SEARCH FOR TRUTH

  SEARCH for nothing any more, nothing

  except truth.

  Be very still, and try and get at the truth.

  And the first question to ask yourself is:

  How great a liar am I?

  LIES ABOUT LOVE

  WE are all liars, because

  the truth of yesterday becomes a lie to-morrow,

  whereas letters are fixed,

  and we live by the letter of truth.

  The love I feel for my friend, this year,

  is different from the love I felt last year.

  If it were not so, it would be a lie.

  Yet we re-iterate love! love!

  as if it were coin with a fixed value

  instead of a flower that dies, and opens a different bud.

  TRAVEL IS OVER

  I HAVE travelled, and looked at the world, and loved it.

  Now I don’t want to look at the world any more,

  there seems nothing there.

  In not-looking, and in not-seeing

  comes a new strength

  and undeniable new gods share their life with us, when we

  cease to see.

  OLD MEN

  WHOM the gods love, die young.

  How the gods must hate most of the old, old men to-day,

  the rancid old men that don’t die

  because the gods don’t want them

  won’t have them

  leave them to stale on earth.

  Old people fixed in a rancid resistance

  to life, fixed to the letter of the law.

  The gods, who are life, and the fluidity of living change

  leave the old ones fixed to their ugly, cogged self-will

  which turns on and on, the same, and is hell on earth.

  DEATH

  DEATH is no escape, ah no! only a doorway to the inevitable.

  That’s why the dogged, resistant old ones dare not die

  dare not die! — they daren’t go through the door.

  They dare not die, because they know

  in death they cannot anymore escape

  the retribution for their obstinacy.

  Old men, old obstinate men and women

  dare not die, because in death

  their hardened souls are washed with fire, and washed and seared

  till they are softened back to life-stuff again, against which

  they hardened themselves.

  BOURGEOIS AND BOLSHEVIST

  THE bourgeois produces the bolshevist, inevitably

  as every half-truth at length produces the contradiction of itself

  in the opposite half-truth.

  PROPERTY AND NO-PROPERTY

  THE bourgeois asserts that he owns his property by divine right,

  and the bolshevist asserts that by human right no man shall

  own property

  and between the two blades of this pair of shears, property

  and no-property

  we shall all be cut to bits.

  COWARDICE AND IMPUDENCE

  BOURGEOIS cowardice produces bolshevist impudence

  in direct ratio.

  As the bourgeois gets secretly more cowardly, knowing he is in

  the wrong

  the bolshevist gets openly more impudent, also knowing he

  is in the wrong.

  And between the cowardice and impudence of this pair who

  are in the wrong,

  this pair of property mongrels

  the world will be torn in two.

  LORD TENNYSON AND LORD MELCHETT

  “ DOST tha hear my horse’s feet, as he canters away?

  Property! Property! Property! tha’s what they seems to

  say! “

  Do you hear my Rolls Royce purr, as it glides away?

  — I lick the cream off property! that’s what it seems to say!

  CHOICE OF EVILS

  IF I have to choose between the bourgeois and the bolshevist

  I choose the bourgeois

  he will interfere with me less.

  But in choosing the bourgeois, one brings to pass

  only more inevitably, the bolshevist

  Since the bourgeois is the direct cause of the bolshevist,

  as a half-lie causes the immediate contradiction of the half-lie.

  HARD-BOILED CONSERVATIVES

  O YOU hard-boiled conservatives, and you soft-boiled liberals

  don’t you see how you make bolshevism inevitable?

  SOLOMON’S BABY

  PROPERTY is now Solomon’s baby

  and whoever gets it, it’ll be a dead baby

  a corpse, even of property.

  THE PROPERTY QUESTION

  IN settling the property question between them,

  bourgeois and bolshevist,

  they’ll merely destroy all property and a great many people

  like the two lions who devoured one another, and left the tail —

  tufts wagging.

  Let’s hope there’ll be more sense in the tail-tufts

  than there was in the lions.

  THE WAY OUT

  THE only way to settle the property question

  is to cease to be interested in it; to be so interested in some —

  thing else

  that the property problem solves itself by the way.

  ST GEORGE AND THE DRAGON

  THE more you tackle the property dragon

  the more deadly and dangerous it becomes.

  Whereas if you ride away and become deeply concerned in

  something else

  the old dragon will dwindle down to the size of a stray cat, neglected,

  whom some recalcitrant old maid will adopt, as a hobby.

  It is all a question of being profoundly interested in property,

  or not.

  And quite a lot of people are not.

