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.