The Act of Creation (50 page)

I went down to the bottoms of the mountains:
the earth with her bars was about me for ever.

The journey always represents a plunge downward and backward to the sources
and tragic undercurrents of existence, into the fluid magma, of which the
Trivial Plane of everyday life is merely the thin crust. In most tribal
societies, the plunge is symbolically enacted in the initiation-rites
which precede the turning points in the life of the individual,
such as puberty or marriage. He is made to undertake a minor Night
Journey: segregated from the community, he must fast, endure physical
hardships and various ordeals, so that he may experience the essential
solitude of man, and establish contact with the Tragic Plane. A similar
purpose is served by the symbolic drowning and rebirth of baptism; the
institution of periods of retreat found in most religious; in fasts and
other purification rituals; in the initiation ceremonies of religious
or masonic orders, even of university societies. Illumination must be
preceded by the ordeals of incubation.
Freudians and Jungians alike emphasize the intimate relation between the
symbolism of the Night Journey, and the unconscious craving for a return
to the womb. The connection is no more far-fetched than our references to
'mother earth', 'mother ocean', or 'mother church'.
Not only do we speak of'Mother Church', but even of the 'womb of the
Church', and in the ceremony of the 'benedictio fontis' of the Catholic
Church the baptismal font is even called the 'immaculatus divini fontis
uterus' (the immaculate uterine font of divinity). . . . [2]
The maternal aspect of the church is impersonated in the Virgin Mary. In
Donne's 'Annunciation', the Angel greets her with:

That All, which alwayes is All every where,
Which cannot sinne, and yet all sinnes must beare,
Which cannot die, yet cannot chuse but die,
Loe, faithfull Virgin, yeelds himselfe to lye
In prison, in thy wombe; . . .
. . . yea thou art now
Thy Makers maker, and thy Fathers mother;
Thou 'hast light in darke; and shutst in little roome,
Immensity cloystered in thy deare wombe.

The craving for the womb, for the dissolution of the self in a lost,
vegetative oneness -- Freud's Nirvana principle -- is further symbolized
in the image of mother ocean in whose calm depths all life originates.
Mythology is full of these symbols -- the metaphors of the collective
unconscious. However bewildering they may appear to the waking mind,
they are familiar to the dreamer, and recur constantly in the sleep of
people who have nothing else in common. The Night Journey is the antipode
of Promethean striving. One endeavours to steal the bright fire from the
gods; the other is a sliding back towards the pulsating darkness, one
and undivided, of which we were part before our separate egos were formed.
Thus the Night Journey is a regression of the participatory tendencies,
a crisis in which consciousness becomes unborn -- to become reborn in
a higher form of synthesis. It is once more the process of
reculer
pour mieux sauter
; the creative impulse, having lost its bearing in
trivial entanglements, must effect a retreat to recover its vigour.
Without our regular, minor night journeys in sleep we would soon
become victims of mental desiccation. Dreaming is for the aesthetically
underprivileged the equivalent of artistic experience, his only means of
self-transcendence, of breaking away from the trivial plane and creating
his own mythology.
The Guilt of Jonah
Among the many variations of the Night Journey in myth and folklore,
one of the most forceful is the swry of Jonah and the whale -- perhaps
because in no ancient civilization was the tension between the Tragic and
Trivial planes more intensely felt than by the Hebrews. The first was
represented by the endless succession of invasions and catastrophes,
the exacting presence of Jehovah and of his apocalyptic prophets;
the second by the rare periods of relatively normal life, which the
over-strung spiritual leaders of the tribe condemned as abject. Jonah
had committed no crime which would warrant his dreadful punishment; he
is described as a quite ordinary and decent fellow with just a streak
of normal vanity -- for he is, justifiably, 'very angry' when, in the
end, God does not raze Nineveh as Jonah had prophesied at His bidding,
and thus makes Jonah appear an impostor or fool.
Now this very ordinary person receives at the beginning of the story
God's sudden order to 'go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it'
-- which is a rather tall order, for Jonah is no professional priest or
prophet. It is quite understandable that he prefers to go on leading his
happy and trivial life. So, instead of responding to the call from the
Tragic Plane, he buys a passage on a ship to Tarshish; and he has such
a clean conscience about it, that while the storm rages and the sailors
cry 'every man unto his god' and throw the cargo into the sea, Jonah
himself is fast asleep. And therein -- in his normality, complacency, in
his thick-skinned triviality and refusal to face the storm, and God, and
the corruption of Nineveh; in his turning his back on the tragic essence
of life -- precisely therein lies his sin, which leads to the crisis,
to the Night Journey in the belly of the whale, in 'the belly of hell'.

