“But what about myself?” said Richard Lovat to himself, as he lay in the
darkness of Sydney, his brain afire. For the horrible bitter fire seemed
really to have got into his brain, burst up from his deepest bowels.
“What about me? Am I too Timotheus crying _Revenge_?”
Oh, revenge, yes, he wanted to be avenged. He wanted to be avenged.
Especially when he felt tangled up in the horrible human affair, the
ideal become like an octopus with a ghastly eye in the centre, and white
arms enwreathing the world. Oh, then he wanted to be avenged.
But now, for the moment he felt he had cut himself clear. He was
exhausted and almost wrecked--but he felt clear again. If no other
ghastly arm of the octopus should flash out and encircle him.
For the moment he felt himself lying inert, but clear, the dragon dead.
The ever-renewed dragon of a great old ideal, with its foul
poison-breath. It seemed as if, for himself, he had killed it.
That was now all he wanted: to get clear. Not to save humanity or to
help humanity or to have anything to do with humanity. No--no. Kangaroo
had been his last embrace with humanity. Now, all he wanted was to cut
himself clear. To be clear of humanity altogether, to be alone. To be
clear of love, and pity, and hate. To be alone from it all. To cut
himself finally clear from the last encircling arm of the octopus
humanity. To turn to the old dark gods, who had waited so long in the
outer dark.
Humanity could do as it liked: he did not care. So long as he could get
his own soul clear. For he believed in the inward soul, in the profound
unconscious of man. Not an ideal God. The ideal God is a proposition of
the mental consciousness, all-too-limitedly human. “No,” he said to
himself. “There _is_ God. But forever dark, forever unrealisable:
forever and forever. The unutterable name, because it can never have a
name. The great living darkness which we represent by the glyph, God.”
There is this ever-present, living darkness inexhaustible and
unknowable. It _is_. And it is all the God and the gods.
And every _living_ human soul is a well-head to this darkness of the
living unutterable. Into every living soul wells up the darkness, the
unutterable. And then there is travail of the visible with the
invisible. Man is in travail with his own soul, while ever his soul
lives. Into his unconscious surges a new flood of the God-darkness, the
living unutterable. And this unutterable is like a germ, a fœtus with
which he must travail, bringing it at last into utterance, into action,
into _being_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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