The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

A community is comprised of n members united, to use a definition of Saint Augustine's, by a common love of something other than themselves. Like a crowd and unlike a society, its character is not changed by the addi­tion or subtraction of a member. It exists, neither by chance, like a crowd, nor actually, like a society, but potentially, so that it is possible to conceive of a com­munity in which, at present, n = I. In a community all members are free and equal. If, out of a group of ten persons, nine prefer beef to mutton and one prefers mutton to beef, there is not a single community contain­ing a dissident member; there are two communities, a large one and a small one. Xo achieve an actual exist­ence, it has to embody itself in a society or societies which can express the love which is its raison d'etre. A community of music lovers, for example, cannot just sit around loving music like anything, but must form itself into societies like choirs, orchestras, string quartets, etc., and make music. Such an embodiment of a community in a society is an order. Of a community it may be said that its love is more or less good. Such a love presupposes choice, so that, in the natural world of the Dynamo, com­munities do not exist, only societies which are submem- bers of the total system of nature, enjoying their self-occurrence. Communities can only exist in the his­torical world of the Virgin, but they do not necessarily exist there.

Whenever rival communities compete for embodi­ment in the same society, there is either unfreedom or disorder. In the chimerical case of a society embodying a crowd, there would be a state of total unfreedom and disorder; the traditional term for this chimerical state is Hell. A perfect order, one in which the community

united by the best love is embodied in the most self- sustaining society, could be described, as science de­scribes nature, in terms of laws-of, but the description would be irrelevant, the relevant description being, "Here, love is the fulfilling of the law" or "In His Will is our peace"; the traditional term for this ideal order is Paradise. In historical existence where no love is per­fect, no society immortal, and no embodiment of the one in the other precise, the obligation to approximate to the ideal is felt as an imperative "Thou shalt."

Man exists as a unity-in-tension of four modes of being: soul, body, mind and spirit.

As soul and body, he is an individual, as mind and spirit a member of a society. Were he only soul and body, his only relation to others would be numerical and a poem would be comprehensible only to its author; were he only mind and spirit, men would only exist collectively as the system Man, and there would be nothing for a poem to be about.

As body and mind, man is a natural creature, as soul and spirit, a historical person. Were he only body and mind, his existence would be one of everlasting recurrence, and only one good poem could exist; were he only soul and spirit, his existence would be one of perpetual novelty, and every new poem would supersede all previous poems, or rather a poem would be superseded before it could be written.

Man's consciousness is a unity-in-tension of three modes of awareness:

O A consciousness of the self as self-contained, as em­bracing all that it is aware of in a unity of experiencing. This mode is undogmatic, amoral and passive; its good is the enjoyment of being, its evil the fear of nonbeing. 2~) A consciousness of beyondness, of an ego standing as a spectator over against both a self and the external world. This mode is dogmatic, amoral, objective. Its good is the perception of true relations, its evil the fear of accidental or false relations.

3) The ego's consciousness of itself as striving-towards,

as desiring to transform the self, to realize its potential­ities. This mode is moral and active; its good is not pres­ent but propounded, its evil, the present actuality.

Were the first mode absolute, man would inhabit a magical world in which the image of an object, the emotion it aroused and the word signifying it were all identical, a world where past and future, the living and the dead were united. Lan­guage in such a world would consist only of proper names which would not be words in the ordinary sense but sacred syllables, and, in the place of the poet, there would be the magician whose task is to discover and utter the truly potent spell which can compel what-is-not to be.

Were the second mode absolute, man would inhabit a world which was a pure system of universals. Language would be an algebra, and there could exist only one poem, of absolute banality, expressing the system.

Were the third mode absolute, man would inhabit a purely arbitrary world, the world of the clown and the actor. In language there would be no relation between word and thing, love would rhyme with indifference, and all poetry would be nonsense poetry.