  But they let themselves be overwhelmed by those that are.

  THE HALF-BIJND

  THE bourgeois and the bolshevist are both blind

  hence the ridiculous way they rush in where angels fear to tread.

  They can’t see it.

  But among the bourgeois and the bolshevist bounders

  one notices men here and there, going hesitatingly, faltering

  with the pathos of those who can see, but whose sight is dim.

  And these, the minority of men who can still see the light of life

  give way all the time before the mechanical rushing of the

  ugly stone-blind ones.

  MINORITIES IN DANGER

  Now above all is the time for the minorities of men,

  those who are neither bourgeois nor bolshevist, but true life,

  to gather and fortify themselves, in every class, in every

  country, in every race.

  Instead of which, the minorities that still see the gleams of life

  submit abjectly to the blind mechanical traffic-streams of those horrors

  the stone-blind bourgeois, and the stone-blind bolshevist,

  and pander to them.

  IF YOU ARE A MAN

  IF you are a man, and believe in the destiny of mankind

  then say to yourself: we will cease to care

  about property and money and mechanical devices,

  and open our consciousness to the deep, mysterious life

  that we are now cut off from.

  The machine shall be abolished from the earth again;

  it is a mistake that mankind has made;

  money shall cease to be, and property shall cease to perplex

  and we will find the way to immediate contact with life

  and with one another.

  To know the moon as we have never known

  yet she is knowable.

  To know a man as we have never known

  a man, as never yet a man was knowable, yet still shall be.

  TERRA INCOGNITA

  THERE are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed of

  vast ranges of experience, like the humming of unseen harps,

  we know nothing of, within us.

  Oh when man escaped from the barbed-wire entanglement

  of his own ideas and his own mechanical devices

  there is a marvellous rich world of contact and sheer fluid beauty

  and fearless face-to-face awareness of now-naked life

  and me, and you, and other men and women

  and grapes, and ghouls, and ghosts and green moonlight

  and ruddy-orange limbs stirring the limbo

  of the unknown air, and eyes so soft

  softer than the space between the stars,

  and all things, and nothing, and being and not-being

  alternately palpitant,

  when at last we escape the barbed-wire enclosure

  of Know Thyself, knowing we can never know,

  we can but touch, and wonder, and ponder, and make our effort

  and dangle in a last fastidious fine delight

  as the fuchsia does, dangling her reckless drop

  of purple after so much putting forth

  and slow mounting marvel of a little tree.

  CLIMBING DOWN

  THEY are afraid of climbing down from this idiotic tin-pot

  heaven of ours

  because they don’t know what they’ll find when they do get down.

  They needn’t bother, most of them will never get down at all,

  they’ve got to stay up.

  And those that do descend have got to suffer a sense-change

  into something new and strange.

  Become aware as leaves are aware

  and fine as flowers are fine

  and fierce as fire is fierce

  and subtle, silvery, tinkling and rippling

  as rain-water

  and still a man,

  but a man re-born from the rigidity of fixed ideas

  resurrected from the death of mechanical motion and emotion.

  ONLY THE BEST MATTERS

  ONLY the best matters, in man especially.

  True, you can’t produce the best without attending to the whole

  but that which is secondary is only important

  in so far as it goes to the bringing forth of the best.

  TO PINO

  O PINO

  What a bean-o!

  when we printed Lady C.!

  Little Giuntina

  couldn’t have been a

  better little bee!

  When you told him

  perhaps they’d scold him

  for printing those naughty words

  All he could say:

  “ But we do it every day!

  like the pigeons and the other little birds! “

  And dear old lady Jean

  “ I don’t know what you mean

  by publishing such a book.”

  We’re all in it, all my family

  me and Ekkerhart and Somers and Pamelie —

  you’re no better than a crook — ! “

  “Wait, dear Lady Jean, wait a minute!

  What makes you think that you’re all in it?

  Did you ever open the book?

  Is Ekke Sir Clifford? it’s really funny!

  And you, dear Lady Jean, are you Connie?

  Do open the book and look! — “

  But off she went, being really rattled

  and there’s a battle that’s still to be battled

  along with the others! what luck!

  BROADCASTING TO THE G. B. P.

  “ HUSHABY baby, on a tree top

  when the wind blows, the cradle shall rock,

  when the bough breaks “

  Stop that at once!

  You’ll give the Great British Public a nervous shock!

  “Goosey goosey gander

  whither do you wander

  upstairs, downstairs

  in my lady’s “

  Stop! where’s your education?