The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me
round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head . . .
yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God.
When my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord:
and my prayer came in unto thee. . . .
They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy.

The story sounds in fact like an allegory of a nervous breakdown and
subsequent spiritual conversion. Jonah might serve as a symbol for
Dimitri Karamazov, or any of the countless heroes of fiction who progress
through crisis to awakening. For I must repeat that Jonah's only crime
was to cling to the Trivial Plane and to cultivate his little garden,
trying to ignore the uncomfortable, unjust, terrible voice from the other
plane. Melville understood this when, in the great sermon in "Moby Dick,"
he made his preacher sum up the lesson of Jonah and the whale in this
unorthodox moral:

Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed
them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal!
Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who,
in this world, courts not dishonour!

And the author of the Jonah story himself must have been aware of its
vast implications, of the impossibility of treating all men who lead an
ordinary life as harshly as Jonah -- for the story ends with an unusual
act of clemency by the otherwise so vengeful desert-god, which comes as
a curious anticlimax full of ironical tolerance for the inadequacy of man:

Then said the Lord. . . . And should I not spare Nineveh, that great
city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot
discern between their right hand and their left hand: and also much
cattle?

The Root and the Flower
Just as there is no mythology without some mention of the death and
rebirth motif; so there is hardly any epoch in world literature without
some variation of it. Maud Bodkin [3] has made an exhaustive study of its
occurrence in works as wide apart as "The Ancient Mariner," Morgan's "The
Fountain," Eliot's "The Waste Land," and D. H. Lawrence's
The Plumed
Serpent
and
The Man Who Died
. Even such an urbane novelist
as E. M. Forster has in each of his five novels one central episode in
which the hero or heroine, who previously walked with self-assurance
on the smooth surface, seems to fall into a manhole with its lid off,
and re-emerge as a changed character -- like Mrs. Moore, after her visit
to the primeval Marabar caves. With the great Russian novelists, crisis
and conversion is a central theme; in German literature one can trace it
from
Faust II
to
The Magic Mountain
. It pops up in such
unexpected places as
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
,
or the last page of
To Have or Have Not
; and it was elevated to
a philosophy in Kierkegaard's
Fear and Trembling
and in Sartre's
existentialist credo: man is what he makes out of his anguish, he becomes
'free' through the realization of his nothingness.
Needless to say, not all great novels are -- or should be -- 'problem
novels' aiming at us a constant heavy barrage of the tragic and the
archetypal; if they were, literature would be very monotonous indeed. But
indirectly and implicitly every great work of art has some bearing on
man's ultimate problems. Yeats had a loathing for 'those learned men
who are a terror to children and an ignominious sight in lovers' eyes';
because 'Art bids us to touch and taste and hear and see the world,
and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematical form, from every abstract
thing.' And yet he knew better -- when, for instance, he evoked the purely
sensual delight of Cleopatra dancing alone under her 'topless towers':

She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks: her feet
Practise a tinker's shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.

