Chapter V · THE LOVE EPISODE (continued 2)

§ 116

There is no question whatever of the ability of most men to attain the degree of control necessary to practise Karezza, or the Succession Plan advocated in this book.

The only question is the amount of clear thinking a man may be willing to do concerning himself, to realize whether he should remain in the infant class of autoerotics, or should represent to himself in vivid colours the advantages of ascending into a truly allerotic adult level of control. It is certain that if a man realizes the advantage, not only to himself but to his wife and to everyone else in his own milieu, he will make the outline of it so clear in his mind that all his unconscious energy will assist him in the attainment of it as an objective reality.

This ideal is here called a representation, or an imagination on the principle adopted by the autosuggestionists that “where the will and the imagination come into conflict, the imagination always wins”—Coué’s Law of Reversed Effort. Therefore the natural and obvious expression was avoided above. It might have been said that when a man realizes the advantages of the Succession Plan in the love episode, he will exert every effort of which he is capable to attain it. But for this form of statement was expressly substituted the form “he will make the outline of it so clear in his own mind.”

For what autosuggestion has so convincingly shown is that the unconscious imagination of the opposite of what one says or thinks consciously is the result that may possibly follow unless he is forewarned. If a man say to himself a hundred times a day, “I will control myself,” he may yet have in his unconscious a clear picture of lack of control, of hasty abandon, and it is that picture which forms the pattern of his acts as they are carried out.

§ 117

The question will at once be asked: first, how one can tell whether one’s unconscious imagination, which controls one’s acts and one’s physiological reactions, contains the picture of control or of lack of control, and, second, how one can change the lineaments of this pattern.

The first question is answered by saying that if a man show lack of erotic control it is proved that his unconscious imagination is thus, and not otherwise, patterned.

The second question requires a longer consideration.

If the unconscious is to be controlled at all, it can be controlled by conscious thinking only by means of substituting one pattern of action for another.

It is obvious that the unconscious mental processes that govern digestion, circulation, excretion, and the work of the glands of internal secretion, cannot be pictured at all in conscious terms, i.e., in visual or auditory or other images. No anatomist, histologist, or physiologist has a definite enough mental picture of what actually does take place in the blood stream upon the injection of the secretions of the various endocrine glands. Therefore the autosuggestionists give the most generic formula possible—simply: “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.”

But in the conduct of the love episode this extremely generic formula is not sufficient. So we come to a more specific answer to our question as to how the unconscious can be controlled. It is controlled by impressing on it patterns of action from the conscious. There is no other way. The extraordinary and freakish accomplishments of Hindu fakirs are made possible by their picturing in their conscious minds the possibility of their living successfully through their months of awkward postures. If these feats were attempted by Occidentals the results would be fevers, congestions, and all manner of ills suggested to them by their environment.

§ 118

The Succession Plan of the love episode is, however, no freakish Hindu proposition. But it is a perfectly possible pattern which involves the application of psychical (hypersomatic) imagination to a course of action that in animals is entirely physical and in humans takes on more and more the psychical characteristics, as men gain more and more insight into the influence of the hypersomatic over the hyposomatic portions of the mind-body combination.

It is obviously impossible in this book, however, to be more specific than to recommend that the man having become fully cognizant of the fact that other men have done, and are today doing, what is not generally done, should say to himself, “I will retard here, I will observe there, I will not hurry or allow myself to be hurried but will take everything as it comes and reap the full measure of satisfaction before advancing a single step farther, knowing full well that whatever acceleration is urged will only defeat its own purpose.”

Each man should fill out the details of this pattern which in a book cannot be any more specific; but above all he should know that he can acquire control over his own passions—indeed, that he must, in order to be able to give them the fullest play later, and that their fullest play is not an iota less than they should have for the health and happiness of himself and his life partner.

§ 119

The fetishism of the single sense quality is an important consideration here. Harvey O’Higgins in The Secret Springs shows how even a part of the person or a phase of the woman’s personality may take on an overplus of emotional tension in the mind of the man, such as to make him think he has found the paragon of all the virtues in the first woman he sees having this peculiarity.

If his mother’s hands were especially beautiful, it is likely that beauty of hands will play a big part in his unconscious selection of a life partner, and that homely hands will repel him in a girl otherwise eminently fitted to be his mate.

The deep emotions experienced by a little boy in seeing his mother in evening dress in the ruddy glow of a red lampshade in the drawing-room gave him a depth of response to that one vision that made him twenty years later fall suddenly in love with a girl whom he saw illuminated by the red hall light in her father’s house.

One is partly, but only partly, conscious of one’s fetishes. No man except the most self-conscious student of his own mental reactions can tell exactly why he likes or dislikes anything. He can give many reasons; but the real cause lies in the unconscious memory he has forgotten—a memory of some pleasurable emotion of exceeding depth that has occurred possibly a quarter of a century before.

But whatever may be the real cause of the disproportionate emphasis on certain features, mannerisms, or mental or physical habits of his wife, the fact remains. It may well be questioned that any such overemphasis on the way she speaks or smiles, or on some peculiar catch in the breath, should make him lose control of himself, but it does. It is not necessarily that he is set to go off in ecstasies at the occurrence of any of these factors, as much as that through his own experience he sets himself thus in a sort of lock combination.

