Great Pan is dead!
dhlawrence
At the beginning of
the Christian era, voices were heard off the coasts of Greece, out
to sea, on the Mediterranean, wailing: "Pan is dead! Great Pan is
dead!"
The father of fauns
and nymphs, satyrs and dryads and naiads was dead, with only the
voices in the air to lament him. Humanity hardly noticed.
But who was he, really?
Down the long lanes and overgrown ridings of history we catch odd
glimpses of a lurking rustic god with a goat's white lightning in
his eyes. A sort of fugitive, hidden among leaves, and laughing
with the uncanny derision of one who feels himself defeated by something
lesser than himself. An outlaw, even in the early days of
the gods. A sort of Ishmael among the bushes.
Yet always his lingering
title: The Great God Pan. As if he was, or had been, the greatest.
Lurking among the
leafy recesses, he was almost more demon than god. To be feared,
not loved or approached. A man who should see Pan by daylight fell
dead, as if blasted by lightning.
Yet you may dimly
see him in the night, a dark body within the darkness. And then,
it was a vision filling the limbs and the trunk of a man with power,
as with new, strong-mounting sap. The Pan-power! You went on your
way in the darkness secretly and subtly elated with blind energy,
and you could cast a spell, by your mere presence, on women and
on men. But particularly on women.
In the woods and the
remote places ran the children of Pan, all the nymphs and fauns
of the forest and the spring and the river and the rocks. These,
too, it was dangerous to see by day. The man who looked up to see
the white arms of a nymph flash as she darted behind the thick wild
laurels away from him followed helplessly. He was a nympholept.
Fascinated by the swift limbs and the wild, fresh sides of the nymph,
he followed for ever, for ever, in the endless monotony of his desire.
Unless came some wise being who could absolve him from the spell.
But the nymphs, running
among the trees and curling to sleep under the bushes, made the
myrtles blossom more gaily, and the spring bubble up with greater
urge, and the birds splash with a strength of life. And the little
flanks of the faun gave life to the oak-groves, the vast trees hummed
with energy. And the wheat sprouted like green rain returning out
of the ground, in the little fields, and the vine hung its black
drops in abundance, urging a secret.
Gradually men moved
into cities. And they loved the display of people better than the
display of a tree. They liked the glory they got of overpowering
one another in war. And, above all, they loved the vainglory of
their own words, the pomp of argument and the vanity of ideas.
So Pan became old and grey-bearded and goat-legged,
and his passion was degraded with the lust of senility. His power
to blast and to brighten dwindled. His nymphs became coarse and
vulgar.
Till at last the old Pan died, and was turned into
the devil of the Christians. The old god Pan became the Christian
devil, with the cloven hoofs and the horns, the tail, and the laugh
of derision. Old Nick, the Old Gentleman who is responsible for
all our wickednesses, but especially our sensual excesses - this
is all that is left to the Great God Pan.
It is strange. It is a most strange ending for a
god with such a name. Pan! All! That which is everything has goat's
feet and a tail! With a black face!
This really is curious.
Yet this was all that remained of Pan, except that
he acquired brimstone and hell-fire, for many, many centuries. The
nymphs turned into the nasty-smelling witches of a Walpurgis night,
and the fauns that danced became sorcerers riding the air, or fairies
no bigger than your thumb.
But Pan keeps on being reborn, in all kinds of strange
shapes. There he was, at the Renaissance. And in the eighteenth
century he had quite a vogue. He gave rise to an "ism", and there
were many pantheists, Wordsworth one of the first. They worshipped
Nature in her sweet-and-pure aspect, her Lucy Gray aspect.
"Oft have I heard of Lucy Gray," the school-child
began to recite, on examination-day.
"So have I," interrupted the bored inspector.
Lucy Gray, alas, was the form that William Wordsworth
thought fit to give to the Great God Pan.
And then he crosses over to the young United States:
I mean Pan did. Suddenly he gets a new name. He becomes the Oversoul,
the Allness of everything. To this new Lucifer Gray of a Pan Whitman
sings the famous Song of Myself: "I am All, and All is Me." That
is: "I am Pan, and Pan is Me."
The old goat-legged gentleman from Greece thoughtfully
strokes his beard, and answers: "All A is B, but all B is not A."
Aristotle did not live for nothing. All Walt is Pan, but all Pan
is not Walt.
This, even to Whitman, is incontrovertible. So the
new American pantheism collapses.
