Fantasia of the UnconsciousLawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
Philosophy
Fantasia of the Unconscious
Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
Psychoanalysis; Sex; Subconsciousness
Man must bravely stand by his own soul, his own responsibility as the
creative vanguard of life. And he must also have the courage to go
home to his woman and become a perfect answer to her deep sexual call.
But he must never confuse his two issues. Primarily and supremely man
is _always_ the pioneer of life, adventuring onward into the unknown,
alone with his own temerarious, dauntless soul. Woman for him exists
only in the twilight, by the camp fire, when day has departed. Evening
and the night are hers.
The psychoanalysts, driving us back to the sexual consummation always,
do us infinite damage.
We have to break away, back to the great unison of manhood in some
passionate _purpose_. Now this is not like sex. Sex is always
individual. A man has his own sex: nobody else's. And sexually he goes
as a single individual; he can mingle only singly. So that to make sex
a general affair is just a perversion and a lie. You can't get people
and talk to them about their sex, as if it were a common interest.
We have got to get back to the great purpose of manhood, a passionate
unison in actively making a world. This is a real commingling of many.
And in such a commingling we forfeit the individual. In the
commingling of sex we are alone with _one_ partner. It is an
individual affair, there is no superior or inferior. But in the
commingling of a passionate purpose, each individual sacredly abandons
his individual. In the living faith of his soul, he surrenders his
individuality to the great urge which is upon him. He may have to
surrender his name, his fame, his fortune, his life, everything. But
once a man, in the integrity of his own individual soul, _believes_,
he surrenders his own individuality to his belief, and becomes one of
a united body. He knows what he does. He makes the surrender
honorably, in agreement with his own soul's deepest desire. But he
surrenders, and remains responsible for the purity of his surrender.
But what if he believes that his sexual consummation is his supreme
consummation? Then he serves the great purpose to which he pledges
himself only as long as it pleases him. After which he turns it down,
and goes back to sex. With sex as the one accepted prime motive, the
world drifts into despair and anarchy.
Of all countries, America has most to fear from anarchy, even from one
single moment's lapse into anarchy. The old nations are _organically_
fixed into classes, but America not. You can shake Europe to atoms.
And yet peasants fall back to peasantry, artisans to industrial labor,
upper classes to their control--inevitably. But can you say the same
of America?
America must not lapse for one single moment into anarchy. It would be
the end of her. She must drift no nearer to anarchy. She is near
enough.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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