§ 120

In reality this setting is something that should take place during and not before marriage, if it must take place at all in a man. It were much better if it took place not at all in the husband but in the wife.

This overvaluation of a smile, a dimple, a look, a timbre of the voice, a perfume or froufrou, is used by men even before marriage as a sexual stimulus when in reality none is needed.

The question of most vital importance is not so much, however, the shape of eyebrow, the laughter rhythm, or other mannerism or characteristic of a woman that causes a man to decide that he wants to marry her, for that is in most cases in the unconscious, and therefore actually inaccessible to him except through much more study than he is able or willing to give it. The fetishes made by the unconscious, kept in the unconscious, and causing selection on the man’s part are as nothing in importance to the fetishes that he had innately or has acquired that give overvaluation for him to certain phases of the love episode itself.

It is likely that in highly sensitive and intellectual men some ordinarily unobserved or half-consciously noted phases of action or being are major causes in the man’s premature arrival at the automatic and uncontrollable part of his own action in the love episode. As an illustration might be mentioned the undue prominence taken in an episode by the bodily fragrance (natural, not the result of artificial perfume) noticed and especially dilated upon verbally by one husband, who thereupon completely lost control of himself at an early stage and was unable to gain the allerotic result of his wife’s (prior) erotic acme.

§ 121

As is repeatedly stated in this book, there are other types of reaction on the woman’s part that are unconscious attempts to test his control, and continually used by her. Unconsciously she gains her deepest satisfaction, one that permeates every thought and action of hers until the next subsequent love episode, from her inability to make her husband lose control of himself.

Fundamentally this is the main cause of woman’s mystery to ordinary man. She is continually springing surprises on him to throw him off his rigid course of action. Continually she is deeply disappointed if she succeeds in doing this. Could anything seem more perverse and contradictory? Is anything really simpler and more straightforward than man’s imperative necessity to pursue his own course quite uninfluenced by her unconsciously motivated actions?

She will beseech him to hurry through the episode, not knowing herself, sometimes, that it is the last thing she really wants or needs. An allegory will serve as an illustration.

§ 122

They are ardent mountaineers. They are ascending Mt. Chocorua in New Hampshire. She is afraid herself to go ahead over the rough mountain trail and see the new views as they develop. She needs also his assistance, his hand, to help her over rocks and fallen tree trunks and up steep ascents. She says to him: “You go ahead and I’ll follow. Rush up quickly and tell me what you see.” If he does so, he runs till he is out of breath and then attempts from a cliff he has reached to shout to her, to tell her how to get up to him, to describe the valley of the Swift River of which he has just caught a glimpse. But he is panting so hard he cannot articulate. Why should he have run ahead of her? Indeed he should not have.

It would have been much wiser for him to reply to her invitation to anticipate her: “Why, dearest, I see you are tired. Of course no woman can keep pace with a strong healthy man up these slopes. Let’s sit down and rest a bit.” He would then sit with her on a mossy stone or tree trunk, or take her on his lap, and point out the beauties of the place they were in, and absolutely refuse to leave her. He really does not wish to see the panorama from the peak first, before she does. He is very foolish to believe her when she says she wishes not to see it herself but to hear about it. She may be, consciously, perfectly sincere and really think she doesn’t care about going clear to the top with him this time.

These two are ardent mountain climbers; but there are many couples where the woman has not ever climbed to the top of a mountain who sends her husband on alone; and, poor thing, he goes, not realizing how much better the view is when two are looking at it.

§ 123

But any two ardent mountain climbers are practically certain to arrive at the top, whether they get there together or the man goes ahead and waits for his lady to come up herself—with the help of another man. For the mountain of which I speak has the peculiarity that no woman can climb alone to the top, as the path is extremely narrow, precipitous and dangerous. If her husband leaves her as they approach the peak (which is an enormous hill of rock capped by one huge boulder), she will be forced to wait until he feels energetic enough to descend a couple of hundred feet or so and help her up. Or if, enchanted himself by the glorious view—miles and miles of rolling country, numerous lakes and the silver ribbon of the Atlantic Ocean nearly eighty miles away—he is absorbed in his own sensations of grandeur, and forgets his wife down there below him as so many men do, it is just possible that another more unselfish and less uncontrolled man will give her his hand and help her to the top, slowly and courteously as behooves a man to do in spite of her effusive protestations to him to leave her and see the sunrise himself from the mountain top.

How will the husband of this woman feel, if, standing and facing the east, he suddenly realizes that there appears his own wife over the edge of the boulder, lifted by the strength of another man?

Had he known the true etiquette of mountain climbing among true married lovers, he would have waited until both had covered together the entire ascent up to the base of the boulder, six feet high and twenty in diameter; and then, making a foot rest for her with his two hands, he would have assisted her to get on this pinnacle herself first, before he did.

