Man to Man H E LAY sick and unmoved, in pure opposition to everything.He knew how near to breaking was the vessel that held his life.
He knew also how strong and durable it was.And he did not care.Better a thousand times take one's chance with death, than accept a life one did not want.But best of all to persist and persist and persist for ever, till one were satisfied in life.
He knew that Ursula was referred back to him.He knew his life rested with her.But he would rather not live than accept the love she proffered.
The old way of love seemed a dreadful bondage, a sort of conscription.
What it was in him he did not know, but the thought of love, marriage, and children, and a life lived together, in the horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction, was repulsive.He wanted something clearer, more open, cooler, as it were.The hot narrow intimacy between man and wife was abhorrent.The way they shut their doors, these married people, and shut themselves in to their own exclusive alliance with each other, even in love, disgusted him.It was a whole community of mistrustful couples insulated in private houses or private rooms, always in couples, and no further life, no further immediate, no disinterested relationship admitted:
a kaleidoscope of couples, disjoined, separatist, meaningless entities of married couples.True, he hated promiscuity even worse than marriage, and a liaison was only another kind of coupling, reactionary from the legal marriage.Reaction was a greater bore than action.
On the whole, he hated sex, it was such a limitation.It was sex that turned a man into a broken half of a couple, the woman into the other broken half.And he wanted to be single in himself, the woman single in herself.
He wanted sex to revert to the level of the other appetites, to be regarded as a functional process, not as a fulfilment.He believed in sex marriage.
But beyond this, he wanted a further conjunction, where man had being and woman had being, two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like two poles of one force, like two angels, or two demons.
He wanted so much to be free, not under the compulsion of any need for unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire.Desire and aspiration should find their object without all this torture, as now, in a world of plenty of water, simple thirst is inconsiderable, satisfied almost unconsciously.
And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised with her.The merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent to him.
But it seemed to him, woman was always so horrible and clutching, she had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love.She wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant.Everything must be referred back to her, to Woman, the Great Mother of everything, out of whom proceeded everything and to whom everything must finally be rendered up.
It filled him with almost insane fury, this calm assumption of the Magna Mater, that all was hers, because she had borne it.Man was hers because she had borne him.A Mater Dolorosa, she had borne him, a Magna Mater, she now claimed him again, soul and body, sex, meaning, and all.He had a horror of the Magna Mater, she was detestable.
She was on a very high horse again, was woman, the Great Mother.Did he not know it in Hermione.Hermione, the humble, the subservient, what was she all the while but the Mater Dolorosa, in her subservience, claiming with horrible, insidious arrogance and female tyranny, her own again, claiming back the man she had borne in suffering.By her very suffering and humility she bound her son with chains, she held him her everlasting prisoner.
And Ursula, Ursula was the same -- or the inverse.She too was the awful, arrogant queen of life, as if she were a queen bee on whom all the rest depended.He saw the yellow flare in her eyes, he knew the unthinkable overweening assumption of primacy in her.She was unconscious of it herself.
She was only too ready to knock her head on the ground before a man.But this was only when she was so certain of her man, that she could worship him as a woman worships her own infant, with a worship of perfect possession.
It was intolerable, this possession at the hands of woman.Always a man must be considered as the broken off fragment of a woman, and the sex was the still aching scar of the laceration.Man must be added on to a woman, before he had any real place or wholeness.
And why? Why should we consider ourselves, men and women, as broken fragments of one whole? It is not true.We are not broken fragments of one whole.Rather we are the singling away into purity and clear being, of things that were mixed.Rather the sex is that which remains in us of the mixed, the unresolved.And passion is the further separating of this mixture, that which is manly being taken into the being of the man, that which is womanly passing to the woman, till the two are clear and whole as angels, the admixture of sex in the highest sense surpassed, leaving two single beings constellated together like two stars.
In the old age, before sex was, we were mixed, each one a mixture.The process of singling into individuality resulted into the great polarisation of sex.The womanly drew to one side, the manly to the other.But the separation was imperfect even them.And so our world-cycle passes.There is now to come the new day, when we are beings each of us, fulfilled in difference.
The man is pure man, the woman pure woman, they are perfectly polarised.
But there is no longer any of the horrible merging, mingling self-abnegation of love.There is only the pure duality of polarisation, each one free from any contamination of the other.In each, the individual is primal, sex is subordinate, but perfectly polarised.Each has a single, separate being, with its own laws.The man has his pure freedom, the woman hers.