Then the poets dress up a few fauns and nymphs,
to let them run riskily - oh, would there were any risk! - in their
private "grounds." But, alas, these tame guinea-pigs soon became
boring. Change the game.
We still to believe that there is One mysterious
Something-or-other back of Everything, ordaining all things for
the ultimate good of humanity. It wasn't back of the Germans in
1914, of course, and whether it's back of the bolshevists is still
a grave question. But still, it's back of us, so that's all right.
Alas, poor Pan! Is this what you've come to? Legless,
hornless, faceless, even smileless, you are less than everything
or anything, except a lie.
And yet here, in America, the oldest of all, old
Pan is still alive. When Pan was greatest, he was not even Pan.
He was nameless and unconceived, mentally. Just as a small baby
new from the womb may say Mama! Dada! whereas in the womb it said
nothing; so humanity, in the womb of Pan, said nought. But when
humanity was born into a separate idea of itself, it said Pan.
In the days before man got too much separated off
from the universe, he was Pan, along with all the rest.
As a tree still is. A strong-willed, powerful thing-in-itself,
reaching up and reaching down. With a powerful will of its own it
thrusts green hands and huge limbs at the light above, and sends
huge legs and gripping toes down, down between the earth and rocks,
to the earth's middle.
Here, on this little ranch under the Rocky Mountains,
a big pine tree rises like a guardian spirit in front of the cabin
where we live. Long, long ago the Indians blazed it. And the lightning,
or the storm, has cut off its crest. Yet its column is always there,
alive and changeless, alive and changing. The tree has its own aura
of life. And in winter the snow slips off it, and in June it sprinkles
down its little catkin-like pollen-tips, and it hisses in the wind,
and it makes a silence within a silence. It is a great tree, under
which the house is built. And the tree is still within the Allness
of Pan. At night, when the lamplight shines out of the window, the
great trunk dimly shows, in the near darkness, like an Egyptian
column, supporting some powerful mystery in the over-branching darkness.
By day, it is just a tree.
It is just a tree. The chipmunks skelter a little
way up it, the little black-and-white birds, tree-creepers, walk
quick as mice on its rough perpendicular, tapping; the bluejays
throng on its branches, high up, at dawn, and in the afternoon you
hear the faintest rustle of many little wild doves alighting in
its upper remoteness. It is a tree, which is still Pan.
And we live beneath it, without noticing. Yet sometimes,
when one suddenly looks far up and sees those wild doves there,
or when one glances quickly at the inhuman-human hammering of a
woodpecker, one realises that the tree is asserting itself as much
as I am. It gives out life, as I give out life. Our two lives meet
and cross one another, unknowingly: the tree's life penetrates my
life, and my life the tree's. We cannot live near one another, as
we do, without affecting one another.
The tree gathers up earth-power from the dark bowels
of the earth, and a roaming sky-glitter from above. And all unto
itself, which is a tree, woody, enormous, slow but unyielding with
life, bristling with acquisitive energy, obscurely radiating some
of its great strength.
It vibrates its presence into my soul, and I am
with Pan. I think no man could live near a pine tree and remain
quite suave and supple and compliant. Something fierce and bristling
is communicated. The piny sweetness is rousing and defiant, like
turpentine, the noise of the needles is keen with aeons of sharpness.
In the volleys of wind from the western desert, the tree hisses
and resists. It does not lean eastward at all. It resists with a
vast force of resistance, from within itself, and its column is
a ribbed, magnificent assertion.
I have become conscious of the tree, and of its
interpenetration into my life. Long ago, the Indians must have been
even more acutely conscious of it, when they blazed it to leave
their mark on it.
I am conscious that it helps to change me, vitally.
I am even conscious that it shivers of energy cross my living plasm,
from the tree, and I become a degree more like unto the tree, more
bristling and turpentiney, in Pan. And the tree gets a certain shade
and alertness of my life, within itself.
Of course, if I like to cut myself off, and say
it is all bunk, a tree is merely so much lumber not yet sawn, then
in a great measure I shall be cut off. So much depends on one's
attitude. One can shut many, many doors of receptivity in oneself;
or one can open many doors that are shut.
I prefer to open my doors to the coming of the tree.
Its raw earth-power and its raw sky-power, its resinous erectness
and resistance, its sharpness of hissing needles and relentlessness
of roots, all that goes to the primitive savageness of a pine-tree,
goes also to the strength of man.
Give me of your power, then, oh tree! And I will
give you of mine.
