Dead Men Make Good Mould

Decay is the Laboratory of Life

(SA/2023)

 

 

Because so much of my thinking has been informed by the work of D. H. Lawrence - and because, as the author of a book of essays on thanatology, all aspects of death are a matter of continued philosophical interest - it means I can never see a pile of fallen wet leaves slowly decomposing without recalling the following lines from Fantasia of the Unconscious:

 

"Old leaves have got to fall, old forms must die. And if men at certain periods fall into death in millions, why, so must the leaves fall every single autumn. And dead leaves make good mold. And so dead men. Even dead men's souls." [1]   

 

That's quite a hard teaching from the materialist school of general economics - one that Bataille would happily affirm - but its apparent callousness in the face of some kind of huge event that results in the mass destruction of human lives doesn't detract from the essential truth that life is rooted in and thrives upon death, and that "the whole universe would perish if man and beast and herb were not putting forth a newness" [2] out of the decay of the old.

 

Or, as the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani puts it: "Through decay, life and death multiply and putrefy each other to no end." [3] 

 

So, next time you see a pile of rotting leaves - or, indeed, contemplate a mass grave of human bodies - try to overcome your horror and console yourself with the knowledge of how compost enriches the soil with organic nutrients and provides sustenance for a range of detritivores on both the macro and micro level; for dead men make good food as well as good mould.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Ch. XV, p. 266. 

      For readers who prefer to consult the 2004 Cambridge Edition of Fantasia, published jointly with Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and ed. Bruce Steele, see p. 189.   

[2] Ibid.

[3] Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, (re:press, 2008), p. 184. 

On Art and Hippology (With Reference to the Work of D. H. Lawrence)

Fig 1: D. H. Lawrence, Laughing Horse (c. 1924)

Fig 2: Josef Moest, Lady Godiva (1906) 

 

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence had very definite ideas on most things, including the art of representation. 

 

Take a look fig. 1 above, for example, which he produced for a possible cover to an edition of Spud Johnson's two-bit literary magazine, The Laughing Horse [1].

 

It's arguable that what Lawrence is attempting here is to give us an impression of a horse that has something childlike about it. For Lawrence believed that a child sees things differently, more magically, than the average adult:

 

"When a boy of eight sees a horse, he doesn't see the correct biological object we intend him to see. He sees a big living presence of no particular shape with hair dangling from its neck and four legs. If he puts two eyes in the profile, he is quite right. Because he does not see with optical, photographic vision. The image on his retina is not the image of his consciousness. The image on his retina just does not go into him. His unconsciousness is filled with a strong, dark, vague prescience of a powerful presence, a two-eyed, four-legged, long-maned presence looming imminent. And to force the boy to see a correct one-eyed horse-profile is just like pasting a placard in front of his vision. It simply kills his inward seeing. We don't want him to see a proper horse. The child is not a little camera. He is a small vital organism which has direct dynamic rapport with the objects of the outer universe. He perceives from his breast and his abdomen, with deep-sunken realism, the elemental nature of the creature." [2]

 

However, if an adult is passionate enough - like an artist - then they retain the ability to see things like a child; i.e., as a kind of vibrating blur in which nothing is fixed and final. They can still see the horse as a darkly vital presence composed of a mane, a long face, a round nose, and four legs.

 

 

II.

 

I remembered what Lawrence wrote here when recently re-reading a discussion about art in Women in Love (1920). Or, more precisely, enjoying the argument between Ursula Brangwen and Loerke over the latter's sculpted bronze figure of a naked young girl sat upon a horse [3].

 

Ursula doesn't care for Loerke - despite the fact her sister Gudrun is very much drawn to him. And so, when he produces a photogravure reproduction of a statuette signed with his name, she is more inclined to be confrontational than complimentary: 

 

"The statuette was of a naked girl, small, finely made, sitting on a great naked horse. The girl was young and tender, a mere bud. She was sitting sideways on the horse, her face in her hands, as if in shame and grief, in a little abandon. Her hair, which was short and must be flaxen, fell forward, divided, half covering her hands. 

