Part 9 (1/2)
To escape from self-loathing, to escape from the odious monotony and the indecent realism of life--what a relief! How desirable to be confronted no longer by that impa.s.sable gulf between one's own soul and all other living souls! How desirable to cross the abyss which separates the ”something” which is the substance of our being from the ”something” which is the substance of the ”objective mystery”!
And yet, according to the revelation of the complex vision, this ”spiritual ecstasy” is a perversion of the true art of life. The true art of life finds in ”the vision of the immortals,” and in ”the vision of the immortals” alone, its real escape from evil. This ”pa.s.sion of ident.i.ty,” offered us by the vice, by the madness of intuition, is not in harmony with the great moments of the soul. Its ”ident.i.ty” is but a gross, mystical, clotted ”ident.i.ty”; and its ”heaven” is not the ”heaven” of the Christ.
If the ”ecstasy of ident.i.ty,” as the unbalanced attribute of intuition forces it upon us, were in very truth the purpose of life, how grotesque a thing life would be! It would then be the purpose of life to create personality, only in order to drown it in the impersonal. In other words it would be the purpose of life to create the ”higher” in order that it should lose itself in the lower. At its very best this ”ecstasy of ident.i.ty” is the expression of what might be called the ”lyrical” element in things. But the secret of life is not lyrical, as many of the prophets have supposed, but dramatic, as all the great artists have shown. For the essence of life is contradiction. And contradiction demands a ”for” and an ”against,”
a protagonist and an antagonist. What the revelation of the complex vision discloses is the inherent duality of all things.
Pleasure and pain, night and day, man and woman, good and evil, summer and winter, life and death, personality and fate, love and malice, the soul and the objective mystery, these are the threads out of which the texture of existence is woven; and there is no escape from these, except in that eternal ”_nothingness_” which itself is the ”contradiction” or ”opposite” of that ”_all_,” which it reduces to chaos and annihilation. Thus runs the revelation of the complex vision.
This integral soul of ours, made of a stuff which for ever defies a.n.a.lysis; this objective mystery, made of a stuff which for ever defies a.n.a.lysis; these two things perpetually confront one another in a struggle that only annihilation can end. The vision of the eternal implies the pa.s.sing of the transitory. For what cannot cease from being beautiful has no real beauty; and what cannot cease from being true has no real truth. The art of life according to the revelation of the complex vision, consists in giving to the transitory the form of the eternal. It is the art of creating a rhythm, a music, a harmony, so pa.s.sionate and yet so calm, that the mere fact of having once or twice attained it is sufficient ”to redeem all sorrows.”
The a.s.sumption that death ends it all, is an a.s.sumption which the very nature of love calls upon us to make; for, if we did not make it make it, something different from love would be the object and purpose of our life. But the revelation of the complex vision, in our supreme moments, discloses to us that love itself is the only justification for life; and therefore, by making the a.s.sumption that the soul perishes, we put once and for all out of our thought that formidable revival of love, the idea of personal immortality.
For the idea of personal immortality, like the idea of an Absolute G.o.d, is a projection of the aboriginal ”inert” malice. It must be remembered that the revelation of the complex vision, by laying stress upon the creative energy of the soul in its grappling with the objective mystery, implies an element of _indeterminism_, or free choice, in regard to the ultimate nature of the world. Man, in a very profound sense, perpetually creates the world according to his will and desire. Nor can he ever know at what point, in the struggle between personality and destiny, the latter is bound to win. Such a point may _seem_ to be reached; until some astounding ”act of faith” on the part of the soul flings that ”point”
into a yet further remoteness. And this creative power in the soul of man may apply in ways which at present our own race has hardly dared to contemplate. It may apply, for instance, to the idea of personal immortality.
Personal immortality may be a thing which the soul, by a concentrated act of creative will, can secure for itself, or can reject for itself. It may be, if we take the whole conscious and subconscious purpose of a man's life, a _matter of choice_.
But when a man makes a choice of such a kind, when a man concentrates his energy upon surviving the death of his body, he is deliberately selecting a ”lower” purpose for his life in place of a ”higher.” In other words, instead of concentrating his will upon the evocation of the emotion of love, he is concentrating his will upon self-realization or self-continuance. What he is really doing is even worse than this. For since what we call ”emotion” is an actual projection into the matrix of the objective mystery, of the very substance and stuff of the soul, when the will thus concentrates upon personal immortality, it takes the very substance of the soul and perverts it to the satisfaction of inert malice. In other words it actually transforms the stuff of the soul from its positive to its negative chemistry, and produces a relative victory of malice over love.