And this is what men must have said, more naïvely,
less sophisticatedly, in the days when all was Pan. It is what,
in a way, the aboriginal Indians still say, and still mean, intensely:
especially when they dance the sacred dance, with the tree; or with
the spruce twigs tied above their elbows.
Give me your power, oh tree, to help me in my life.
And I will give you my power: even symbolised in a rag torn from
my clothing.
This is the oldest Pan.
Or again, I say: " Oh you, you big tree, standing
so strong and swallowing juice from the earth's inner body, warmth
from the sky, beware of me. Beware of me, because I am strongest.
I am going to cut you down and take your life and make you into
beams for my house, and into a fire. Prepare to deliver up your
life to me."
Is this any less true than when the lumberman glances
at a pine tree, sees if it will cut good lumber, dabs a mark or
a number upon it, and goes his way absolutely without further thought
or feeling? Is he truer to life? Is it truer to life to insulate
oneself entirely from the influence of a tree's life, and to walk
about in an inanimate forest of standing lumber, marketable in St.
Louis, Mo.? Or is it truer to life to know, with a pantheistic sensuality,
that the tree has its own life, its own assertive existence, its
own relatedness to me: that my life is added to, or militated against,
by the tree's life?
Which is really truer?
Which is truer, to live among the living, or to
run on wheels?
And who can sit with the Indians around a big camp-fire
of logs, in the mountains at night, when a man rises and turns his
breast and his curiously-smiling bronze face away from the blaze,
and stands voluptuously warming his thighs and buttocks and loins,
his back to the fire, faintly smiling the inscrutable Pan-smile
into the dark trees surrounding, without hearing him say, in the
pan-voice: "Aha! Tree! Aha! Tree! Who has triumphed now? I drank
the heat of your blood into my face and breast, and now I am drinking
it into my loins and buttocks and legs, oh tree! I am drinking your
heat right through me, oh tree! Fire is life, and I take your life
for mine. I am drinking it up, oh tree, even into my buttocks. Aha!
Tree! I am warm! I am strong! I am happy, tree, in this cold night
in the mountains!"
And the old man, glancing up and seeing the flames
flapping in flamy rags at the dark smoke, in the upper fire-hurry
towards the stars and the dark spaces between the stars, sits stonily
and inscrutably: yet one knows that he is saying: "Go back, oh fire!
Go back like honey! Go back, honey of life, to where you came from,
before you were hidden in the tree. The trees climb into the sky
and steal the honey of the sun, like bears stealing from a hollow
tree-trunk. But when the tree falls and is put on to the fire, the
honey flames and goes straight back to where it came from. And the
smell of burning pine is as the smell of honey."
So the old man says, with the lightless Indian eyes.
But he is careful never to utter one word of the mystery. Speech
is the death of Pan, who can but laugh and sound the reed-flute.
Is it better, I ask you, to cross the room and turn
on the heat at the radiator, glancing at the thermometer and saying:
"We're just a bit below the level, in here"? Then go back to the
newspaper!
What can a man do with his life but live it? And
what does life consist in, save a vivid relatedness between the
man and the living universe that surrounds him? Yet man insulates
himself more and more into mechanism, and repudiates everything
but the machine and the contrivance of which he himself is master,
god in the machine.
Morning comes, and white ash lies in the fire-hollow,
and the old man looks at it broodingly.
"The fire is gone," he says in the Pan silence,
that is so full of unutterable things. "Look! there is no more tree.
We drank his warmth, and he is gone. He is way, way off in the sky,
his smoke is in the blueness, with the sweet smell of a pine-wood
fire, and his yellow flame is in the sun. It is morning, with the
ashes of night. There is no more tree. Tree is gone. But perhaps
there is fire among the ashes. I shall blow it, and it will be alive.
There is always fire, between the tree that goes and the tree that
stays. One day I shall go--"
So they cook their meat, and rise, and go in silence.
There is a big rock towering up above the trees,
a cliff. And silently a man glances at it. You hear him say, without
speech:
"Oh, you big rock! If a man fall down from you,
he dies. Don't let me fall down from you. Oh, you big pale rock,
you are so still, you know lots of things. You know a lot. Help
me, then, with your stillness. I go to find deer. Help me find deer."
And the man slips aside, and secretly lays a twig,
or a pebble, some little object in a niche of the rock, as a pact
between him and the rock. The rock will give him some of its radiant-cold
stillness and enduring presence, and he makes a symbolic turn, of
gratitude.