      Her limbs were young and tender. Her legs, scarcely formed yet, the legs of a maiden just passing towards cruel womanhood, dangled childishly over the side of the powerful horse, pathetically, the small feet folded one over the other, as if to hide. But there was no hiding. There she was exposed naked on the naked flank of the horse. 

      The horse stood stock still, stretched in a kind of start. It was a massive, magnificent stallion, rigid with pent-up power. Its neck was arched and terrible, like a sickle, its flanks were pressed back, rigid with power." [4]

 

Gudrun, who is also present, is clearly affected by the work: she turns pale, "and a darkness came over her eyes" [5]. She finds the horse phallic and wishes to know its size. But also she was thinking "of the slender, immature, tender limbs of the girl, smooth and cold in green bronze" [6]. 

 

Ursula, however, hates it:  

 

"'Why,' said Ursula, 'did you make the horse so stiff? It is as stiff as a block.'" [7]

 

Somewhat affronted by this, Loerke merely repeats the word stiff, obliging Ursula to expand upon her accusation: 

 

"'Yes. Look how stock and stupid and brutal it is. Horses are sensitive, quite delicate and sensitive, really.'" [8]

 

At this, Loerke "raised his shoulders, spread his hands in a shrug of slow indifference, as much as to inform her she was an amateur and an impertinent nobody" [9], before attempting to explain "with an insulting patience and condescension in his voice" [10], that the horse is not an actual living creature:

 

"'It is part of a work of art, a piece of form. It is not a picture of a friendly horse to which you give a lump of sugar, do you see - it is part of a work of art, it has no relation to anything outside that work of art.'" [11]

 

That, of course, in one sense at least, is quite true. But the opinionated somewhat provincial Brangwen girl is having none of it and creates quite the scene:

 

"Ursula, angry at being treated quite so insultingly de haut en bas, from the height of esoteric art to the depth of general exoteric amateurism, replied, hotly, flushing and lifting her face:  'But it is a picture of a horse, nevertheless.'

      [Loerke] lifted his shoulders in another shrug. 

      'As you like - it is not a picture of a cow, certainly.' 

      Here Gudrun broke in, flushed and brilliant, anxious to avoid any more of this, any more of Ursula's foolish persistence in giving herself away. 

      'What do you mean by "it is a picture of a horse?"' she cried at her sister. 'What do you mean by a horse? You mean an idea you have in your head, and which you want to see represented. There is another idea altogether, quite another idea. Call it a horse if you like, or say it is not a horse. I have just as much right to say that your horse isn't a horse, that it is a falsity of your own make-up.'

      Ursula wavered, baffled. Then her words came. 

      'But why does he have this idea of a horse?' she said. 'I know it is his idea. I know it is a picture of himself, really -' 

      Loerke snorted with rage. 

      'A picture of myself!' he repeated, in derision. 'Wissen sie, gnädige Frau, that is a Kunstwerk, a work of art. It is a work of art, it is a picture of nothing, of absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with anything but itself, it has no relation with the everyday world of this and other, there is no connection between them, absolutely none, they are two different and distinct planes of existence, and to translate one into the other is worse than foolish, it is a darkening of all counsel, a making confusion everywhere. Do you see, you must not confuse the relative work of action, with the absolute world of art. That you must not do.' 

      'That is quite true,' cried Gudrun, let loose in a sort of rhapsody. 'The two things are quite and permanently apart, they have nothing to do with one another. I and my art, they have nothing to do with each other. My art stands in another world, I am in this world.' 

      Her face was flushed and transfigured. Loerke who was sitting with his head ducked, like some creature at bay, looked up at her, swiftly, almost furtively, and murmured: 

      'Ja - so ist es, so ist es.' 