The refrain, recurring after each of the three stanzas of the poem,
connects (as the context clearly indicates) Cleopatra's meditations
during her childish dance with the monumental archetype of the spirit
of God moving upon the face of the waters.
A flower, even if it is only a daisy, must have a root; and a work of
art, however gay, precious, or serene, is in the last instance fed,
however indirectly, invisibly, through delicate capillary tubes, from
the ancient substrata of experience. If it has a humorous message, it
produces a smile -- a subdued laugh or
sous-rire
; if it is tragic,
it produces a
sous-pleurer
, that rapt stillness and overflowing
of emotion where, to quote Donne again, "with a strong, sober thirst,
my soule attends."
The Tightrope
The ordinary mortal in our urban civilization moves virtually all his
life on the Trivial Plane; only on a few dramatic occasions -- during
the storms of puberty, when he is in love or in the presence of death
-- does he fall suddenly through the manhole, and is transferred to the
Tragic Plane. Then all at once the pursuits of his daily routines appear
as shallow, trifling vanities; but once safely back on the Trivial Plane,
he dismisses the realities of the other as the products of overstrung
nerves or adolescent effusions. Sudden catastrophes -- famines, wars,
and plagues -- may shift a whole population from the Trivial to the
Tragic Plane; but they soon succeed in banalizing even tragedy itself,
and carry on business as usual among the shambles. During the Spanish
Civil War, one of my fellow prisoners, a youth condemned to death by
shooting, and suffering from appendicitis, was put on a milk diet two
days before his execution.
The force of habit, the grip of convention, hold us down on the Trivial
Plane; we are unaware of our bondage because the bonds are invisible,
their restraints acting below the level of awareness. They are the
collective standards of value, codes of behaviour, matrices with built-in
axioms, which determine the rules of the game, and make most of us run,
most of the time, in the grooves of habit -- reducing us to the status of
skilled automata which Behaviourism proclaims to be the only condition
of man. What Bergson called 'the mechanical encrusted on the living'
is the result of protracted confinement to the Trivial Plane.
But, glory be, man is not a flat-earth dweller all the time -- only
most of the time. Like the universe in which he lives, he is in a state
of continuous creation. The exploratory drive is as fundamental to his
nature as the principle of parsimony which tends toward the automatization
of skilled routines; his need for self-transcendence as basic as the
necessity of self-assertion; lastly, we shall see that the
reculer
pour mieux sauter
of the creative act itself has its evolutionary
precedents in the phenomena of organic regeneration and in the 'original
adaptations' of which animals are capable in a crisis.
Life on the Trivial Plane is a state of unnoticed confinement --
but also a condition of social and intellectual stability. The belly
of the whale cannot be made into a permanent residence. Neither
emotionally, nor intellectually, can we afford to live for more than
brief transition periods on the Tragic Plane, surrounded by archetypes
and Ultimates. Emotionally, it would mean the journey of no return of
Blake -- or of the Yogi entering into final samadhi. Intellectually,
it would mean the abdication of reason. For the entities encountered on
that plane, the members of its matrix -- eternity, infinity, ultimate
causes, archetypal paradoxes -- are irreducible absolutes which do not
lend themselves to logical manipulation. They disrupt all rational
operations, as the mathematical symbols for nought and the infinite
do if introduced into a finite equation. Malraux's 'une vie ne vaut
rien -- mais rien ne vaut une vie' is a perfect expression of this. The
physicist can deal with infinite space in an abstract symbol-language,
but in ordinary experience it is just the infinite, a thing that passeth
understanding, and there the matter ends.
Absolutes are too inhuman and elusive to cope with, unless they are
connected with some experience in the tangible world of the finite. In
fact, eternity is a pretty meaningless notion -- unless it is made to
look through the window of time. 'Immensity' is a bore -- unless it
is 'cloystered in thy deare wombe'. The absolute becomes emotionally
effective only if it is bisociated with something concrete -- dovetailed,
as it were, into the familiar. The rain of manna on the children of
Israel which lasted forty years was an act of incomprehensible divine
largesse which, as we learn from Exodus, did not particularly impress
them; the miracle of the loaves and fishes was a true miracle.