Is it foolish? Would it have been better to invent
a gun, to shoot his game from a great distance, so that he need
not approach it with any of that living stealth and preparedness
with which one live thing approaches another? Is it better to have
a machine in one's hand, and so avoid the life-contact: the trouble!
the pains! Is it better to see the rock as a mere nothing, not worth
noticing because it has no value, and you can't eat it as you can
a deer?
But the old hunter steals on, in the stillness of
the eternal Pan, which is so full of soundless sounds. And in his
soul he is saying: "Deer! Oh, you thin-legged deer! I am coming!
Where are you, with your feet like little stones bounding down a
hill? I know you. Yes, I know you. But you don't know me. You don't
know where I am, and you don't know me, anyhow. But I know you.
I am thinking of you. I shall get you, and shoot and arrow right
in you."
In this state of abstraction, and subtle, hunter's
communion with the quarry - a weird psychic connection between hunter
and hunted - the man creeps into the mountains.
And even a white man who is born hunter must fall
into this state. Gun or no gun! He projects his deepest, most primitive
hunter's consciousness abroad, and finds his game, not by accident,
nor even chiefly by looking for signs, but primarily by a psychic
attraction, a sort of telepathy: the hunter's telepathy. Then when
he finds his quarry, he aims with a pure, spellbound volition. If
there is no flaw in his abstracted huntsman's will, he cannot miss.
Arrow or bullet, it flies like a movement of pure will, straight
to the spot. And the deer, once she has let her quivering alertness
be overmastered or stilled by the hunter's subtle, hypnotic, following
spell, she cannot escape.
This is Pan, the Pan-mystery, the Pan-power. What
can men who sit at home in their studies, and drink hot milk and
have lamb's-wool slippers on their feet, and write anthropology,
what can they possibly know about men, the men of Pan?
Among the creatures of Pan there is an eternal struggle
for life, between lives. Man, defenceless, rapacious man, has needed
the qualities of every living thing, at one time or other. The hard,
silent abidingness of rock, the surging resistance of a tree, the
still evasion of a puma, the dogged earth-knowledge of the bear,
the light alertness of the deer, the sky-prowling vision of the
eagle: turn by turn man has needed the power of every living thing.
Tree, stone, or hill, river, or little stream, or waterfall, or
salmon in the fall - man can be master and complete in himself,
only by assuming the living powers of each of them, as the occasion
requires.
He used to make himself master by a great effort
of will, and sensitive, intuitive cunning, and immense labour of
body.
Then he discovered the "idea." He found that all
things were related by certain laws. The moment man learned to abstract,
he began to make engines that would do the work of his body. So,
instead of concentrating upon his quarry, or upon the living things
which made his universe, he concentrated upon the engines or instruments
which should intervene between him and the living universe, and
gave him mastery.
This was the death of the great Pan. The idea and
the engine came between man and all things, like a death. The old
connection, the old Allness, was severed, and can never be ideally
restored. Great Pan is dead.
Yet what do we live for, except to live? Man has
lived to conquer the phenomenal universe. To a great extent he has
succeeded. With all the mechanism of the human world, man is to
a great extent master of all life, and of most phenomena.
And what then? Once you have conquered a thing,
you have lost it. Its real relation to you collapses.
A conquered world is no good to man. He sits stupefied
with boredom upon his conquest.
We need the universe to live again, so that we can
live with it. A conquered universe, a dead Pan, leaves us nothing
to live with.
You have to abandon the conquest, before Pan will
live again. You have to live to live, not to conquer. What's the
good of conquering even the North Pole, if after the conquest you've
nothing left but an inert fact? Better leave it a mystery.
It was better to be a hunter in the woods of Pan,
than it is to be a clerk in a city store. The hunter hungered, laboured,
suffered tortures of fatigue. But at least he lived in a careless
living relation to his surrounding universe.
At evening, when the deer was killed, he went home
to the tents, and threw down the deer-meat on the swept place before
the tent of his women. And the women came out to greet him softly,
with a sort of reverence, as he stood before the meat, the life-stuff.
He came back spent, yet full of power, bringing the life-stuff.
And the children looked with black eyes at the meat, and at that
wonder-being, the man, the bringer of meat.
Perhaps the children of the store-clerk look at
their father with a tiny bit of the same mystery. And perhaps the
clerk feels a fragment of the old glorification, when he hands his
wife the paper dollars.
But about the tents the women move silently. Then
when the cooking-fire dies low, the man crouches in silence and
toasts meat on a stick, while the dogs lurk round like shadows and
the children watch avidly. The man eats as the sun goes down. And
as the glitter departs, he says: "Lo, the sun is going, and I stay.