      Ursula was silent after this outburst. She was furious. She wanted to poke a hole into them both. 

      'It isn’t a word of it true, of all this harangue you have made me,' she replied flatly. 'The horse is a picture of your own stock, stupid brutality, and the girl was a girl you loved and tortured and then ignored.' 

      He looked up at her with a small smile of contempt in his eyes. He would not trouble to answer this last charge. Gudrun too was silent in exasperated contempt. Ursula was such an insufferable outsider, rushing in where angels would fear to tread. But there - fools must be suffered, if not gladly. 

      But Ursula was persistent too. 

      'As for your world of art and your world of reality,' she replied, 'you have to separate the two, because you can't bear to know what you are. You can’t bear to realise what a stock, stiff, hide-bound brutality you are really, so you say "it's the world of art". The world of art is only the truth about the real world, that's all - but you are too far gone to see it.' 

      She was white and trembling, intent. Gudrun and Loerke sat in stiff dislike of her. Gerald too, who had come up in the beginning of the speech, stood looking at her in complete disapproval and opposition. He felt she was undignified, she put a sort of vulgarity over the esotericism which gave man his last distinction. He joined his forces with the other two. They all three wanted her to go away. But she sat on in silence, her soul weeping, throbbing violently, her fingers twisting her handkerchief." [12]

  

What, then, do we think of this? 

 

Well, I hate to say it - and don't want to sound like Clive Bell ecstatically singing the praises of significant form [13] - but I tend to agree with Loerke and Gudrun and think Ursula is being almost wilfully naive. 

 

Ultimately, it is irritating when individuals like Miss Brangwen insist that the plastic arts have to be representational; that a sculpture or painting must forever be referred back to a model in the real world; or that a horse is a horse of course of course ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The Laughing Horse was irregularly published between 1921 and 1939 and celebrated the contemporary literary and artistic culture of the American West. 

      Willard ('Spud') Johnson was the principal editor and contributed much of the poetry, prose, and artwork himself. He also encouraged friends and acquaintances to submit material, including D. H. Lawrence, who had an entire issue devoted to his work in April 1926 (#13). 

      The laughing horse sketch by Lawrence was unused - perhaps because Lawrence got the price wrong; Johnson's magazine always sold for 25¢ (or two bits). It is reproduced in D. H. Lawrence's Paintings, ed. Keith Sagar, (Chaucer Press, 2003), p. 145. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 121.

      Lawrence was not alone in the view that the child sees - and draws - in a manner that is difficult for the adult to replicate. As Picasso once famously said: "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."  

 

[3] Lawrence was most likely thinking of a patinated bronze sculpture by the German artist Josef Moest (1873-1914) entitled Lady Godiva (1906); see fig. 2 above.

 

[4-6] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 429.    

 

[7-11] Ibid., p. 430.

[12] Ibid., pp. 430-31. 

[13] Significant form was a theory developed by English art critic Clive Bell which specified a set of criteria for what qualified as a work of art. In his 1914 book Art, for example, Bell argues that art transports us from the actual world of existence to one of aesthetic exaltation. 

      Lawrence hates this kind of abstract idealism, so popular amongst the Bloomsbury elite of his time, and he openly attacks Bell in his own writings on art, which can be found in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). For an excellent discussion of all this see chapter 4 of Anne Fernihough's, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, (Oxford University Press, 1993).   

 

 

As for Lawrence ... He's a Moral Conservative

 

 

Perhaps one of the most surprising - and, for some, disappointing - things that D. H. Lawrence ever wrote is found in the Foreword to Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922):

 

"On the whole, our important moral standards are, in my opinion, quite sound [...] In its essential character, our present morality seems to me to offer no very serious obstacle to our living: our moral standards need brightening up a little, not shattering." [1]

 

Tell that to the followers of Nietzsche, for example, who call for a revaluation of all values ...! Indeed, this might almost be read as an explicit rejection of Zarathustra, who famously advocates the breaking of law tables [2]. 

