D. H. Lawrence Revisited

        The lonely desert mesas stretched to a line of mountains etched on the stark blue horizon. At an elevation of 7,000 feet the morning air was crisp and cool, even though it was July in New Mexico. I was alone in front of a little shrine that reminded me of a country chapel. It seemed an appropriate metaphor considering whose ashes were buried there -- author D. H. Lawrence, the "priest of love."
        To the left was the tomb of Frieda, the fiery German woman who became his wife and soul mate on their free-spirited adventures traveling around the world. With Frieda he explored the deepest mysteries of love and tapped into the wellspring of life, which kept him going long after he should have died from tuberculosis. From her Lawrence learned the secret of knowing all women through tender intimacy with one woman, a lesson lost in the modern age.
        I had tried to make that connection with a woman myself, first in a marriage and then in a succession of relationships, but I never found my Frieda. Lawrence's writings had been an inspiration to me since I was a teenager and I had come to New Mexico to see if I could commune with his spirit. Call it a mid-life crisis if you like cliches, but I thought of the trip as a visit with an old friend.
        Morning in the land of enchantment was as exhilarating as Lawrence described:

In the magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico one sprang awake,
a new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way
to a new . . .

        My head was uncommonly clear despite the several beers I drank the previous night at a bar in Taos. The air of the high plateau seemed to breathe new life into my middle-aged, nicotine-stained lungs. I felt like I could run the mile in under six minutes, but I was wise enough not to put this feeling to the test. With age and clogged arteries comes wisdom.
        On the leisurely drive to the shrine I stopped at the Rio Grande gorge to watch a group of white-water rafters plunge down the river. The gorge was an oasis of green in the vast gray sagebrush and tumbleweed mesas. The steep walls of the gorge made it resemble an earthquake crack, a wound in the surface of the land that bled the waters of the Rio Grande. I lingered at the rim, fantasizing about diving into the cold water with all my clothes on just for the hell of it. What a rush that would be! But wisdom prevailed again and I drove on to my rendezvous with Lawrence. He wrote:

I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world
that I have ever had. It certainly
changed me forever . . .

        I understood what he meant because I felt the same way about Hawaii. Some places simply get under your skin and you can't imagine living anywhere else. After a vagabond life of travel all over the world, Lawrence and Frieda settled on Kiowa Ranch, the only home they ever owned. The ranch and the surrounding wilderness became his symbolic arena for Life At Large. It was the background setting of philosophical musings he recorded in "Reflections On The Death Of A Porcupine" and other writings.
        The ranch is now owned by the University of New Mexico, which allows public access to the D. H. Lawrence Memorial. I entered the shrine through its narrow doorway and paused to let my eyes get accustomed to the dim lightning. Inside it looked more like a pagan altar than a chapel -- something that would have pleased Lawrence, who worshipped the dark gods of the blood.
         Above the memorial block imprinted with his initials was a rendering of the Phoenix, a mythological bird that was set afire by the sun and then sprang back to life out of its own ashes. Lawrence was fascinated with this symbol of rebirth from utter destruction, one of many ideas he shared with the philosopher Nietzsche. He also disliked the scientific conception of the sun as a ball of hot gas, preferring to regard it as a god like his Pueblo Indian neighbors.
        As I stared at his favorite emblems, I could almost feel Lawrence's presence in the tiny room. I sat crossed-legged on the floor and closed my eyes, recalling the influence he had on my life. His novel "Lady Chatterly's Lover" taught me the vital importance of tenderness in love-making when I was a clumsy young man. The most haunting short story I ever read, "The Rocking Horse Winner," helped turned me away from a life of shallow materialism. Lawrence's travel essays inspired me to see the world while I was still young enough to enjoy it. I also followed his example and became a writer myself. I thought if the son of an illiterate coal miner could do it, then why not me as well?
        Like another writer I admired, Henry David Thoreau, Lawrence practiced frugal living and made the most of the little money he was able to earn. He valued his freedom more than money or security and followed Thoreau's advice to do the work you love whether it pays well or not. Lawrence's work was steeped in manna, the spiritual power of the life force, and it came from the core of his being. I always sensed there was more life in his words alone than in the actual lives of a million average people. He was a disciple of the aristocratic order of nature who railed against the modern world as dehumanizing and nihilistic. I think Lawrence would have been considered a holy man in earlier cultures. In his own time his best novel was banned as pornography for its honest description of sex.
         After half an hour of meditation that bordered on prayer, I left the shrine and drove back to my hotel in Taos. Along the way I gazed at the yawning expanse of desert, trying to see it through the fresh vision of Lawrence's eyes. I finally decided it was the timeless quality of the desert landscape that captured Lawrence's imagination.

LAWRENCE QUOTES

The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two . . .

The tragedy is when you've got sex in the head instead of down where it belongs.

We are almost always guilty of the hate we encounter.

Those that go searching for love, only manifest their own lovelessness. And the loveless never find love, only the loving find love. And they never have to seek for it.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.

And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily.

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.

This is what I believe:
That I am I.
That my soul is a dark forest.
That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.
That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.
That I must have the courage to let them come and go.
That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.
There is my creed.

No man is or can be purely individual. The mass of men have only the tiniest touch of individuality: if any. The mass of men live and move, think and feel collectively, and have practically no individual emotions, feelings or thoughts at all. They are fragments of the collective or social consciousness. It has always been so, and will always be so.

If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work.
 
There is only one evil, to deny life.

Realism is just one of the arbitrary views man takes of man. It sees us all as little ant-like creatures toiling against the odds of circumstance, and doomed to misery. It is a kind of aeroplane view. It became the popular outlook, and so today we actually are, millions of us, little ant-like creatures toiling against the odds of circumstance, and doomed to misery; until we take a different view of ourselves. For man always becomes what he passionately thinks he is; since he is capable of becoming almost anything.

When we postulate a beginning, we only do so to fix a starting-point for our thought. There never was a beginning, and there never will be an end of the universe. The creative mystery, which is life itself, always was and always will be. It unfolds itself in pure living creatures.

Our present system of education is extravagantly expensive, and simply dangerous to our social existence. It turns out a lot of half-informed youth who despise the whole business of understanding and wisdom, and who realise that in a world like ours nothing but money matters.

The more we intervene machinery between us and the naked forces the more we numb and atrophy our own senses. Every time we turn on a tap to have water, every time we turn a handle to have fire or light, we deny ourselves and annul our being. The great elements, the earth, air, fire, water, are there like some great mistress whom we woo and struggle with . . . And all our appliances do but deny us these fine embraces, take the miracle of life away from us. The machine is the great neuter. It is the eunuch of eunuchs. In the end it emasculates us all. When we balance the sticks and kindle a fire, we partake of the mysteries. But when we turn on an electric tap there is, as it were, a wad between us and the dynamic universe. We do not know what we lose by all our labour-saving appliances. Of the two evils it would be much the lesser to lose all machinery, every bit, rather than to have, as we have, hopelessly too much.

We have lost the art of living, and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behaviour, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.