All goes, but still I stay. Power of deer-meat is in my belly, power
of sun is in my body. I am tired, but it is with power. There the
small moon gives her first sharp sign. So! So! I watch her. I will
give her something; she is very sharp and bright, and I do not know
her power. Lo! I will give the woman something for this moon, which
troubles me above the sunset, and has power. Lo! how very curved
and sharp she is! Lo! how she troubles me!"
Thus, always aware, always watchful, subtly poising
himself in the world of Pan, among the powers of the living universe,
he sustains his life and is sustained. There is no boredom, because
everything is alive and active, and danger is inherent in all movement.
The contact between all things is keen and wary: for wariness is
also a sort of reverence, or respect. And nothing, in the world
of Pan, may be taken for granted.
So when the fire is extinguished, and the moon sinks,
the man says to the woman: "Oh, woman, be very soft, be very soft
and deep towards me, with the deep silence. Oh, woman, do not speak
and stir and wound me with the sharp horns of yourself. Let me come
into the deep, soft places, the dark, soft places deep as between
the stars. Oh, let me lose there the weariness of the day: let me
come in the power of the night. Oh, do not speak to me, nor break
the deep night of my silence and my power. Be softer than dust,
and darker than any flower. Oh, woman, wonderful is the craft of
your softness, the distance of your dark depths. Oh, open silently
the deep that has no end, and do not turn the horns of the moon
against me."
This is the might of Pan, and the power of Pan.
And still, in America, among the Indians, the oldest
Pan is alive. But here, also, dying fast.
It is useless to glorify the savage. For he will
kill Pan with his own hands, for the sake of a motor-car. And a
bored savage, for whom Pan is dead, is the stupefied image of all
boredom.
And we cannot return to the primitive life, to live
in tepees and hunt with bows and arrows.
Yet live we must. And once life has conquered, it
is pretty difficult to live. What are we going to do, with a conquered
universe? The Pan relationship, which the world of man once had
with all the world, was better than anything man has now. The savage,
today, if you give him the chance, will become more mechanical and
unliving than any civilised man. But civilised man, having conquered
the universe, may as well leave off bossing it. Because, when all
is said and done, life itself consists in a living relatedness between
man and his universe: sun, moon, stars, earth, trees, flowers, birds,
animals, men, everything - and not in a "conquest" of anything by
anything. Even the conquest of the air makes the world smaller,
tighter, and more airless.
And whether we are a store-clerk or a bus-conductor,
we can still choose between the living universe of Pan, and the
mechanical conquered universe of modern humanity. The machine has
no windows. But even the most mechanised human being has only got
his windows nailed up, or bricked in.
1. TEMPERANCE
Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus,
but don't sit down without one of the gods.
2. SILENCE
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves
you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
3. ORDER
Know that you are responsible to the gods inside you and to the
men in whom the gods are manifest. Recognize your superiors and
your inferiors, according to the gods. This is the root of all order.
4. RESOLUTION
Resolve to abide by your own deepest promptings, and to sacrifice
the smaller thing to the greater. Kill when you must, and be killed
the same: the must coming from the gods inside you, or from
the men in whom you recognize the Holy Ghost.
5. FRUGALITY
Demand nothing; accept what you see fit. Don't waste your pride
or squander your emotion.
6. INDUSTRY
Lose no time with ideals; serve the Holy Ghost; never serve mankind.
7. SINCERITY
To be sincere is to remember that I am I, and that the other
man is not me.
8. JUSTICE
The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul,
angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgment is
never just.
9. MODERATION
Beware of absolutes. There are many gods.
10. CLEANLINESS
Don't be too clean. It impoverishes the blood.
11. TRANQUILITY
The soul has many motions, many gods come and go. Try and find
your deepest issue, in every confusion, and abide by that. Obey
the man in whom you recognize the Holy Ghost; command when your
honour comes to command.
12. CHASTITY
Never 'use' venery at all. Follow your passional impulse, if
it be answered in the other being; but never have any motive in
mind, neither offspring nor health nor even pleasure, nor even service.
Only know that 'venery' is of the great gods. An offering-up of
yourself to the very great gods, the dark ones, and nothing else.
13. HUMILITY
See all men and women according to the Holy Ghost that is within
them. Never yield before the barren.
There's my list. I have been trying dimly to realize it for a
long time, and only America and old Benjamin have at last goaded
me into trying to formulate it. ~DHLawrence in
Studies in Classic American Literature