Of course, as digital pilgrim James Walker reminds us, Lawrence was a mass of contradictions - elsewhere in his work he explicitly rejects the idea of standards of any kind - and so maybe we shouldn't take what he says in Fantasia too seriously after all ...? [3]

 

It could be, for example, that Lawrence was simply being contrary in the face of one critic who suggests that he seeks a "'revision of moral standards such as will remove artificial bars to the escape of each person from the isolation which is his most intolerable hardship'" [4]. 

 

That would explain why - again to one's bemusement - Lawrence even challenges the idea that isolation is an intolerable form of hardship for the individual. And yet, it's precisely such solitary confinement - leading ultimately to self-enclosure or solipsism - that Lawrence elsewhere rages against:

 

"For it is only when we can get a man to fall back into his true relation to other men, and to women, that we can give him an opportunity to be himself. So long as men are inwardly dominated by their own isolation [...] nothing is possible but insanity more or less pronounced. Men must get back into touch." [5]

 

If it isn't his contrary nature that explains this surprising defence of the present moral order, then, I suppose, we might just have to consider the possibility that Lawrence was fundamentally more conventional and conservative than many of his readers like to believe [6]; thus his support for traditional marriage, capital punishment, and the censorship of pornography. 

 

And thus his contempt for those writers and artists who wore jazz underwear and didn't subscribe to his central teaching that the "essential function of art is moral." [7]  

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 60.  

[2] The line I'm thinking of is found in Zarathustra's Prologue (9) and is translated by Adrian Del Caro as: "'Look at the good and the just! Whom do they hate most? The one who breaks their tablets of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker - but he is the creative one.'" 

      See the Cambridge University Press edition of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2006), ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin. The line quoted is on p. 14.   

 

[3] See the related post to this one - As for Lawrence ... A Reply to James Walker - click here.

 

[4] L. L. Buermyer, writing in the New York Evening Post Literary Review (16 July 1921), quoted by Lawrence in Fantasia, p. 60. 

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 336. 

      It's worth noting that whilst Lawrence says there's no need to shatter moral standards, he does argue here for the shattering of the ideal of a standardised (or normalised) humanity. 

 

[6] This might help explain why Lawrence is increasingly popular in conservative (and even neo-reactionary) circles; see for example Micah Mattix, 'Reconsidering D. H. Lawrence', The American Conservative, (9 Oct 2020): click here.  

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 155. 

      See also the essay 'Art and Morality' in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 161- 168, which opens: "It is part of the common clap-trap, that 'art is immoral.'" In this short text, Lawrence expresses his loathing for those artists whose only aim was to épater les bourgeoisie.      

As for Lawrence ... A Reply to James Walker

James Walker: Senior Lecturer School of Arts and Humanities

Nottingham Trent University: full profile click here. 

 

 

I. 

 

As torpedophiles will be aware, digital storyteller James Walker is someone I have a fair degree of time for, even if his political views often strike me as all-too-predictably prim and proper. 

 

His graphic novel (co-produced with Paul Fillingham), Dawn of the Unread (2014-16), which celebrates Nottingham's literary heritage, was amusing and his current transmedia project which aims to build an online Memory Theatre inspired by D. H. Lawrence's global wanderings, also promises to be of interest.    

 

A member of the D. H. Lawrence Society Council, Walker assembles and edits a monthly bulletin that is emailed to members of the Society, thereby demonstrating his commitment to circulating all the latest news of Lawrence, but without becoming an uncritical follower of the latter. 

 

Indeed, Walker often seems to regard Lawrence primarily as a figure of fun, rather than as a novelist and poet who might actually have something important to teach us. This helps explain his remark left in a comment to a recent post published here on Torpedo the Ark:          

 

"As for Lawrence, he's a mass of contradictions who needs to be read in context. I wouldn't take quotes from Fantasia too seriously, although at least he was honest enough to call it what it was: this 'pseudo-philosophy of mine'."

