But to understand why, as if to follow the role of a divinity one should rehearse it, she feels impelled to appear so august to her chilaren that heaven and hell must be invoked to entorce her motherhood, or why she becomes magnified in the nursery to exactly the inverse of the inconsiderable proportions she attained in the world where she was only in evidence as a picture, let us measure the conventional frame in which she was set, or rather, let us look into the cage that confined the women of the eighties.

20

"Well" asks

"Now" says Miss Watt looking as if the novel had
at last embraced her

"Guess what letter it begins with ? "

"A"? "No" . "B"? "No" . "C"?"

at

"Yes" And so on through a long word; each letter
recommencing the alphabet.

34

The Victorian parent having scrapped the mask, terror
becomes more insidious; for where there is nothing visible to in-
spire it, the child is free to imagine its source; and while in
the Old Testament woman was disregarded, she has since been in-
stated, and, in the home, being considered a fitting ally for the
patriarch, has become so influential as almost to have usurped his
authority, and this sense of a power that is new to her has made
her even more insistent upon its exercise than he, in whom a long
familiarity may have bred a certain contempt; so the fear of God
and the flame of Hell are laid in her lap, to be learned at
Mother's knee.

And she the more earnestly defends a creed that damns
incredulity the less she finds it credible, as if hoping that in
convincing her offspring she may convince herself, in the same way,
that religious institutions maintain their permanence by passing
the buck.

If imbecility is a half waking into the world, senility
is a half going out of it before death. This was the case with an
ancient peasant woman, my snapshot contact with whom sufficed to
show me how, if the corporeal genie intuit unrevealed sensations

7

The wife of our family doctor had taken me home with her to keep me 'out of the way' while my younger sister was born, but I was not aware of this visit at all except for one moment when I was leaving and Dr. Monks, who had one of those bulbous purple faces that have practically disappeared with the caricaturists who exploited them (however, he had not as yet materialized as far as I was concerned) was carrying me down the staircase to a carriage waiting in the drive.

There may have been some sort of laboratory giving on to one of the landings, for we passed a row of glass bottles filled with colored liquids standing behind a fanlight over a door. The afternoon sun was shining through the bottles, through the fanlight, firing the drastic reds and yellows in a double transparency that was so bright it caused a blazing explosion in me. I was riddled with splinters of delight. Quickened by that fundamental excitement whose elements are worship and covetousness, which, being the primary responses to the admirable, very likely composes the whole human ideal, my arms, like antennae, were waving towards the glittering bottles, and, through a sort of vibrational extension, came into as good as bodily contact with them. As if I were capable of a plastic protusion beyond my anatomical frontiers, in spite of the fact that the doctor who held me so firmly was headed downstairs, he having no idea that out of his small charge an impalpable bird, trailing a certain degree of my atomic energy along with it, had flown onto a sunlit shelf above us. On the other hand, I could distinctly feel that something not far away from me was being held in a clamp, but even while my body struggled, as it seemed, independently, I was

8

not yet enough of a piece with it to find out that this 'wome-
thing' was attached to my own elasticity until after future ex-
periences. Although a vague unease in the vicinity of the clamp
forbidding any further extension on my part, as the doctor de-
scended another step, constrained it to follow in the wake of my
body, once having been drawn off the bottled, my consciousness
had no time to attribute its forced displacement to the haul of
his arms, for when his descent did divert its course, it anti-
cipated his intention-- my airy consciousness was out in the glow
of the garden, while he must carry its load downstairs.

Or perhaps what really occurred was an immediate trans-
portation of a bed of those pantomimic flowers called 'red-hot
pokers' to the middleof the stair carpet-- these first impressions
being of such lightening nature.

I cannot explain why the actual scene-- a strong man
carrying a small child downstairs towards a door opened on to a
garden, the waiting carri ge or the knowledge that I was being
taken home-- did not exist for me at the time. It seems as if
it may have taken shape subsequently, as if stored in an embryonic
state to mature in the practical compartment of memory which only
opened up for me later on when I accepted rational standards.

As a background to my first encounter with color, they
attended me only so far as in a dream a particular person ac-
companies us, although on awakening we should be hard pressed to
understand why we had presumed he was there, as the dream con-
tained nothing to indicate his presence except our conviction
that he was with us.

exclaiming at the width of the globe on meeting with
such a wanderer as myself.

Before twilight

The oil light had been lit ---and the maidens
walked along the corridors with supple hips, bearing on
their braided heads the rolled colossal palm leaves filled
with arum lilies ---and the light through the green skreen
sheaths kaukukadxxhkaemxxwika fell upon them as through dim
windows of jade.

