The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [429]
They embrace the whole of the human motive. The truth is only to be found in our own entrails — the truth of Time.
‘Copulation is the lyric of the mob!’ Aye, and also the university of the soul: but a university at present without endowments, without books or even students. No, there are a few.
How wonderful the death-struggle of Lawrence: to realize his sexual nature fully, to break free from the manacles of the Old Testament; flashing down the firmament like a great white struggling man-fish, the last Christian martyr. His struggle is ours — to rescue Jesus from Moses. For a brief moment it looked possible, but St Paul restored the balance and the iron handcuffs of the Judaic prison closed about the growing soul forever. Yet in Th e Man Who Died he tells us plainly what must be, what the reawakening of Jesus should have meant — the true birth of free man. Where is he? What has happened to him? Will he ever come?
My spirit trembles with joy as I contemplate this city of light which a divine accident might create before our very eyes at any moment! Here art will find its true form and place, and the artist can play like a fountain without contention, without even trying. For I see art more and more clearly as a sort of manuring of the psyche. It has no intention, that is to say no theology. By nourish-ing the psyche, by dunging it up, it helps it to find its own level, like water. That level is an original innocence — who invented the perversion of Original Sin, that filthy obscenity of the West? Art, like a skilled masseur on a playing-field, is always standing by to help deal with casualties; and just as a masseur does, its minis-trations ease up the tensions of the psyche’s musculature. That is why it always goes for the sore places, its fingers pressing upon the knotted muscles, the tendon afflicted with cramp — the sins, perversions, displeasing points which we are reluctant to accept. Revealing them with its harsh kindness it unravels the tensions, relaxes the psyche. The other part of the work, if there is any other work, must belong to religion. Art is the purifying factor merely. It predicates nothing. It is the handmaid of silent content, essential only to joy and to love! These strange beliefs, Brother Ass, you will find lurking under my mordant humours, which may be described simply as a technique of therapy. As Balthazar says:
‘A good doctor, and in a special sense the psychologist, makes it quite deliberately, slightly harder for the patient to recover too
easily. You do this to see if his psyche has any real bounce in it, for the secret of healing is in the patient and not the doctor. The only measure is the reaction!’
I was born under Jupiter, Hero of the Comic Mode! My poems, like soft music invading the encumbered senses of young lovers left alone at night…. What was I saying? Yes, the best thing to do with a great truth, as Rabelais discovered, is to bury it in a moun-tain of follies where it can comfortably wait for the picks and shovels of the elect.
Between infinity and eternity stretches the thin hard tight-rope human beings must walk, joined at the waist! Do not let these unamiable propositions dismay you, Brother Ass. They are written down in pure joy, uncontaminated by a desire to preach!
I am really writing for an audience of the blind — but aren’t we all? Good art points, like a man too ill to speak, like a baby! But if instead of following the direction it indicates you take it for a thing in itself, having some sort of absolute value, or as a thesis upon something which can be paraphrased, surely you miss the point; you lose yourself at once among the barren abstractions of the critic? Try to tell yourself that its fundamental object was only to invoke the ultimate healing silence — and that the symbolism contained in form and pattern is only a frame of reference through which, as in a mirror, one may glimpse the idea of a universe at rest, a universe in