 

It's a remark I thought we might examine a little more closely ...

 

 

II. 

 

Firstly, it's true that Lawrence is a mass of contradictions and that there is little point in searching for a coherent or consistent philosophy in his work. Like Nietzsche, Lawrence makes no attempt to systematise his ideas - something which betrays a lack of integrity according to the former. However, he does offer a very distinctive style which is characterised by plurality, difference, and insouciance.

 

In other words, it's a style that enrages the puritan who not only expects but demands logical seriousness and dependability. 

 

Arguably, Lawrence anticipates the figure imagined by Roland Barthes who "abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simple disregard of that old spectre: logical contradiction" [1]; that anti-Socratic hero who mixes every language and endures the mockery of moral-rational society without shame. 

 

For me, this is one of Lawrence's strengths and at the heart of his appeal; but do I sense a trace of disappointment and/or irritation in Walker's As for Lawrence remark? Does he secretly hope that by reading Lawrence in context - something he says needs to be done, although he doesn't specify what constitutes this context - his work might not only be better understood but, as it were, coordinated within a wider framework of meaning which is clear, coherent, and woven into Truth?

 

Secondly, one might wonder just how seriously Walker would have us take Lawrence's work in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). Not too seriously, he says, but what exactly does that mean; who determines what is and is not a serious piece of writing and what is and is not an appropriate reader response? 

 

Again, I might be mistaken, but I get the impression that Walker secretly thinks Lawrence a clown and his work ludicrous. I also suspect he thinks Lawrence something of a fraud. This is why he is quick to remind us of Lawrence's own use of the phrase pseudo-philosophy to describe his thinking in Fantasia. And why he commends Lawrence for his honesty here, as if elsewhere in the book he is flagrantly dishonest and peddling falsehoods.

 

The ironic thing is that Lawrence's pseudo-philosophy remark is one that is usefully read within a wider context; namely, the Foreword to Fantasia in which Lawence amusingly answers his critics, including Mr. John V. A. Weaver of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, who reviewed Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious and coined the term Pollyanalystic which Lawrence then rewrote as pollyanalytics in order to describe his own philosophy.

 

Read within this context, it becomes clear that Lawrence neither regards his own thinking as a pseudo-philosophy nor a "wordy mass of revolting nonsense" [2]. He is using this phrase - as he's using pollyanalytics - in an ironic (rather weary) manner in the face of past criticism and anticipated future criticism. 

 

It also becomes clear that Lawrence takes his philosophical inferences - deduced from the novels and poems -  seriously and he challenges his readers to do so also if they wish to fully understand his work. For Lawrence, underlying all art is a philosophy upon which it is utterly dependent:

 

"The metaphysic or philosophy may not be anywhere very accurately stated" [3] - it may contain a mass of contradictions or be wearing woefully thin - but it is of primary importance and not to be scornfully dismissed as something unworthy of serious consideration.    

 

 

Notes

  

[1] Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 3. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 62.  

[3] Ibid., p. 65. 

 

For a follow-up post to this one - in which it seems James Walker might have a point after all and we examine Lawrence's moral conservativism - click here.

Above all Things Encourage a Straight Backbone

 

Winners of Miss Correct Posture - aka Miss Beautiful Spine 

(Chicago, May 1956) [1]

 

 

Deleuze - and those influenced by his work (particularly the books written in collaboration with Félix Guattari) - often thrill to the idea (borrowed from Artaud) of a body without organs. And they seem equally excited at the thought of heads without faces and backs without vertebrae. 

 

For if the face is a universal mask and machine of moral overcoding which makes pale-faced Christians of us all, then "the spinal column is nothing but a sword beneath the skin, slipped into the body of an innocent sleeper by an executioner" [2]. 

 

Perhaps that's why there's a radical tradition of associating bones with fascism and privileging the soft pathology of the flesh as somehow more vital - something I touched on briefly in a recent post: click here. 

