Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

The foxy faces Of Edwardian Graces Horse-faces full of charm With strings of beads And a packet of seeds And an ape-tuft under each arm!

Society! Let us complicate existence to the point of drudgery so that it acts as a drug against reality. Unfair! Unfair! But, my dear Brother Ass, the sort of book I have in mind will be characterized by the desired quality which will make us rich and famous: it will be characterized by a total lack of codpiece!

When I want to infuriate Balthazar I say: ‘Now if the Jews would only assimilate they would give us a valuable lead in the matter of breaking down puritanism everywhere. For they are the licence-holders and patentees of the closed system, the ethical response! Even our absurd food prohibitions and inhibitions are copied from their melancholy priest-ridden rigmarole about flesh and fowl. Aye! We artists are not interested in policies but in values — this is our field of battle! If once we could loosen up, relax the terrible grip of the so-called Kingdom of Heaven which has made the earth such a blood-soaked place, we might rediscover in sex the key to a metaphysical search which is our raison d ’ кtre here below! If the closed system and the moral exclusiveness on divine right were relaxed a little what could we not do?’ What indeed? But the good Balthazar smokes his Lakadif gloomily and shakes his shaggy head. I think of the black velvet sighs of Juliet and fall silent. I think of the soft white knosps — unopened flower-shapes — which decorate the tombs of Moslem women!

The slack, soft insipid mansuetude of these females of the mind!

No, clearly my history is pretty weak. Islam also libs as the Pope does.

Brother Ass, let us trace the progress of the European artist from problem—child to case-history, from case-history to crybaby! He has kept the psyche of Europe alive by his ability to be wrong, by his continual cowardice — this is his function!

Cry-baby of the Western World! Cry-babies of the world unite!

But let me hasten to add, lest this sounds cynical or despairing, that I am full of hope. For always, at every moment of time, there is a chance that the artist will stumble upon what I can only call The Great Inkling! Whenever this happens he is at once free to enjoy his fecundating role; but it can never really happen as fully and completely as it deserves until the miracle comes about — the miracle of Pursewarden’s Ideal Commonwealth! Yes, I believe in this miracle. Our very existence as artists affirms it! It is the act of yea-saying about which the old poet of the city speaks in a poem you once showed me in translation.* The fact of an artist being born affirms and reaffirms this in every generation. The miracle is there, on ice so to speak. One fine day it will blossom: then the artist suddenly grows up and accepts the full responsibility for his origins in the people, and when simultaneously the people recognize his peculiar significance and value, and greet him as the unborn child in themselves, the infant Joy! I am certain it will come. At the moment they are like wrestlers nervously circling one another, looking for the hold. But when it comes, this great blinding second of illumination — only then shall we be able to dispense with hierarchy as a social form. The new society — so different from anything we can imagine now — will be born around the small strict white temple of the Infant Joy! Men and women will group themselves around it, the protoplasmic growth of the village, the town, the capital! Nothing stands in the way of this Ideal Commonwealth, save that in every generation the vanity and laziness of the artist has always matched the self-indulgent blindness of the people. But prepare, prepare! It is on the way.

It is here, there, nowhere!

The great schools of love will arise, and sensual and intellectual knowledge will draw their impetus from each other. The human animal will be uncaged, all his dirty cultural straw and coprolitic refuse of belief cleaned out. And the human spirit, radiating light and laughter, will softly tread the green grass like a dancer; will emerge to cohabit with the time-forms and give children to the world of the elementaries — undines and salamanders, sylphs and sylvestres, Gnomi and Vulcani, angels and gnomes.

Yes, to extend the range of physical sensuality to embrace mathematics and theology: to nourish not to stunt the intuitions.

For culture means sex, the root-knowledge, and where the faculty is derailed or crippled, its derivatives like religion come up dwarfed or contorted — instead of the emblematic mystic rose you get Judaic cauliflowers like Morons or Vegetarians, instead of artists you get cry-babies, instead of philosophy semantics.

The sexual and the creative energy go hand in hand. They convert into one another — the solar sexual and the lunar spiritual holding an eternal dialogue. They ride the spiral of time together.

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 nourishing 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 ministrations 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 mountain of follies where it can comfortably wait for the picks and shovels of the elect.