The Complex Vision

rsonality. When we consider, further, the form under which personality realizes, itself, w

which surrounds the soul, we find it complicated by the fact that the soul's encounter with this mystery reveals the

tle the particular meaning I give to it in connection with this ultimate duality. A strange and grotesque commentary upo

the sex-maniac, the will to voluptuous cruelty of the sex-pervert, the maternal instinct, the race-instinct, the instinct towards fetish-worship, the instinct towards art, towards nature, towar

sympathy. But it is much more than this. The emotion of love is not a simple nor an easily defined thing. How should it be that, when it is one aspect of the outpouring of

ystery, under the form of an eternal vision. At first sight this definition might seem but a cold

; but it is an ecstasy from which all troubling, agitating, individual exactions have been obliterated. It is an ecstasy completely purged of the possessive instinct. It is an ecstasy that brings to us a feeling of indescribable peace and calm. It is an ecstasy in which our personal self, in the fullest realization of its inmost identity, loses itself, even at the moment of such realization, in something which cannot be

-rolls up around it, and pours through it, and brings it healing and peace. The emotion of love in which personality, and therefore in which the universe, finds the secret of its life, has not the remotest

but such an instinct is directed towards death rather than towards life, because i

thing it cannot reveal, because of the strain of malice it carries with it, and that is the spring of genuine love. "Like unto like" is the key to the situation; and the deeper

e is an element of destructive hatred springing from some perversion of the sexual instinct. Whatever difficulty we may experience in finding words wherewith to define this emotion of love, there is not one of us, however sceptical and malign, who does not re

hen it so concentrates itself is not to make an alliance of "attack and defence" with the person it loves, but to flow outwards, through them and beyond them, until it includes every living thing. Let it not, however, be for a mom

that these should be different from what they are, except in so far as love inevitably makes them different. It accepts them as its "unive

ary to the emotion of love to react against such weaknesses of the flesh with austere or cruel contempt. It is humorously indulgent to t

n or the other person, as the unaccountable attractions of likeness and difference dictate or as destiny dictates; but the deepest loyalty of love is always directed to the eternal vision; for in the eternal vision it not only becomes one with all living souls but it also becomes one-though this is a high and difficult mystery-with all

m Blake which imply the difficulty which love finds in overcoming the murderous exactions of the possessive instinct and the cruel clairvoy

. The situation, in fact, is never a static one. These "faults" which malice, in its reproductive "discoveries" lays bare, are not fixed, immobile, dead. They are organic and psychic conditions of a living soul. They are themselves in a perpetual state of change, of growth, of increase, of withering, of fading. They are affected at every moment by the will and by the emotion of th

human consciousness increasing the evil which it is its purpose to collect. The apostolic definition of "charity" as the thing which "thinketh no evil" is hereby completely justif

n in the very act of increasing these faults. For the I static and unchanging is precisely what malice desires a

fall away and cease to exist. It is completely justified in its declaration that what it sees and feels in such a person is a hidden reservoir of unsatisfied good. It does see this; it does feel this; because there arises, in ans

nd shifting masks and disguises. What we call the "universe" is nothing but a congeries of innumerable "souls," manifested in

ls towards the body and soul of any other, or again, in a still wider sens

n a forlorn piece of trodden earth-mould or dusty sand which lies at his feet. Something about the light movement of these shadows and their delicate play upon the ground thrills him with a sudden thrill; and he finds he "loves" this barren piece of earth, these grass-blades, and this tree. He does

of the tree, the plant, and the earth. Let an animal enter upon the scene, or a bird, or a windblown butterfly, or a flickering flight of midges or gnats, their small bodies illumined by the sun. These new comers he also loves; and is obscurely co

to find its account in some physical or mental annoyance produced in us by each of these living things. This annoyance, th

poison the blood of man. The human invader, above all; how loud and unpleasing his voice is! The eternal malice in the depths of our soul pounces upon this tendency of grass to be "a common weed," of gnats to bite, of dogs to bark, of shadows to flicker, of a man to have an evil temper, of a woman to have an atrocious shrewishness, or an appalling sluttishness; and out of these annoyances or "faults" it feeds its desire; it satisfies its necrophilis

of the various visions whose "universe" it is, that we suffer so cruelly from its ironic "diablerie." A universe entirely composed of the bodies and souls of beings whose primordial emotion is so largely made up of malice is naturally a malicio

ir various "universes" and found them to be one, is a thing which also may be affected by malice. It is an open question and one which, in the words of Sir Thomas Browne, "admits a wide solution," whether

explanation of the curious malignant impishness of those so-called "elementals" who teas

dial love of all the souls it contains continually redeems and transforms the universe. In other words it is no exaggeration to say that the unfathomable un

ruth is quite the contrary of this. What the revelation of the complex vision indicates is that this loathing of the body, this revulsion against the body, this craving to escape from the body, is a mood which springs u