  Don’t you know that’s obscene?

  Remember the British Public!

  “ Baa-baa black sheep

  have you any wool?

  yes sir! yes sir!

  three bags full!

  One for the master, and one for the dame,

  and one for the little boy that lives down the “

  No!

  You’d better omit that, too communistic!

  Remember the state of mind of the British Public.

  “Pussy-cat pussy-cat where have you been?

  I’ve been up to London to see the fine queen!

  Pussy-cat pussy-cat what did you there?

  I frightened a little mouse — — “

  Thank you! thank you

  There are no mice in our Royal Palaces. Omit it!

  WE CANT BE TOO CAREFUL

  WE can’t be too careful

  about the British Public.

  It gets bigger and bigger

  and its perambulator has to get bigger and bigger

  and its dummy-teat has to be made bigger and bigger and bigger

  and the job of changing its diapers gets bigger and bigger and

  bigger and bigger

  and the sound of its howling gets bigger and bigger and bigger

  and bigger and bigger

  and the feed of pap that we nurses and guardian angels of

  the press have to deal out to it

  gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger

  yet its belly-ache seems to get bigger too

  and soon even god won’t be big enough to handle that infant.

  GLIMPSES

  WHAT’S the good of a man

  unless there’s the glimpse of a god in him?

  And what’s the good of a woman

  unless she’s a glimpse of a goddess of some sort?

  ALL SORTS OF GODS

  THERE’S all sorts of gods, all sorts and every sort,

  and every god that humanity has ever known is still a god to-day

  the African queer ones and Scandinavians’ queer ones,

  the Greek beautiful ones, the Phoenician ugly ones, the Aztec

  hideous ones

  goddesses of love, goddesses of dirt, excrement-eaters or lily virgins

  Jesus, Buddha, Jehovah and Ra, Egypt and Babylon

  all the gods, and you see them all if you look, alive and moving to-day,

  and alive and moving to-morrow, many to-morrows, as yesterdays.

  Where do you see them, you say?

  You see them in glimpses, in the faces and forms of people,

  in glimpses.

  When men and women, when lads and girls are not thinking,

  when they are pure, which means when they are quite clean

  from self-consciousness

  either in anger or tenderness, or desire or sadness or wonder

  or mere stillness

  you may see glimpses of the gods in them.

  FOR A MOMENT

  FOR a moment, at evening, tired, as he stepped off the tram- car,

  — the young tram-conductor in a blue uniform, to himself

  forgotten, —

  and lifted his face up, with blue eyes looking at the electric

  rod which he was going to turn round,

  for a moment, pure in the yellow evening light, he was

  Hyacinthus.

  In the green garden darkened the shadow of coming rain

  and a girl ran swiftly, laughing breathless, taking in her white washing

  in rapid armfuls from the line, tossing in the basket,

  and so rapidly, and so flashing, fleeing before the rain

  for a moment she was Io, Io, who fled from Zeus, or the Danae.

  When I was waiting and not thinking, sitting at a table on the

  hotel terrace

  I saw suddenly coming towards me, lit up and uplifted with pleasure

  advancing with the slow-swiftness of a ship backing her white

  sails into port

  the woman who looks for me in the world

  and for the moment she was Isis, gleaming, having found her

  Osiris.

  For a moment, as he looked at me through his spectacles

  pondering, yet eager, the broad and thick-set Italian who

  works in with me,

  for a moment he was the Centaur, the wise yet horse-hoofed

  Centaur

  in whom I can trust.

  GOETHE AND POSE

  WHEN Goethe becomes an Apollo, he becomes a plaster cast.

  When people pose as gods, they are Crystal Palace statues,

  Made of cement poured into a mould, around iron sticks.

  MEN LIKE GODS

  WHEN men think they are like gods

  they are usually much less than men

  being conceited fools.

  THOUGHT

  THOUGHT, I love thought.

  But not the jaggling and twisting of already existent ideas

  I despise that self-important game.

  Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness

  Thought is the testing of statements on the touchstone of the conscience

  Thought is gazing on to the face of life, and reading what can

  be read,

  Thought is pondering over experience, and coming to con- clusion.

  Thought is not a trick, or an exercise, or a set of dodges

  Thought is a man in his wholeness wholly attending.

  BE IT SO

  O, IF a flame is in you, be it so!

  When your flame flickers up, and flickers forth in sheer purity

  for a moment free from all conceit of yourself, and all after- thought

  you are for that moment one of the gods, Jesus or Fafnir or

  Priapus or Siva.