 

It's a tradition that one might have expected D. H. Lawrence to have belonged to; for Lawrence certainly celebrated the flesh as opposed to the spirit - and the latter, as Hegel famously declared, is a bone.

 

However, it turns out that Lawrence is all in favour of back bone, particularly the lumbar ganglion which, he says, negatively polarizes the solar plexus in the primal psyche [4] and is the centre of all independent activity (or what we might term a will to separation).

 

Lawrence encourages children to stiffen their little backs and escape the influence of their mothers; to kick themselves into singular being full of pride and the joy of self-assertion; to know that they are themselves and distinct from all others. He writes:

 

"From the great voluntary ganglion of the lower plane, the child is self-willed, independent, and masterful. In the activity of this centre a boy refuses to be kissed and pawed about, maintaining his proud independence like a little wild animal. From this centre he likes to command and to receive obedience. From this centre likewise he may be destructive and defiant and reckless, determined to have his own way at any cost." [5]   

 

Obviously, those who despise these spinal characteristics, interpret them as signs of fascist or phallocratic imperialism. 

 

But, as Lawrence would say, curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines and slimy, belly-wriggling invertebrates [5] who slander those who dare to stand upright, with shoulders back, taking pleasure in their own sovereign power. 

  

 

Notes 

 

[1] In the 1950s and '60s, American chiropractors decided to stage a number of beauty contests in the hope that this would help legitimise their profession and raise their public profile. The photo reproduced here shows the winner and runners up of one such contest held in Chicago, May 1956. According to a newspaper report at the time, the girls were picked for their beauty and perfect posture. For more details and more images, click here.  

 

[2] Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, (Continuum, 2003), p. 23. Like many of his ideas and phrases, Deleuze is borrowing this from a writer of fiction; in this case, Franz Kafka. See: 'The Sword', in Diaries 1914-1923, ed. Max Brod, trans. Martin Greenberg with Hannah Arendt (Schocken Books, 1949), pp. 109-10.   

 

[3] Lawrence borrows many of the ideas and terminology used in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) from theosophy rather than physiology and when he does use anatomical terms they only approximate with scientific and medical knowledge.  

[4] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 89. 

[5] I'm paraprasing from Lawrence's famous letter written to Edward Garnett on 3 July 1912. See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 422.

 

 

This post grew out of correspondence with the artist Heide Hatry and I am grateful as always for her inspiration. 

Suffer the Little Children: D. H. Lawrence on Child Sexuality, Puberty, and Savage Initiation Rites

Portrait of Lawrence as a young boy

 

 

D. H. Lawrence despised false notions of childhood purity and innocence, as if children were entirely ignorant of their own bodies and pleasures; "even in a child of three, rudimentary sex throws strange shadows on the wall".*

 

Having said that, he insists that the sexuality of pre-pubescent children is distinct from that of adults and that if the latter should intervene at all in the sexual behaviour of the former it is only as guarantors of this specificity. 

 

Thus, in an interesting passage in Fantasia whilst he writes in favour of allowing children to witness the passions of adult life (and animals fucking), he strongly opposes formal sex education: 

 

"It is ten times criminal to tell young children facts about sex, or to implicate them in adult relationships. A child has a strong evanescent sex consciousness. It instinctively writes impossible words on back walls. But this is not a fully conscious mental act. It is a kind of dream act - quite natural. The child's curious, shadowy, indecent sex-knowledge is quite in the course of nature. And does nobody any harm at all. Adults had far better not notice it. But if a child sees a cockerel tread a hen, or two dogs coupling, well and good. It should see these things. Only, without comment. Let nothing be exaggeratedly hidden. By instinct, let us preserve the decent privacies. But if a child occasionally sees its parent nude, taking a bath, all the better. Or even sitting in the W. C. Exaggerated secrecy is bad. But indecent exposure is also very bad. But worst of all is dragging in the mental consciousness of these shadowy dynamic realities." [125-26] 

 

For Lawrence, puberty - which he explains in pollyanalytic terms of dynamic consciousness and the biological psyche - is an absolute and crucial dividing line: before it, sex is "submerged, nascent, incipient only" [134]; after it, sex is not quite the be-all and end-all, but a hugely important factor nevertheless and "an element of sex enters into all human activity" [66]. 