Among the music of their speech, the sempstress
detached with one last unanswered imploration in her eyes,
detached herself from the shadow of the travelling sales-
man, and stepped dejected from the train.

And I was wondering, why in those lands where
women are so brown, the flowers should grow------
all---so heavily, so waxen white?

10

has always been a revelation to me-- that my mother was playing
a march on a piano with a long black tail.

"Listen," said my nurse who, together with the player,
had only the tenuous dream proximity, "that's the soldier's music."

Instantly before my eyes a file of soldiers sprang from
the carpet. All shining and alive they jogged across the drawing-
room floor with a full-blown military swagger, notwithstanding
that they grew like rooted plants only from the waist up out of
a soft golden-yellow pile lying in the light from the 'French'
windows through which they vanished.

After they had gone, the room and all it contained resumed the monotony of practical conditions I have always found so unconvincing.

It is curious if the real and unreal are interchangeable
in its mind, for which such materializations are a matter of
course, that the child should so very rarely mention them to an
elder. Does it know instinctively that for us words are not in
the habit of materializing to disturb our conviction that nativity
suffices to bring our offspring into the same world with ourselves;
or else, why should it make reservations in view of adult standards,
as if it could not get into touch with them.

But these magical embodiments that do actually take place
within our range are more simple than they would seem were we
aware of them. They are the result of the child having received
such intense first impressions that it is able to externalize
memory.

13

tries to postpone, the child is prompted by a clearer reasoning
than ours, to avoid the perils and disgraces we hold out to it,
and to linger in an unseen region it inhabits that is staked be-
yond fear.

But as soon as it gets into our real world, it is
frightened in the dark of dangers threatening from the rear, and
this may be in memory of primeval ancestors or because the first
remonstrance in the nursery sprang on it from behind. It is also
possible that it feels hampered in its facilities for self-pro-
tection by its blind-back that has slammed like a shutter on a
lost dimension.

16

As a patient under an anaesthetic feels agony drawn out
of the body like an elastic that finally snaps, inversely, I be-
came aware that a discomfort taking place at some distance, yet
more distinct than was the doctor's grip, was drawing nearer; until
in a last operation of that curiously detached attachment we have
been observing, I located it in a slim black object lying in
front of me like an overthrown post, in an uncustomary sharpness
of perspective.

The mind, in an effort to define the nature of anything
it faces for the first time, grasps at comparisons. I thought of
the legs of furniture that pillared so much of my adventure. But
this, in spite of seeming rigid, was secluded from the insensate
stuff of its surroundings by an aura of viability and a certain
tenderness in which I was alarmed to find myself beginning to
take part.

I tried to recede, but the space that had hitherto in-
tervened between myself and such things as I did not require,
failed to expand. Bound in a new relation of inseparableness, I
cannot get away. The pinch of pain, unhindered, darts from the
protruding solid to my brain; and the world congeals in a clap
of inertia.

The tempo of my consciousness, the hilarious riot of
vibrant infancy slow down, the scene dim, as when the weather
changes. Distinctly as if a film of radiance and velocity should
transform before my eyes to arrested motion and monochrome; for
after the violently superlative values I had been used to, I

17

cannot at once make distinctions among a milder coloration, so at
first the actual world presents its lethargic performance in photo-
graphic greys.

A woman, of the color of shadows and strangely slow, was
pressed against and bending over me in an intimate partnership of
my concrete plight.

"Can't you keep still," she asks, lifting with a long
exertion the buttonhook in her grey hand, "while I do up your
gaiters?"

There must be something ominous about a hue refractory
to light, that led our ancestors to choose it for the pall of
death; (often an infant in arms will scream with terror at
widow's weeds). The sight of the mat black sheath of my gaiter
with its row of boot buttons, stirring an inherited reaction of
the eternal subconscious, is my first alert of mortality; although
it is incredible, unless the condition for entering the adult's
world is the acceptance of finitude; Death is staring me in the
face.

And the heaviness of the flesh incurs its psychic counterpart, an apprehensive sullenness, when by some sly, slow, fourth-dimensional stunt one finds oneself trapped in a brick box, caught by the leg.

"Now, Goy, don't sit there sulking, it's time- - - ."

The marked propensity, in children, to hop like broken
birds--------.

Nature takes care of all that. She stokes the sun to an intensity that will compensate for the sublime, and the child emerges into clarity once more.

*****

I was high as the hedge-grass. An horizon of immediate sky descended to my domain of insects and umergrowth on the edge of an open country road, and the residuum of its azure splashed blue one cornflower against immensity. For I isolated in this grounded perspective in which my parents, leaning over the fence, vanished above the kneeg, for I was only brought into communication with their entrails when they were sitting down, I saw nothing or the hills and plains that were spread out before them.

