end of
uplift. Downhill to the land of milk and honey. The blood will soon be
flowing faster than either, but we can't help that. We can't help it
if Canaan has blood in its veins, instead of pure milk and honey.

If it is a question of origins, the origin is always the same,
whatever we say about it. So is the cause. Let that be a comfort to
us. If we want to talk about God, well, we can please ourselves. God
has been talked about quite a lot, and He doesn't seem to mind. Why we
should take it so personally is a problem. Likewise if we wish to have
a tea party with the atom, let us: or with the wriggling little unit
of energy, or the ether, or the Libido, or the Elan Vital, or any
other Cause. Only don't let us have sex for tea. We've all got too
much of it under the table; and really, for my part, I prefer to keep
mine there, no matter what the Freudians say about me.

But it is tiring to go to any more tea parties with the Origin, or the
Cause, or even the Lord. Let us pronounce the mystic Om, from the pit
of the stomach, and proceed.

There's not a shadow of doubt about it, the First Cause is just
unknowable to us, and we'd be sorry if it wasn't. Whether it's God or
the Atom. All I say is Om!

The first business of every faith is to declare its ignorance. I don't
know where I come from--nor where I exit to. I don't know the origins
of life nor the goal of death. I don't know how the two parent cells
which are my biological origin became the me which I am. I don't in
the least know what those two parent cells were. The chemical analysis
is just a farce, and my father and mother were just vehicles. And yet,
I must say, since I've got to know about the two cells, I'm glad I do
know.

The Moses of Science and the Aaron of Idealism have got the whole
bunch of us here on top of Pisgah. It's a tight squeeze, and we'll be
falling very, very foul of one another in five minutes, unless some of
us climb down. But before leaving our eminence let us have a look
round, and get our bearings.

They say that way lies the New Jerusalem of universal love: and over
there the happy valley of indulgent Pragmatism: and there, quite near, is
the chirpy land of the Vitalists: and in those dark groves the home of
successful Analysis, surnamed Psycho: and over those blue hills the
Supermen are prancing about, though you can't see them. And there is
Besantheim, and there is Eddyhowe, and there, on that queer little
tableland, is Wilsonia, and just round the corner is Rabindranathopolis....

But Lord, I can't see anything. Help me, heaven, to a telescope, for I
see blank nothing.

I'm not going to try any more. I'm going to sit down on my posterior
and sluther full speed down this Pisgah, even if it cost me my trouser
seat. So ho!--away we go.

In the beginning--there never was any beginning, but let it pass.
We've got to make a start somehow. In the very beginning of all
things, time and space and cosmos and being, in the beginning of all
these was a little living creature. But I don't know even if it was
little. In the beginning was a living creature, its plasm quivering
and its life-pulse throbbing. This little creature died, as little
creatures always do. But not before it had had young ones. When the
daddy creature died, it fell to pieces. And that was the beginning of
the cosmos. Its little body fell down to a speck of dust, which the
young ones clung to because they must cling to something. Its little
breath flew asunder, the hotness and brightness of the little beast--I
beg your pardon, I mean the radiant energy from the corpse flew away
to the right hand, and seemed to shine warm in the air, while the
clammy energy from the body flew away to the left hand, and seemed
dark and cold. And so, the first little master was dead and done for,
and instead of his little living body there was a speck of dust in the
middle, which became the earth, and on the right hand was a brightness
which became the sun, rampaging with all the energy that had come out
of the dead little master, and on the left hand a darkness which felt
like an unrisen moon. And that was how the Lord created the world.
Except that I know nothing about the Lord, so I shouldn't mention it.

But I forgot the soul of the little master. It probably did a bit of
flying as well--and then came back to the young ones. It seems most
natural that way.

Which is my account of the Creation. And I mean by it, that Life is
not and never was anything but living creatures. That's what life is
and will be just living creatures, no matter how large you make the
capital L. Out of living creatures the material cosmos was made: out
of the death of living creatures, when their little living bodies fell
dead and fell asunder into all sorts of matter and forces and
energies, sun, moons, stars and worlds. So you got the universe. Where
you got the living creature from, that first one, don't ask me. He was
just there. But he was a little person with a soul of his own. He
wasn't Life with a capital L.

If you don't believe me, then don't. I'll even give you a little song
to sing.

"If it be not true to me
What care I how true it be . ."

That's the kind of man I really like, chirping his insouciance. And I
chirp back:

"Though it be not true to thee
It's gay and gospel truth to me. . ."

The living live, and then die. They pass away, as we know, to dust and
to oxygen and nitrogen and so on. But what we don't know, and what we
might perhaps know a little more, is how they pass away direct into
life itself--that is, direct into the living. That is, how many dead
souls fly over our untidiness like swallows and build under the eaves
of the living. How many dead souls, like swallows, twitter and breed
thoughts and instincts under the thatch of my hair and the eaves of my
forehead, I don't know. But I believe a good many. And I hope they
have a good time. And I hope not too many are bats.

I am sorry to say I believe in the souls of the dead. I am almost
ashamed to say, that I believe the souls of the dead in some way
reenter and pervade the souls of the living: so that life is always
the life of living creatures, and death is always our affair. This
bit, I admit, is bordering on mysticism. I'm sorry, because I don't
like mysticism. It has no trousers and no trousers seat: _n'a pas de
quoi_. And I should feel so uncomfortable if I put my hand behind me
and felt an absolute blank.

Meanwhile a long, thin, brown caterpillar keeps on pretending to be a
dead thin beech-twig, on a little bough at my feet. He had got his
hind feet and his fore feet on the twig, and his body looped up like
an arch in the air between, when a fly walked up the twig and began to
mount the arch of the imitator, not having the least idea that it was
on a gentleman's coat-tails. The caterpillar shook his stern, and the
fly made off as if it had seen a ghost. The dead twig and the live
twig now remain equally motionless, enjoying their different ways. And
when, with this very pencil, I push the head of the caterpillar off
from the twig, he remains on his tail, arched forward in air, and
oscillating unhappily, like some tiny pendulum ticking. Ticking,
ticking in mid-air, arched away from his planted tail. Till at last,
after a long minute and a half, he touches the twig again, and
subsides into twigginess. The only thing is, the dead beech-twig can't
pretend to be a wagging caterpillar. Yet how the two commune!
However--we have our exits and our entrances, and one man in his time
plays many parts. More than he dreams of, poor darling. And I am
entirely at a loss for a moral!

Well, then, we are born. I suppose that's a safe statement. And we
become at once conscious, if we weren't so before. _Nem con._ And our
little baby body is a little functioning organism, a little developing
machine or instrument or organ, and our little baby mind begins to
stir with all our wonderful psychical beginnings. And so we are in
bud.

But it won't do. It is too much of a Pisgah sight. We overlook too
much. _Descendez, cher Moise. Vous voyez trop loin._ You see too far
all at once, dear Moses. Too much of a bird's-eye view across the
Promised Land to the shore. Come down, and walk across, old fellow.
And you won't see all that milk and honey and grapes the size of
duck's eggs. All the dear little budding infant with its tender
virginal mind and various clouds of glory instead of a napkin. Not at
all, my dear chap. No such luck of a promised land.

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