Phase Nine

Yeats’s description of the phase from A Vision

Out of phase, blundering and ignorant, the man becomes when in phase powerful and accomplished; all that strength as of metallic rod and wheel discovered within himself. He should seek to liberate the Mask by the help of the Creative Mind from the Body of Fate – that is to say, to carve out and wear the now free Mask and so to protect and to deliver the Image. In so far as he does so, there is immense confidence in self-expression, a vehement self, working through mathematical calculation, a delight in straight line and right angle; but if he seek to live according to the primary tincture, to use the Body of Fate to rid the Creative Mind of its Mask, to live with objective ambition and curiosity, all is confused, the Will asserts itself with a savage, terrified violence. All these phases of incipient personality when out of phase are brutal, but after Phase 12, when true personality begins, brutality gives place to an evasive capricious coldness 'false, fleeting, perjured Clarence' – a lack of good faith in their primary relation, often accompanied in their antithetical relation by the most self-torturing scruples. When an antithetical man is out of phase, he reproduces the primary condition, but with an emotional inversion, love for Image or Mask becomes dread, or after Phase 15, hatred, and the Mask clings to the man or pursues him in the Image. It may even be that he is haunted by a delusive hope, cherished in secret, or bragged of aloud, that he may inherit the Body of Fate and Mask of a phase opposed to his own. He seeks to avoid antithetical conflict by accepting what opposes him, and his antithetical life is invaded. At Phase 9, the Body of Fate that could purify from an unreal unity the mind of a Carlyle, or of a Whitman, breaks with sensuality (the rising flood of instinct from Phase 7), a new real unity, and the man instead of mastering this sensuality, through his dramatisation of himself as a form of passionate self-mastery, instead of seeking some like form as Image, becomes stupid and blundering. Hence one finds at this phase, more often than at any other, men who dread, despise and persecute the women whom they love. Yet behind all that muddy, flooded, brutal self, there is perhaps a vague timid soul knowing itself caught in an antithesis, an alternation it cannot control. It is said of it, 'The soul having found its weakness at Phase 8 begins the inward discipline of the soul in the fury of Phase 9'. And again, 'Phase 9 has the most sincere belief any man has ever had in his own desire'.

There is a certain artist who said to a student of these symbols, speaking of a notable man, and his mistress and their children, 'She no longer cares for his work, no longer gives him the sympathy he needs, why does he not leave her, what does he owe to her or to her children?' The student discovered this artist to be a Cubist of powerful imagination and noticed that his head suggested a sullen obstinacy, but that his manner and his speech were generally sympathetic and gentle.

(AV B 119-21)