Women in Love

There is a long way we can travel, after the death-break: after that

point when the soul in intense suffering breaks, breaks away from its

organic hold like a leaf that falls. We fall from the connection with

life and hope, we lapse from pure integral being, from creation and

liberty, and we fall into the long, long African process of purely

sensual understanding, knowledge in the mystery of dissolution.

He realised now that this is a long process--thousands of years it

takes, after the death of the creative spirit. He realised that there

were great mysteries to be unsealed, sensual, mindless, dreadful

mysteries, far beyond the phallic cult. How far, in their inverted

culture, had these West Africans gone beyond phallic knowledge? Very,

very far. Birkin recalled again the female figure: the elongated, long,

long body, the curious unexpected heavy buttocks, he long, imprisoned

neck, the face with tiny features like a beetle's. This was far beyond

any phallic knowledge, sensual subtle realities far beyond the scope of

phallic investigation.

There remained this way, this awful African process, to be fulfilled.

It would be done differently by the white races. The white races,

having the arctic north behind them, the vast abstraction of ice and

snow, would fulfil a mystery of ice-destructive knowledge,

snow-abstract annihilation. Whereas the West Africans, controlled by

the burning death-abstraction of the Sahara, had been fulfilled in

sun-destruction, the putrescent mystery of sun-rays.

Was this then all that remained? Was there left now nothing but to

break off from the happy creative being, was the time up? Is our day of

creative life finished? Does there remain to us only the strange, awful

afterwards of the knowledge in dissolution, the African knowledge, but

different in us, who are blond and blue-eyed from the north?

Birkin thought of Gerald. He was one of these strange white wonderful

demons from the north, fulfilled in the destructive frost mystery. And

was he fated to pass away in this knowledge, this one process of

frost-knowledge, death by perfect cold? Was he a messenger, an omen of

the universal dissolution into whiteness and snow?

Birkin was frightened. He was tired too, when he had reached this

length of speculation. Suddenly his strange, strained attention gave

way, he could not attend to these mysteries any more. There was another

way, the way of freedom. There was the paradisal entry into pure,

single being, the individual soul taking precedence over love and

desire for union, stronger than any pangs of emotion, a lovely state of

free proud singleness, which accepted the obligation of the permanent

connection with others, and with the other, submits to the yoke and

leash of love, but never forfeits its own proud individual singleness,

even while it loves and yields.