I urged my body through the lower bars of the fence to get into the field and gather this blue innocence, whose beauty was reassuring after the mirage of the ruby blood. But even a flower held in the hand is not possessed, there is something more about it than itself; the aesthetic suggestion: to make beauty one's own through some dimly conceived and in calculable transformation.

Flooded with a sudden determination, the physiological vehicle is wiped out; one more for a moment consciousness overflows and there is nothing here but infinity and where I had been standing is left only a nucleus of power. As consciousness came upon its body, the child finds its will. It is redeemed by self-sufficiency.

When I narrowed down to myself again, something of this power that had absorbed me remained within me; it is the power that hovers over our eyes and through our eyes reciprocates the

The final achievement of consciousness, meditation, is perhaps misconstrued, when, owing to a general concession that a certain degree of subjugation of the body is required to bring it about, it is demeaned to a form of punishment for very young children. For there is also that other essential preliminary, concentration, and when I had been told not to move while everyone else went down to tea, I just sat pushing my fingers through the holes in the cane seat of my chair.

But as one half of our mind seldom knows what the other half is doing, I was at the same time tremendousmy engrossed with the rectangular clarity set in the air, that had been so surprisingly mixed up with a series of excitements for which, try as I would, I could not find myself responsible. It was the 'being there' of its 'not being there' that intrigued me. Only one thing had become quite plain to my child consciousness. The soiled light of these strange new days does not come in by itself, for an implausible wound in invisibility whose zone is fine as a spider's line reveals a *clearer* distance.

"Never mind", says Mary Maude Munn, whose eyes, that are like violets too bashful to fade, steal into the nursery with their maiden lady to look at the hole in the window. "It was an accident".

49

by all humanity alike, it arouses a certain sympathy that is
never extended to the pleasure-seeker. The excitation around an
accident having inspired the humane sciences, Society recognizes
little responsibility for the individual before he gets a pain and
is almost prohibitive to pleasure. Notwithstanding that, the great-
er the area of consciousness preserved for the culture of pleasure,
the less will be available for the experience of pain.

Under the raptureless regime the apostle appointed us
to doff the flesh and invest ourselves of the spirit. The
ecclesiast ostracised the flesh, the laity were persuaded they in-
dulged the flesh, while Eros distributed his misleading literature.

Both Eros and the Apostle err. The fleshly discomforts
for which the ascetic is notorious; of adolescent friars who van-
quished Satan in his guise of urgence towards self-consolation
were as nothing in comparison to those of venerated mothers and
light ladies; of male householuers trapped with the eternal
Feminine when debarred from the climax of 'love'. In the matter
of discomfort the ascetic was the slacker, for what is abstention
when set against participance entailing effects such as pre-
asceptic childbirth, or, for our really rollicking sisters and
brothers, illicit abortion and the syphilitic debacle?

So the tentative progress of that nincompoop, The Flesh,
devolved upon the layman who, taking all the sporting risks in
suffering, has succeeded in pressing some sparse essences of
Beauty from biological life.

The aeroplane and the dragonfly are not released from
the same hand. Deity alone makes soft machines, the subtlety of

50

whose material allows that articulate tuber, the living entity, to
carry on the work of its Creator, in being conscious.

But in how far conscious? For the least phenomena with
which we are involved could only be entirely embraced by a uni-
versal consciousness inasmuch as all relations are illimitable;
while our small share in the universal consciousness seems to be
in some way restricted by the dominant movement of life; forward-
ness. We are featured forwardly, we look, sound, toe and finger
forwardly, and the time we take to make use of our senses moves
forward with Life. As if we would flee from our blind back be-
cause life began as an impulsion to issue from nothingness.

And this consciousness so like an effluence in continu-
al escape from the body to mix with the outside world, cannot re-
vert and explore the territory from which it emanates that lies
behind the frontiers of instinct; for the body, like the vastness
surrounding it, is interpenetrated by intangible dimensions of
concentrated distance to which our intellect has no access, except
by the aid of the instruments of our sciences. For if one aspect
of the fall of Man is the descent of his intellect into the micro-
scopic universe-- when an alternative, apparently beyond his
choosing was offered him, to train his intuition on the diffused
nearness of things enormous and divine-- even so the body is not
self-conscious, for by reason of the necessity for such instruments
its data of itself are second-hand. The body is unknown to itself,
as it is to its clothed impersonator.

A transcental observer could look into this unexplored
territory where our Being is sustained through the shaping of the
indiscernible destinies of microscopic collaborators; could see in
that flesh which, when accidentally exposed to us, is nothing but

51

a butchered horror, an island in the air, whose routes bear the
rush of infinitessimal races among the fronds of forestal nerves;
would be able to hear the boom of the sensitive dynamo to which
the currents of our life are confluent, receiving and expelling
their pouring velocities through ivory aorta and arteries, to
scatter in ruby spray on arrival at capillary terminals.

