Fantasia of the UnconsciousLawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
Philosophy
Fantasia of the Unconscious
Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
Psychoanalysis; Sex; Subconsciousness
So I hope now I have put you in your place, dear reader. Sit you like
Watts' Hope on your own little blue globe, and I'll sit on mine, and
we won't bump into one another if we can help it. You can twang your
old hopeful lyre. It may be music to you, so I don't blame you. It is
a terrible wowing in my ears. But that may be something in my
individual atmosphere; some strange deflection as your music crosses
the space between us. Certainly I never hear the concert of World
Regeneration and Hope Revived Again without getting a sort of
lock-jaw, my teeth go so keen on edge from the twanging harmony.
Still, the world-regenerators may _really_ be quite excellent
performers on their own jews'-harps. Blame the edginess of my teeth.
Now I am going to launch words into space so mind your cosmic eye.
As I said in my small but naturally immortal book, "Psychoanalysis and
the Unconscious," there's more in it than meets the eye. There's more
in you, dear reader, than meets the eye. What, don't you believe it?
Do you think you're as obvious as a poached egg on a piece of toast,
like the poor lunatic? Not a bit of it, dear reader. You've got a
solar plexus, and a lumbar ganglion not far from your liver, and I'm
going to tell everybody. Nothing brings a man home to himself like
telling everybody. And I _will_ drive you home to yourself, do you
hear? You've been poaching in my private atmospheric grounds long
enough, identifying yourself with me and me with everybody. A nice row
there'd be in heaven if Aldebaran caught Sirius by the tail and said,
"Look here, you're not to look so green, you damm dog-star! It's an
offense against star-regulations."
Which reminds me that the Arabs say the shooting stars, meteorites,
are starry stones which the angels fling at the poaching demons whom
they catch sight of prowling too near the palisades of heaven. I must
say I like Arab angels. My heaven would coruscate like a catherine
wheel, with white-hot star-stones. Away, you dog, you prowling
cur.--Got him under the left ear-hole, Gabriel--! See him, see him,
Michael? That hopeful blue devil! Land him one! Biff on your bottom,
you hoper.
But I wish the Arabs wouldn't entice me, or you, dear reader, provoke
me to this. I feel with you, dear reader, as I do with a deaf-man when
he pushes his vulcanite ear, his listening machine, towards my mouth.
I want to shout down the telephone ear-hole all kinds of improper
things, to see what effect they will have on the stupid dear face at
the end of the coil of wire. After all, words must be very different
after they've trickled round and round a long wire coil. Whatever
becomes of them! And I, who am a bit deaf myself, and may in the end
have a deaf-machine to poke at my friends, it ill becomes me to be so
unkind, yet that's how I feel. So there we are.
Help me to be serious, dear reader.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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