Then he would have watched her face for full five minutes in its varying lights as she turned about in ecstasy at the sublime panorama, the sunlight falling on her cheeks with their heightened colour from her climb, the wind blowing a lock of hair across her temple. He would have enjoyed for a while her outcry of delight as she saw and recognized the miniature presentment of now a familiar village, now a lake, before he jumped up beside her, clasped her in his arms and both turned about from north to east to south to west together, and together drank in the vitalizing air. He would be infinitely better able to tell her what to look at, than he was able when he was on the boulder and she two hundred feet below, to shout to her that he could see a hundred miles in every direction.

And now he need not shout. He can whisper in her ears, between kisses on every part of her head and neck, the joy of both of them, and can listen to her murmuring endearments she never otherwise would have thought of uttering.

§ 124

This climax-capping boulder on the peak of Mt. Chocorua in New Hampshire has on its southeast side the six-foot sheer perpendicular up which he helped her first. On its northwest side it has a slope of some forty degrees up which they might have scrambled hand in hand and reached the utmost altitude simultaneously. But she will be much better pleased and admire his restraint forever, if he not only keeps her ahead of him all the long trail up the mountain but finally lifts her up ahead of him, up the steep side at the southeast and (with her pardonable childish satisfaction, which well becomes her but ill becomes him) lets her, on this mountain-climbing experience, be his superior in this one little thing for these brief five minutes. During this time she will recover a bit from the sublimity of her position, will regain her breath, and will be able to turn her attention from the wonders of the mountain view, so that she too may have the pleasure of watching his face and covering it with kisses when he has made his final upspringing to the highest physical altitude in the region. Ardent mountain climbers like this will not be satisfied until they have symbolically, so to speak, climbed Mt. Everest in the Himalayas. And these ascents, each with the other, will preclude their taking any interest in the company of other mountain climbers. No woman will want other company than that of her husband, no man will be able to find a more attractive companion than his wife.

§ 125

For, on the mountain top, thoughts come to each—thoughts that can occur in no other situation. The difficulties encountered and overcome make them inseparable soul mates. The refusal of her husband to leave her and go up without her endears him more to her than presents of many jewels. It shows her he has the only strength a woman can respect, the strength to reserve his strength and to use it for and with her, a strength which all unconsciously she must test at every step of the ascent. If this strength is found wanting, she will be left forlorn, the most wretched of living things, far more miserable than any female animal. If it is found present, it will make her the happiest of mortals, happy beyond words in her defeat in the contest of strength, yearning to make him the father of her children.

To both of them come deep thoughts, those of the one reflected in the multitudinous facets of the personality of the other, thoughts deep into the past, thoughts looking far into the future, thoughts corresponding in depth to the vastness of the prospects before them as they turn now east, now south. A realization of the greatness of the world will come to them, of the minute littleness of lonely atoms of humanity, a realization that this aspect of nature alone is the one view of life that enables each to know the other deeply and to be a complete unity instead of solitary demi-humans each longing for an unseen other.

§ 126

To revert to the concept of fetishism one may use the mountain-climbing symbolism of the love episode and say that almost anything on the ascent may be used as, and become habitual as, a fetish capable of causing the husband to leave his wife on the trail and hurry forward to the peak that has a thousand ecstatic views.

She may use any of a number of suggestive arguments or mannerisms or actions to convince him if she can that it is his duty to leave her, no matter how harmful may be his abandoning her for his own erotic abandon.

She may tell him that he must get there so as not to miss the setting (or rising) sun, or a rainbow, or a nuance of cloud forms, obscured from where they are, halfway up the trail.

Of course, he too, unless he has been convinced of the childishness of his act, may think there is some reason why he cannot or should not wait for her, halfway, three-quarters, nine-tenths, perhaps, of the way up. At the very boulder he may be persuaded to take this last jump alone, and indeed it were a pity if, having brought her so far, he should leave her, walled by the boulder from at least half the complete view. Some women would petulantly begin the descent, forever unknowing what was the husband’s experience in looking over the half of the circumference of horizon impossible for the wife to see.

§ 127

The one injunction necessary for the too enthusiastically climbing husband is: There is plenty of time. Sit on this mossy bank. Help your wife over every stone and stick in the path. Tell her of the grandeur of the view. There is no hurry provided you both arrive at the top and she take the final step before you. No aspect of sun, sky, clouds, forest or lake but is absolutely different after every ascent and superlatively, nay ecstatically, sublime. This is not the only chance you will have to climb Chocorua. Mountain climbing, if not too speedy, is good for the heart, and no expedition so fortifies one for work among the world of men as this pedestrian ascent into the sky. Only you should go together and be together all the time. The men who leave their wives on the piazzas of the hotels in the valley are purely autoerotic boys. No man can tell in words this mountain-climbing experience.

There may be women who think this mountain climbing immoral, coarse, too rough for their fine constitution. These will have to be tenderly lifted up each step of the way but when once at the top will be enthusiastic converts, for they will have in the panorama an experience they will then recognize as totally different and distinctively human.

“It has always been common to discuss the psychology of women. The psychology of men has usually been passed over, whether because it is too simple or too complicated. But the marriage question today is much less the wife problem than the husband problem.”—Havelock Ellis: Little Essays of Love and Virtue, New York, 1922, p. 75.