The Complex Vision

by John Cowper Powys

The word "love" has been used so indiscriminately in its surprising history that it becomes necessary to elucidate a little the particular meaning I give to it in connection with this ultimate duality. A strange and grotesque commentary upon human life, these various contradictory feelings that have covered their "multitude of sins" under this historic name!

The lust of the satyr, the affectionate glow of the domestic habitué, the rare exalted passion of the lover, the cold, clear attraction of the intellectual platonist, the will to possession of 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, towards the ultimate mystery—all these things have been called "love" that we should follow them and pursue them; all these things have been called "love" that we should avoid them and fly from them.

The emotion of love in which we seem to detect the ultimate creative force is not precisely any of these things. Of all normal human emotions it comes nearest to passionate 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 the very stuff of the soul itself? How should it be that when it is the projection, into the heart of the objective mystery, of the soul's manifold and complicated essence?

The best definition of love is that it is the creative apprehension of life, or of the objective mystery, under the form of an eternal vision. At first sight this definition might seem but a cold and intellectual account of love; an account that has omitted all feeling, all passion, all ecstasy.

But when we remember that what we call "the eternal vision" is nothing less than the answer of love to love, nothing less than the reciprocal rhythm of all souls, in so far as they have overcome malice, with one another and with the mystery which surrounds them, it will be seen that the thing is something in which what we call "intellect" and what we call "feeling" are both transcended. Love, in this sense, is an ecstasy; 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 put into words. At one moment our human soul finds itself harassed by a thousand vexations, outraged by a thousand miseries. Physical pain torments it, spiritual pain torments it; and a great darkness of thick, heavy, poisonous obscurity wraps it round like a grave-cloth. Then, in a sudden movement of the will, the soul cries aloud upon love; and in one swift turn of the ultimate wheel, the whole situation is transformed.

The physical pain seems to have no longer any hold upon the soul. The mental misery and trouble falls away from it like an unstrapped load. And a deep, cool, tide—calm and still and full of infinite murmurs—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 connection with sex. Sexual passion has its place in the world'; but it is only when sexual passion merges itself in the sort of love we are now considering that it becomes an instrument of real clairvoyance.

There is a savage instinct of cruel and searching illumination in sexual passion, but such an instinct is directed towards death rather than towards life, because it is dominated, through all its masks and disguises, by the passion of possession.

Like the passion of hate, to which it is so closely allied, sexual passion has a kind of furious intensity which is able to reveal many deep levels of human obliquity. But one 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 the clairvoyance of malice digs into the subterranean poison of life, the more poison it finds. For in finding poison it creates poison, and in finding malice it doubles malice.

The great works of art are not motivated by the clairvoyance of malice; they are motivated by the clairvoyance of love. It is only in the inferior levels of art that malice is the dominant note; and even there it is only effective because, mixed with it, there 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 recognize it when it appears in the flesh. Malice displays its recognition of it by a passion of furious hatred; but even this hatred cannot last for ever, because in every personality that exists there must be a hidden love which answers to the appeal of love.

The feeling which love has, at its supreme moments, is the feeling of "unity in difference" with all forms of life. Love may concentrate itself with a special concentration upon one person or upon more than one; but what it does when 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 moment supposed that the emotion of love resembles that vague "emotion of humanity" which is able to satisfy itself in its own remote sensationalism without any contact with the baffling and difficult mystery of real flesh and blood.