The soul's desires for personal immortality is one of the aspects of the soul's ”possessive” instinct. The soul desires to ”possess”
itself--itself as it exactly is, itself in its precise and complete ”status quo”--without interruption for ever. But love has a very different desire from this. Love is not concerned with time at all-- for time has a ”future”; and any contemplation of a ”future”
implies the activity of something in the soul which is different from love, implies something which is concerned with outward events and occurrences and chances. But love is not concerned with outward events, whether past or future. Love desires eternity and eternity alone. Or rather it does not ”desire” eternity. It _is_ eternity. It is an eternal Now, in which what _will_ happen and what _has_ happened are irrelevant and unimportant.
All this offers us an intelligible explanation of a very bewildering phenomenon in human life. I mean the instinctive disgust experienced by the aesthetic sense when men, who otherwise seem gentle and good, display an undue and unmeasured agitation about the fate of their souls.
Love never so much as even considers the question of the fate of the soul. Love finds, in the mere act of loving, a happiness so profound that all such problems seem tiresome and insignificant.
The purpose of life is to attain the rhythmic ecstasy of all love's intrinsic potentialities. This desire for personal immortality is not one of love's intrinsic potentialities. When a human soul has lost by death the one person it has loved, the strength of its love is measured by the greater or less emphasis it places upon the problem of the lost one's ”survival.”
The disgust which the aesthetic sense experiences when it encounters a certain sort of mystical and psychic agitation over the question as to whether the lost one ”lives still somewhere” is a disgust based upon our instinctive knowledge that this particular kind of inquiry would never occur to a supreme and self-forgetful love. For this enquiry, this agitation, this dabbling in ”psychic evidences,” is a projection of the baser nature of the soul; is, in fact, a projection of the ”possessive instinct,” which is only another name for the original inert malice.
In the ”ave atque vale” of the Roman poet, there is much more of the absolute quality of great love than in all these psychic dabblings. For in the austere reserve of that pa.s.sionate cry there is the ultimate acceptance, by Love itself, of the tragedy of having lived and loved at all. There is an acceptance of that aspect of the ”vision of the immortals” which implies that the possessive instinct has no part or lot in the eternal.
The inhuman cruelties which have been practised by otherwise ”good” men under the motive of ”saving” other people's souls, and the inhuman cruelties which have been practised by otherwise ”good” men under the motive of saving their own souls, have, each of them, the same evil origin. Love sweeps aside, in one great wave of its own nature, all these doubts and ambiguities. It lifts the object of its love into its own eternity; and in its own eternity the ultimate tragedy of personal separation is but one chord of its unbroken rhythm.
The tragedy of personal separation is not a thing which love realizes for the first time when it loses the object of its love. It is a thing which is of the very nature of the eternity in which love habitually dwells. For the eternity in which love habitually dwells is its vision of the tragedy of all life.
This, then, is the original revelation of the complex vision. The soul is confronted by an ultimate duality which extends through the whole ma.s.s of its impressions. And because this duality extends through every aspect of the soul's universe and can be changed and transformed by the soul's will, it is inevitable that what the world has. .h.i.therto named ”philosophy” and has regarded as the effort of ”getting hold” of a reality which exists already, should be named by the complex vision the ”art of life” and should be regarded as the effort of reducing to harmony the unruly impulses and energies which perpetually transform and change the world.
CHAPTER V.
THE ULTIMATE DUALITY
What we are really, all of us, in search of, whether we know it or not, is some concrete and definite symbol of life and the ”object”
of life which shall gather up into one living image all the broken, thwarted, devious, and discordant impressions which make up our experience. What we crave is something that shall, in some permanent form and yet in a form that can grow and enrich itself, represent and embody the whole circle of the joy and pain of existence. What we crave is something into which we can throw our personal joys and sorrows, our individual sensations and ideas, and know of a certainty that thrown into that reservoir, they will blend with all the joys and sorrows of all the dead and all the living.
Such a symbol in order to give us what we need must represent the ultimate reach of insight to which humanity has attained. It must be something that, once having come into existence, remains independent of our momentary subjective fancies and our pa.s.sing moods. It must be something of clearer outlines and more definite lineaments than those vague indistinct ecstasies, half-physiological and half-psychic, which the isolated intuition brings us.
Such a symbol must represent the concentrated struggle of the human soul with the bitterness of fate and the cruelty of fate, its long struggle with the deadly malice in itself and the deadly malice in nature.
There is only one symbol which serves this purpose; a symbol which has already by the slow process of anonymous creation and discovery established itself in the world. I mean the symbol of the figure of Christ.