l the soul has put off all its manifold degrees and forms
of upper consciousness. As the self falls back into quiescence, it
draws itself from the brain, from the great nerve-centers, into the
blood, where at last it will sleep. But as it draws and folds itself
livingly in the blood, at the dark and powerful hour, it sends out its
great call. For even the blood is alone and in part, and needs an
answer. Like the waters of the Red Sea, the blood is divided in a dual
polarity between the sexes. As the night falls and the consciousness
sinks deeper, suddenly the blood is heard hoarsely calling. Suddenly
the deep centers of the sexual consciousness rouse to their
spontaneous activity. Suddenly there is a deep circuit established
between me and the woman. Suddenly the sea of blood which is me heaves
and rushes towards the sea of blood which is her. There is a moment of
pure frictional crisis and contact of blood. And then all the blood in
me ebbs back into its ways, transmuted, changed. And this is the
profound basis of my renewal, my deep blood renewal.

And this has nothing to do with pretty faces or white skin or rosy
breasts or any of the rest of the trappings of sexual love. These
trappings belong to the day. Neither eyes nor hands nor mouth have
anything to do with the final massive and dark collision of the blood
in the sex crisis, when the strange flash of electric transmutation
passes through the blood of the man and the blood of the woman. They
fall apart and sleep in their transmutation.

But even in its profoundest, and most elemental movements, the soul is
still individual. Even in its most material consciousness, it is still
integral and individual. You would think the great blood-stream of
mankind was one and homogeneous. And it is indeed more nearly one,
more near to homogeneity than anything else within us. The
blood-stream of mankind is almost homogeneous.

But it isn't homogeneous. In the first place, it is dual in a perfect
dark dynamic polarity, the sexual polarity. No getting away from the
fact that the blood of woman is dynamically polarized in opposition,
or in difference to the blood of man. The crisis of their contact in
sex connection is the moment of establishment of a new flashing
circuit throughout the whole sea: the dark, burning red waters of our
under-world rocking in a new dynamic rhythm in each of us. And then in
the second place, the blood of an individual is his _own_ blood. That
is, i