The Southend Venus (Alternative Version)

Stephen Alexander: Birth of a Southend Venus (2016)

Lawrence writes that the gods exist according to the soul's desire. Which doesn't mean they are merely imaginary or mind-dependent, but that their becoming-manifest does require a creative act of attention on our part; what some might call an act of faith.

In other words, in order to experience their presence - in order to glimpse them in the limbs and bodies and faces of men and women (in their movements, gestures and expressions) - then one must learn to see that which the camera cannot capture. 

And so to the young woman I'm describing as a Southend Venus ...

Seen as a low resolution image snapped on a smartphone, it's true that she looks quite ordinary and anonymous; just another pretty teen in the universal outfit of denim shorts and t-shirt.

But, seen with an eye that is free from optical complacency and which is sensitive to far more than light, her flesh suddenly gleams with transcendent loveliness and she embodies that innocence and forgetfulness that betokens an Essex Aphrodite.            

 

The Southend Venus

And what's the good of a woman 
unless she's a glimpse of a goddess of some sort?

For Lawrence, women in whom one cannot glimpse something immortal  - that is to say, a transcendent loveliness of being, unfolding like a rose in the fourth dimension - are little more than animated lumps of clay.

Such women may be very attractive. And may even have winning personalities. But if their flesh lacks a divine gleam or sparkle, then they'll ultimately fail to engender any true sense of awe in a man. 

I thought of this when I watched a friend's teenage daughter emerge from the grey sea at Southend and stroll along the shoreline holding a phone to her ear like a shell, softly laughing and chatting, and pushing her wet hair from her face.

At that moment, her bare limbs pallid with light from the silent sky behind, she embodied Aphrodite far more perfectly than Ursula Andress or Pamela Anderson ever could.

For despite all their Hollywood glamour, they fail to manifest the purity and the stillness that speaks of the sacred and all the lovely morning-wonder that can be found even on a beach in Essex. 
      

See: D. H Lawrence, 'Glimpses' and 'The Man of Tyre', The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 

Note: An alternative version of this post can be read by clicking here.