We we, ourselves, are deaf to the whole roaring factory
of our impulses where the ceaseless signalling of the cerebellum
flashes commands from an unknown control; as deaf as though we
were in no way connected with it. Only in such rare moments of
inverted consciousness as occur when we are coming out of a swoon,
can we listen to the action of our own heart.

Siding up to his virgin, Simon begins to fumble and she
to shrink away, for not only are their bodies unreal to them but
the intellects they anchor consist mostly in the hallucination
that words will materialize without any assistance.

"I am now experiencing marriage," they say inwardly. But
being conscious, as it were, by hearsay, they leave the word marri-
age to its own devices, in that intellectual incapacity to come to
terms with instinct which causes so many of human-kind to succomb
to symbolism.

Theirs is such a hazy hymen that it makes us wonder if
the tradition of Love did not arise in the able passion of some
pagan god, transcribed a long, long time ago in an Olympian ode,
to dwindle down the ages.

Mistaking automatism for initiative, and the echoes that
ring in their brains for the birth of ideas, Simon and Ada are no
more originative than records played on a gramophone.

52

Yet there is nothing for which they have more respect than their own personalities. But as personality is the stamp of ideas, and only exceptional minds are capable of conceiving them; while an idea, once it has been handed on by its originator remains as little more than a symbol, or even degenerates to a prejudice, this man and woman safeguard their private stock of symbolic prejudices with almost the brutish obstinacy with which felons hang on to ill-gotten gains.

Yet under all this there still lies the cripple instinct with its own diabolical obstinacy of the sub-conscious; for after all, Man is little else than a vehicle for forces whose inherence to himself he cannot explain. So that, when we listen to arguments in favor of the survival of personality, it is not so much the plausibleness of the Immortal we call into question, but the existence of any personality for survival.

So if we push past the signals of approach to the supposed personalities of Simon and his bride; these eyes that are humid with an excited they share with even the insect world, we find only the eternal modus of invasion and resurrection, and the eternal lying-in-wait of a cavernous passivity to be fulfilled of anything extraneous to itself.

Yet Simon fumbles on, for the Presence of Nature has invited his instinct to take part for a moment in cosmic sentience, a moment in which the generations, with their countless hair, their enormously bamboozled souls and all the detail of their idiosyncracies, are mustered in the invisible spermatozoa, and urges that instinct to combine with the intellect, that together they may learn to keep up with the instant and vast operations

that are concluded in fractions of time; as when Life, conjoining
with the Absolute, engenders the fresh organism in a blaze of
sensibility whose sources of enlightenment we have not yet tapped.
For it is sensation itself that has the lightening intelligence
we shall have to share, if we are ever to gauge the entire extent
of our consciousness or the larger import of our reactions.

A wooden bed in Hampstead Heath is less like a tree than
is this slender stalk of grass that grows on the other side of the
world, where, while Simon's gas is low, the sun stands high in
heaven, drawing the grass erect to his ray lest it be weighed down
by the chain of coupling life that clings to it. Standing as if
in a draught from the open door of the furnace of summer, the stalk
is pendant with loves and the pairing of crowded insects takes
place, under cover of their modest chitin, in a haze of heat so
fine that it looks as if light had been caught in its own golden
web.

United in a passion as inscrutable as the enduring eyes
of the Buddhist, only once in as long as patience lasts the
onlooker they are jerked in a single tick of convulsion as intense
as the throb of this open noon.

The female ~~never~~ let's go of the stalk; the male continues
to clasp her abdomen...

74

And where an audience of the eighties were to be content-
ed with even one girl ripening her pink cotton tights, who had
little else to do but carry it about with her; our multiple
modern attention is drawn to a composite monster set on a re-
volving platform.

Her constellatory flesh whose substance is a troupe of
female acrobats; myriad-limbed, over-disciplined, falls into
metaphysical arabesques that dwindle and swell in contorted
perspectives.

Sometimes stellar. Sometimes serpentine. To swish
and intertwine with tentacular facility in paradoxical projec-
tions of spick and span light,

WOMAN - the big Review -- still inconsummate.

74

Her constellatory flesh whose substabce is a troupe of
female acrobats; myriad-limbed, over-disciplined, falls into
metaphysical arabesques that dwindle and swell in contorted
perspectives.

Sometimes stellar. Sometimes serpentine. To swish
and intertwine with tentacular facility in paradoxical projec-
tions of spick and span light.

WOMAN - the big Review - - - still inconsummate.