CHAPTER XXIII

 

June 1^st 1934

 

Tonight, at dinner with Mark, saw Helen, for the first time since my return from America.

      Consider the meaning of a face.  A face can be a symbol, signifying matter which would require volumes for its exposition in successive detail.  A vast sum, for the person on whom it acts as a symbol, of feelings and thoughts, of remembered sensations, impressions, judgments, experiences – all rendered synthetically and simultaneously, at a single glance.  As she came into the restaurant, it was like the drowning man's instantaneous vision of life.  A futile, bad, unsatisfactory life; and a vision, charged with regret.  All those wrong choices, those opportunities irrevocably missed!  And that sad face was not only a symbol, indirectly expressive of my history; it was also a directly expressive emblem of hers.  A history for whose saddening and embittering quality I was at least in part responsible.  If I had accepted the love she wanted to give me, if I had consented to love (for I could have loved) in return … But I preferred to be free, for the sake of my work – in other words, to remain enslaved in a world where there could be no question of freedom, for the sake of my amusements.  I insisted on irresponsible sensuality, rather than love.  Insisted, in other words, on her becoming a mean to the end of my detached, physical satisfaction and, conversely, of course, on my becoming a mean to hers.

      Curious how irrelevant appears the fact of having been, technically, 'lovers'!  It doesn't qualify her indifference or my feeling.  There's a maxim of La Rochefoucauld's about women forgetting the favours they have accorded to past lovers.  I used to like it for being cynical; but really it's just a bald statement of the fact that something that's meant to be irrelevant, i.e. sensuality, is irrelevant.  Into my present complex of thoughts, feelings and memories, physical desire, I find, enters hardly at all.  In spite of the fact that my memories are of intense and complete satisfactions.  Surprising, the extent to which eroticism is a matter of choice and focus.  I don't think much in erotic terms now; but very easily could, if I wished to.  Choose to consider individuals in their capacity as potential givers and receivers of pleasure, focus attention on sensual satisfactions: eroticism will become immensely important and great quantities of energy will be directed along erotic channels.  Choose a different conception of the individual, another focal range: energy will flow elsewhere and eroticism seem relatively unimportant.

      Spent a good part of the evening arguing about peace and social justice.  Mark, as sarcastically disagreeable as he knew how to be about Miller and what he called my neo-Jesus avatar.  'If the swine want to rip one another's guts out, let them; anyhow, you can't prevent them.  Swine will be swine.'  But may become human, I insisted.  Homo non nascitur, fit.  Or rather makes himself out of the ready-made elements and potentialities of man with which he's born.

      Helen's was the usual communist argument – no peace or social justice without a preliminary 'liquidation' of capitalists, liberals and so forth.  As though you could use violent, unjust means and achieve peace and justice!  Means determine ends; and must be like the ends proposed.  Means intrinsically different from the ends proposed achieve ends like themselves, not like those they were meant to achieve.  Violence and war will produce a peace and a social organization having the potentialities of more violence and war.  The war to end war resulted, as usual, in a peace essentially like war; the revolution to achieve communism, in a hierarchical state where a minority rules by police methods à la Metternich-Hitler-Mussolini, and where the power to oppress in virtue of being rich is replaced by the power to oppress in virtue of being a member of the oligarchy.  Peace and social justice, only obtainable by means that are just and pacific.  And people will behave justly and pacifically only if they have trained themselves as individuals to do so, even in circumstances where it would be easier to behave violently and unjustly.  And the training must be simultaneously physical and mental.  Knowledge of how to use the self and of what the self should be used for.  Neo-Ignatius and neo-Sandow was Mark's verdict.

      Put Mark into a cab and walked, as the night was beautiful, all the way from Soho to Chelsea.  Theatres were closing.  Helen brightened suddenly to a mood of malevolent high spirits.  Commenting in a ringing voice on passers-by.  As though we were at the Zoo.  Embarrassing, but funny and acute, as when she pointed to the rich young men in top-hats trying to look like the Dr Reszke Aristocrat, or opening and shutting cigarette-cases in the style of Gerald du Maurier; to the women trying to look like Vogue, or expensive advertisements (for winter cruises or fur coats), head in air, eyelids dropped superciliously – or slouching like screen vamps, with their stomachs stuck out, as though expecting twins.  The pitiable models on which people form themselves!  Once it was the Imitation of Christ – now of Hollywood.