of truth, beauty and goodness which are pre-existent in the universe and theref

arth and air and water and fire, are incarnated in this miracle of flesh and blood. In the countenance of a human child, in the countenance of a man or a woman, the whole unfathom

now "love" at all. To loathe flesh and blood, to will the annihilation of flesh and blood, is to

of the human body; but practically it does so. And it practically does so because the human body evidently incarna

tent to deal with the actual experiences which we have, the human body, summing up the magical qualities of all oth

creative impulse. It is a sign of a relative disintegration of the power of "love" and a relative concentration of the power of "malice." Thus when, by an abuse of th

tribute of sensation is forgotten, the principle of love is outraged, because the eternal idea of the body is denied. The prin

wer of love is inconceivably greater than our own, we are compelled, by the necessity of the complex vision, to encounter one of those

this love is the creative energy of those personal souls we have named "the sons of the universe," therefore "the sons of the universe" must be regarded as directing their desire and their will towards what satisfies the inherent nature of such love. And becaus

ng souls must be directed towards the eternalizing of this same reality. And because the love of all living souls remains restless and unsatisfied when directed to any object except the "eternal vision" and because when directed to the "eter

, the inherent desire of the love of all living souls is directed towards the eternalizing of the idea of flesh and blood. From this it fol

they give themselves up to the creative energy, to direct their will towards the eternalization o

or "the sons of the universe" frustrated in its desire in so far as "the sons of the universe" cannot be embodied in flesh and blood? And is not t

" could appear in flesh and blood for the satisfaction of any one of their lovers, all other souls in the wide world would lose them as their invisible companions. But although this dilemma cannot in its literal outlines be

pect of the fulness and completeness of personality. But though the idea of flesh and blood is a necessary aspect of personality, every act

t, which we have to think of, although we cannot define it, as constituting the soul's essential self. Those pre-existed ideas which find their synthesis in the emotion of love are undoubtedly part of the unfathomable universe. But they ar

zation of the idea of flesh and blood would be on the way to satisfaction, even if it never altogether reached it, if it were able to feel that this beauty and nobility and reality which exist in this "vani

we have seen, become more than a "vanishing-point of sensation" we have at least the satisfaction of knowing that if we were able to define the thing more clearly

ion, they may be considered as leading such love upon the true way by simply being what they are; that is by being living souls. For, as living souls, the

t of them could possibly be; though human imagination and human art have a profound right to attempt to visualize such an impossible embodimen

h and blood in the "spiritual bodies" of these "invisible companions," so the gods can themselves satisfy so

are reluctant to analyse, to the furthest limit, their own capacity for the kind of "love" I have attempted to describe; and possib

d by a direct appeal to concrete experience. When one analyses this emotion of love in relation to any actual human object

ery different kind of pity; into the "pity," namely, of a torturer for his victim. But I feel I am not wrong in my analysis of the kind o

such a person's soul. "Love is not love" when the blemishes and defects and maladies of the physical form of the person loved interfere with our love and

sness and repulsiveness and offensiveness, as exists in some degree in the physiological aspects of us all?" It is able to endure because in the pre

hese "sons of the universe" it is in reality false to its desire for the "eternal idea of the body," beca

form of such a soul must of necessity be profoundly penetrated by pity and by a tender and humorous recogni

e expression of the soul, we fall into the same fatal weakness as that into which those fall who demand a physical incarnation of

is unattractive. The sexual emotion, the emotion which we call "being in love," does sometimes include this morbidity, just because, by reason of its physiological origin, it tends to remain the slave of the physiological. But although love does not imply a morbid attraction to the repulsive and the offen

s not so much the retention of the physiological aspect of these things, as we know them now, but of the physiologic

" or the "body" which guarantees the eternal reality of these aspects of life. It does not demand that we should love

at we call "mind" but exist in what we call "matter" also. Consequently love, when in its craving for complete reality

y craving, namely that in some actual human body "the eternal idea of the body" should be realized, that the sweet and terrible madness of sexual love continually i

ebris of "matter," the eternal idea of "matter" and because it is able to see, under the lamentable re

ation and sometimes an attitude of destructive fire. Love's attitude towards the repulsive and the offensive in hu

ncerned, an element of profound pity. The best concrete example of the mood I am trying to indicate is the emotion which any one would naturally feel in the presence of some torturer or tyrant w

thing of the physiological is a sign of a weakening of the creative energy. It is also a sign of the stiffening of the resistant "malice," or "motiveless malignity," which opposes creation. What the energy of love directs its desire and its will towards, is fir

l. In such moments the soul gathers itself together on the verge and brink of the unknown. Something beyond the power of our will takes possessi

rces" and "energies" and "evolution" or "dissolution," in place of our struggle for "existence" or for "power," we become suddenly aware that in the outflowing and reciprocal inter-action of the emotion of love there is something that