It’s the oldest Pan-mystery. God is the flame-life in all the universe; multifarious, multifarious flames, all colours and beauties and pains and sombrenesses. Whichever flame flames in your manhood, that is you, for the time being. It is your manhood, don’t make water on it, says the novel. A man’s manhood is to honour the flames in him, and to know that none of them is absolute: even a flame is only relative. But see old Leo Tolstoi wetting on the flame. As if even his wet were absolute! Sex is flame, too, the novel announces. Flame burning against every absolute, even against the phallic. For sex is so much more than phallic, and so much deeper than functional desire. The flame of sex singes your absolute, and cruelly scorches your ego. What, will you assert your ego in the universe? Wait till the flames of sex leap at you like striped tigers. “They returned from the ride With the lady inside, And a smile on the face of the tiger.” You will play with sex, will you! You will tickle yourself with sex as with an ice-cold drink from a soda-fountain! You will pet your best girl, will you, and spoon with her, and titillate yourself and her, and do as you like with your sex? Wait! Only wait till the flame you have dribbled on flies back at you, later! Only wait! Sex is a life-flame, a dark one, reserved and mostly invisible. It is a deep reserve in a man, one of the core-flames of his manhood. What, would you play with it? Would you make it cheap and nasty! Buy a king-cobra, and try playing with that. Sex is even a majestic reserve in the sun. Oh, give me the novel! Let me hear what the novel says. As for the novelist, he is usually a dribbling liar. HIM WITH HIS TAIL IN HIS MOUTH HIM WITH HIS TAIL IN HIS MOUTH Answer a fool according to his folly, philosophy ditto. Solemnity is a sign of fraud. Religion and philosophy both have the same dual purpose: to get at the beginning of things, and at the goal of things. They have both decided that the serpent has got his tail in his mouth, and that the end is one with the beginning. It seems to me time someone gave that serpent of eternity another dummy to suck. They’ve all decided that the beginning of all things is the life-stream itself, energy, ether, libido, not to mention the Sanskrit joys of Purusha, Pradhana, Kala. Having postulated the serpent of the beginning, now see all the heroes from Moses and Plato to Bergson, wrestling with him might and main, to push his tail into his mouth. Jehovah creates man in his Own Image, according to His Own Will. If man behaves according to the ready-made Will of God, formulated in a bunch of somewhat unsavoury commandments, then lucky man will be received into the bosom of Jehovah. Man isn’t very keen. And that is Sin, original and perpetual. Then Plato discovers how lovely the intellectual idea is: in fact, the only perfection is ideal.