Phase Eighteen

Yeats’s description of the phase from A Vision

The antithetical tincture closes during this phase, the being is losing direct knowledge of its old antithetical life. The conflict between that portion of the life of feeling which appertains to his unity, and that portion he has in common with others, coming to an end, has begun to destroy that knowledge. A 'Love's Nocturn' or an 'Ode to the West Wind' are probably no more possible, certainly no more characteristic. He can hardly, if action and the intellect that concerns action are taken from him, recreate his dream life; and when he says 'Who am I?', he finds it difficult to examine his thoughts in relation to one another , his emotions in relation to one another, but begins to find it easy to examine them in relation to action. He can examine those actions themselves with a new clearness. Now for the first time since Phase 12, Goethe's saying is almost true: 'Man knows himself by action only, by thought never'. Meanwhile the antithetical tincture begins to attain, without previous struggle or self-analysis, its active form which is love - love being the union of emotion and instinct - or when out of phase, sentimentality. The Will seeks by some form of emotional philosophy to free a form of emotional beauty Mask) from a 'disillusionment' differing from the 'illusions' of Phase 16, which are continuous, in that it permits intermittent awakening. The Will, with its closing antithetical, is turning away from the life of images to that of ideas, it is vacillating and curious, and it seeks in this Mask (from a phase where all the functions can be perfect), what becomes, when considered antithetically, a wisdom of the emotions.

At its next phase it will have fallen asunder; already it can only preserve its unity by a deliberate balancing of experiences (Creative Mind at Phase 12, Body of Fate at Phase 26), and so it must desire that phase (though that transformed into the emotional life), where wisdom seems a physical accident. Its object of desire is no longer a single image of passion, for it must relate all to social life; the man seeks to become not a sage, not Ahasuerus, but a wise king, an see s a woman who looks the wise mother of children. Perhaps now, and for the first time, the love of a living woman ('disillusionment' once accepted) as apart from beauty or function, is an admitted aim, though not yet wholly achieved. The Body of Fate is from the phase where the 'wisdom of knowledge' has compelled Mask and Image to become not objects of desire but objects of knowledge. Goethe did not, as Beddoes said, marry his cook, but he certainly did not marry the woman he had desired, and his grief at her death showed that, unlike Phase 16 or Phase 17, which forget their broken toys, he could love what disillusionment gave. When he seeks to live objectively, he will substitute curiosity for emotional wisdom, he will invent objects of desire artificially, he will say perhaps, though this was said by a man who was probably still later in phase, 'I was never in love with a serpent-charmer before'; the False Mask will press upon him, pursue him, and, refusing conflict, he will fly from the True Mask at each artificial choice. The nightingale will refuse the thorn and so remain among images instead of passing to ideas. He is still disillusioned, but he can no longer through philosophy substitute for the desire that life has taken away, love for what life has brought. The Will is near the place marked Head upon the great chart, which enables it to choose its Mask even when true to phase almost coldly and always deliberately, whereas the Creative Mind is derived from the place marked Heart, and is therefore more impassioned and less subtle and delicate than if Phase 16 or Phase 17 were the place of the Will, though not yet argumentative or heated. The Will at Head uses the heart with perfect mastery and, because of the growing primary, begins to be aware of an audience, though as yet it will not dramatise the Mask deliberately for the sake of effect as will Phase 19.

(AV B 145-47)