      Were silent when we had left the crowds.  Then Helen asked if I were happy.  I said yes – though didn't know if happiness was the right word.  More substantial, more complete, more interested, more aware.  If not happy exactly, at any rate having greater potentialities for happiness.  Another silence.  Then, 'I thought I could never see you again, because of that dog.  Then Ekki came, and the dog was quite irrelevant.  And now he's gone, it's still irrelevant.  For another reason.  Everything's irrelevant, for that matter.  Except Communism.'  But that was an afterthought – an expression of piety, uttered by force of habit.  I said our ends were the same, the means adopted, different.  For her, end justified means; for me, means the end.  Perhaps, I said, one day she would see the importance of the means.'

 

      June 3^rd 1934.

      At today's lesson with Miller found myself suddenly a step forward in my grasp of the theory and practice of the technique.  To learn proper use one must first inhibit all improper uses of the self.  Refuse to be hurried into gaining ends by the equivalent (in personal, psycho-physiological terms) of violent revolution; inhibit this tendency, concentrate on the means whereby the end is to be achieved; then act.  This process entails knowing good and bad use – knowing them apart.  By the 'feel.'  Increased awareness and increased power of control result.  Awareness and control; trivialities take on new significance.  Indeed, nothing is trivial anymore or negligible.  Cleaning teeth, putting on shoes – such processes are reduced by habits of bad use to a kind of tiresome non-existence.  Become conscious, inhibit, cease to be a greedy end-gainer, concentrate on means; tiresome non-existence turns into absorbingly interesting reality.  In Evans-Wentz's book on Tibet I find among 'The Precepts of the Gurus' the injunction: 'Constantly retain alertness of consciousness in walking, in sitting, in eating, in sleeping.'  An injunction, like most injunctions, unaccompanied by instructions as to the right way of carrying it out.  Here, practical instructions accompany injunctions; one is taught how to become aware.  And not only that.  Also how to perform rightly, instead of wrongly, the activities of which there is awareness.  Nor is this all.  Awareness and power of control are transferable.  Skill acquired in getting to know the muscular aspect of mind-body can be carried over into the exploration of other aspects.  There is increasing ability to detect one's motives for any given piece of behaviour, to assess correctly the quality of a feeling, the real significance of a thought.  Also, one becomes more clearly and consistently conscious of what's going on in the outside world, and the judgment associated with that heightened consciousness is improved.  Control also is transferred.  Acquire the art of inhibiting muscular bad use and you acquire thereby the art of inhibiting more complicated trains of behaviour.  Not only this: there is prevention as well as cure.  Given proper correlation, many occasions for behaving undesirably just don't arise.  There is an end, for example, of neurotic anxieties and depressions – whatever the previous history.  For note: most infantile and adolescent histories are disastrous; yet only some individuals develop serious neurosis.  Those, precisely, in whom use of the self is particularly bad.  They succumb because resistance is poor.  In practice, neurosis is always associated with some kind of wrong use.  (Note the typically bad physical posture of neurotics and lunatics.  The stooping back, the muscular tension, the sunken head.)  Re-educated.  Give back correct physical use.  You remove a keystone of the arch constituting the neurotic personality.  The neurotic personality collapses.  And in its place is built up a personality in which all the habits of physical use are correct.  But correct physical use entails – since body-mind is indivisible except in thought – correct mental use.  Most of us are slightly neurotic.  Even slight neurosis provides endless occasions for bad behaviour.  Teaching of right use gets rid of neurosis – therefore of many occasions for bad behaviour.  Hitherto preventive ethics had been thought of as an external to individuals. Social and economic reforms carried out with a view to eliminating occasions for bad behaviour.  This is important.  But not nearly enough.  Belief that it is enough makes the social-reform conception of progress nonsensical.  The knowledge that it is nonsensical had always given me pleasure.  Sticking pins in large, highly inflated balloons – one of the most delightful of amusements.  But a bit childish; and after a time it palls.  So how satisfactory to find that there seems to be a way of making sense of the nonsense.  A method of achieving progress from within as well as from without.  Progress, not only as a citizen, a machine-minder and machine-user, but also as a human being.

      Prevention is good; but can't eliminate the necessity for cure.  The power to cure bad behaviour seems essentially similar to the power to cure bad co-ordination.  One learns this last when learning the proper use of self.  There is a transference.  The power to inhibit and control.  It becomes easier to inhibit undesirable impulses.  Easier to follow as well as see and approve the better.  Easier to put good intentions into practice and be patient, good-tempered, kind, unrapacious, chaste.