Fantasia of the Unconscious

the bottomless pit, insatiable. It demands at last the departure into death, the only available beyond. Like Carmen, or like Anna Karenina. When sex is the starting point and the returning point both, then the only issue is death. Which is plain as a pike-staff in "Carmen" or "Anna Karenina," and is the theme of almost all modern tragedy. Our one hackneyed, hackneyed theme. Ecstasies and agonies of love, and final passion of death. Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion. Lovers, pure lovers should say "Let it be so."

She may of course already love you, and love you for yourself. But the love will be a nest of scorpions unless it is overshadowed by a little fear or awe of your further purpose, a living belief in your going beyond her, into futurity.

But when once a woman does believe in her man, in the pioneer which he is, the pioneer who goes on ahead beyond her, into the darkness in front, and who may be lost to her for ever in this darkness; when once she knows the pain and beauty of this belief, knows that the loneliness of waiting and following is inevitable, that it must be so; ah, then, how wonderful it is!

And you'll have to fight very hard to make a woman yield her goal to yours, to make her, in her own soul, believe in your goal as the goal beyond, in her goal as the way by which you go. She'll never believe until you have your soul filled with a profound and absolutely inalterable purpose, that will yield to nothing, least of all to her. She'll never believe until, in your soul, you are cut off and gone ahead, into the dark.

You'll have to fight to make a woman believe in you as a real man, a real pioneer. No man is a man unless to his woman he is a pioneer. You'll have to fight still harder to make her yield her goal to yours: her night goal to your day goal. The moon, the planet of women, sways us back from our day-self, sways us back from our real social unison, sways us back, like a retreating tide, in a friction of criticism and separation and social disintegration. That is woman's inevitable mode, let her words be what they will. Her goal is the deep, sensual individualism of secrecy and night-exclusiveness, hostile, with guarded doors. And you'll have to fight very hard to make a

You've got to take a new resolution into your soul, and break off from the old way. You've got to know that you're a man, and being a man means you must go on alone, ahead of the woman, to break a way through the old world into the new. And you've got to be alone. And you've got to start off ahead. And if you don't know which direction to take, look round for the man your heart will point out to you. And follow—and never look back. Because if Lot's wife, looking back, was turned to a pillar of salt, these miserable men, for ever looking back to their women for guidance, they are miserable pillars of half-rotten tears.

But fight for your life, men. Fight your wife out of her own self-conscious preoccupation with herself. Batter her out of it till she's stunned. Drive her back into her own true mode. Rip all her nice superimposed modern-woman and wonderful-creature garb off her. Reduce her once more to a naked Eve, and send the apple flying

So with man and woman. They must stand clear again. They must fight their way out of their self-consciousness: there is nothing else. Or, rather, each must fight the other out of self-consciousness. Instead of this leprous forbearance which we are taught to practice in our intimate relationships, there should be the most intense open antagonism. If your wife flirts with other men, and you don't like it, say so before them all, before wife and man and all, say you won't have it. If she seems to you false, in any circumstance, tell her so, angrily, furiously, and stop her. Never

mind about being justified. If you hate anything she does, turn on her in a fury. Harry her, and make her life a hell, so long as the real hot rage is in you. Don't silently hate her, or silently forbear. It is such a dirty trick, so mean and ungenerous. If you feel a burning rage, turn on her and give it to her, and never repent. It'll probably hurt you much more than it hurts her. But never repent for your real hot rages, whether they're "justifiable" or not. If you care one sweet straw for the woman, and if she makes you that you can't bear any more, give it to her, and if your heart weeps tears of blood afterwards, tell her you're thankful she's got it for once, and you wish she had it worse

But an ideal purpose which has no roots in the deep sea of passionate sex is a greater disaster still. And now we have only these two things: sex as a fatal goal, which is the essential theme of modern tragedy: or ideal purpose as a deadly parasite. Sex passion as a goal in itself always leads to tragedy. There must be the great purposive inspiration always present. But the automatic ideal-purpose is not even a tragedy, it is a slow humiliation and sterility.

A perfected sex circuit and a successful sex union. And there can be no successful sex union unless the greater hope of purposive, constructive activity fires the soul of the man all the time: or the hope of passionate, purposive destructive activity: the two amount religiously to the same thing, within the individual. Sex as an end in itself is a disaster: a vice