Chronophobia
Threading in the present with DH Lawrence.
I’ve been swept up again in the vision of DH Lawrence. The recent collection of essays, The Bad Side of Books has been a constant companion as I sit in the stale but thrilling silence of the New York City subways, in the small office in my apartment or while just lounging about. There’s something beautiful about a work of nonfiction, or a collection of works, that immerse you in a mind singular and challenging person, but still offers a welcoming hand down from the ledge of their intellect and taste, a guiding flame burning through the darkness of impermanence. This is perhaps the oldest function of books and one that still has value today. Lawrence understood this timeless interaction between beings, even though he was haunted by the tendrils of the undead past, in architecture, in ceremony, that was juxtaposed with the venality and virtue-sickness of the people who filled his early-twentieth-century life.
Why read Lawrence now? I’m sure that the editorial board at the NYRB asked the same question, though, given the anaemic introduction offered by Geoff Dryer, I’m not sure they had a very convincing answer. The content cycle reaches even the most Yes, Lawrence wrote much, in many genres (and yes, he wrote chronologically, an aspect of Dryer’s organization he seems oddly pleased with), but it was the same ideas that animated him: that of primeval positions thrusting their heads into modernity either to declare their curious out-of-placeness or their absence, of the malformation of love and its cults, and of the endless relational bend and flux of life, a word which Lawrence furiously defined against existence plainly writ.
No, like any truly inspiring thing, DH was brought back into my orbit by the recommendation of my friend, who insists, probably rightly, that prose in English peaked somewhere around 1930. As in any heightened state, the writers of the time new it. Experimented feverishly. Lawrence constantly asks himself questions about the future of the novel, a form which he considered “the highest form of human expression for far attained.” Such concern for something’s health comes usually from a sense of societal hypochondria brought on by the passing of time, and fads. But my friend is probably right, and not because novels today are bad. He’s right because very few longer hold the novel to this level, and understand the historical significance of the novel as a heterogeneity machine. Lawrence’s experimentations include looking directly into the present and turning out glamour and grime together into coherent wholes. He went beyond the eye and the mind. His prose is, as Benjamin Krunkel wrote 20 years ago, “infrared”.
“The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships,” Lawrence writes, back in England, face to face with its “many small boxes”, after years in Italy and the deserts of New Mexico. Away from the outside, stifled, his mind turns back to the formal.
It’s this insistence on the constant flux of relationships that define Lawrence that drove his love for the novel and its ability to capture the apple through the eyes of a mollusk as well as a man, and why he loathed photography with its static assumptions of reality, ditto philosophy and religion and Victorian culture.
Like Nietzsche, he held up the pulse of life and its affirmation while glancing back, cynically and painfully, away from the moments of golden and harrowed dawns, towards the society in which he lived.
The Lawrence of his essays, it seems to me, is a kind of mystical conservative. But his conservatism balances both the social valences as well as the conservatism that plays into nature conservatism and the conservation of energy. But even in his political asides, always off-handed, he sticks to his disgust of the contemporary, railing against the dead letter of ideology, of jargon, of notions of superiority earned outside of a thing in itself. But who now wouldn’t ponder the infinite presence of the honeybee rather than listen to even the most impassioned, articulate contemporary politician?
Lawrence was haunted by his own conservatism, and he at once condemns those who look to the past for an escape from the present and unfairly, pities, though not underestimating, the tendrils of the old world he witnesses among the peasants of Italy, the peoples of New Mexico.
A draw toward old virtues drags Lawrence back in his non-fiction writing in a way it does only atmospherically in his fiction, which is panoramic, psychic and pulsing. At once he affirms the existence and ubiquity of past ways of life in the present, nods towards the nobility of them, acknowledge their unsettling appearances, but then asks us to depart, to dive into the present.
Even though he’s stuck in the muck of loss — of the primeval virtues and relations, of “tribal mysteries”— like many of his contemporaries, which drags the prose into the essentializing territory, he manages to slough off these presumptions, to be attentive to “the great devious onward flowing stream of conscious human blood.”
Many that write about him are obsessed with his mad roaming of the globe, his temperament and passing condemnation of publishers and the public, Lawrence’s duel obsessions, life and the novel, are what make him interesting.
He’s sceptical of art that tries to teach, of self-consciously experimental and of art that tries to explain itself.
“You might as well force your guest to eat the menu card, at the end of the dinner,” he writes.
He, in his constant sickness, shines brightest when he gives time itself some flavor; he does what every writer, deep in their solidified book-love, wishes.
If we think about it, we find that our life consists in this achieving of a pure relationship between ourselves and the living universe about us. This Is how ‘I save my soul’ by accomplishing a pure relationship between me and another person, me and other people, me and a nation, me and a race of men, me and the animals, me and the trees or flowers, me and the earth, me and the skies and sun and stars, me and the moon: an infinity of pure relations, big and little, like the stars in the sky: that makes our eternity, for each one of us, me and the timber I am sawing, the lines of force follow; me and though I knead for bread, me and the very motion with which I write, me and the bit of gold I have got. This, if we knew it, is our life and our eternity: the subtle, perfected relationship between me and my whole circumambient universe.
This is perhaps one of the best paragraphs in the English language, as Lawrence shuttles himself into a catalog of worldly things via the objective pronoun, drowned in the list of phenomena.
What reading Lawrence begs for today is to take his vision of the novel’s place and life and take it further. Stripped of the assumptions and cruelnesses, which he no doubt had; a movement in flux he probably would have approved of.
Lately, there does feel like there’s something deficient in appealing to some sort of flux, what Lawrence calls the ineffable “quick” of the moment. Relationality, being present and distaste for society as it is all seem stale. Maybe it’s because variety continues to lessen and we approach yet another century with an economic system only slightly different from that under which Lawrence lived. Or perhaps it’s because of the age of nuclearity, within which we are bound to singularity and individualism.
Individualism is bestowed and creates the novel in its popular form, but if one must be individual, they must plunge the whole of their body into the waking stream of life, Lawrence’s rainbow. We need to read Lawrence to go further, further into his critiques of stifled philosophy and self-explanatory art, further in our vehemence, further in the tracks through the deep snow of the present, further in our laughing and wrestling with the past, further in our eschewing of clean chronology and mandated order and further in finding the newness of the novel, the perfect form for the capitalist age, in the beating heart of the contemporary.
Even if we drown ourselves in ourselves by doing it.
That was some solid writing Chief.