 

So vital is puberty for Lawrence, that he strongly advocates that it is marked by some form of initiation, for both sexes, although his primary interest seems to be the process of turning boys into men: 

 

"Boys should be taken away from their mother and sisters [...] at adolescence. They should be given into some real manly charge. And there should be some actual initiation into sex life. Perhaps like the savages, who make the boy [...] suffer and endure terrible hardships, to make a great dynamic effect on the consciousness, a terrible dynamic sense of change in the very being. In short, a long, violent initiation, from which the lad emerges [...] cut off forever from childhood [...] [139] 

 

I don't quite know what Lawrence has in mind here, or to whom he is referring when he speaks of savages. I do know, however, that he read various anthropological accounts of initiation ceremonies, so perhaps he was thinking of those tribal peoples who practice circumcision on adolescent boys, or engage in acts of ritualised homosexuality, including semen ingestion via the fellating of elders.  

 

For the cruel truth is that in societies which do practice such rites, the transtion from the biological state of childhood into the socio-sexual status of adulthood is never completed without tears and bloodshed ...

 

 

Notes

 

* D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 138. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the post.

 

Education, Education, Education à la D. H. Lawrence

Hey, teachers, leave them kids alone!

 

I. 

 

Former schoolteacher D. H. Lawrence always retained an interest in education and held typically strong views on the subject, some of which I would like to discuss here as set out in a long essay entitled 'Education of the People'. Composed of twelve sections, this work goes way beyond anything we might encounter in the Times Educational Supplement.* 

 

In places, the language used resembles Lawrence's later study Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), though readers will be relieved to know that I'll not be making reference here to plexuses, planes, and ganglia, nor discussing his neurophysiological account of consciousness. As far as possible, I want to remain in the classroom and focus on Lawrence's thoughts on a new national curriculum ...

II. 

 

Lawrence opens his essay with three questions: "What is education all about? What is it doing? Does anybody know?" [87]

Whether he answers his own questions is debatable, though he clearly thinks he knows what education is all about - or, rather, what education should be all about - and has a good idea of what it should do; namely, develop the individual and not simply produce model citizens. For Lawrence, the ultimate aim of education has to be to "recognise the true nature in each child, and to give each its natural chance [...] helped wisely, reverently, towards his own fulfilment" [99].  

That sounds pretty idealistic to me - which is ironic, as Lawrence vehemently attacks all forms of idealism in this essay - and, obviously, I'm uncomfortable with the language used here; particularly when Lawrence maps this line of thinking on to a conventional model of class, so that the latter too becomes a question of nature rather than politics.

In the blink of an eye, Lawrence moves from know thyself to know thy place and fulfilment is privileged over freedom and equality. He might believe in universal education, but he certainly doesn't believe in universal suffrage and thinks that liberal democracy pisses on the spark of divinity that exists in every man, woman and child and which gives them their ontological uniqueness. 

 

III.

 

The first thing Lawrence calls for is the defeat of fear; particularly the fear of failure and of not being able to earn a living. We should educate our children to be fearless, he says; to have courage and a little insouciance. After all, what's the worst that can happen? You might be unemployed and penniless - you might even starve to death - but why worry about it? "It isn't such an awful thing, if you don't care about keeping up appearances" [91] or preserving yourself like a fat green cabbage. 

The second thing that Lawrence advocates is leaving children alone as much as possible; teach 'em the three Rs and then let them find their own aims and concerns. If they choose not to study, then that's their business: "Is not radical unlearnedness just as true a form of self-expression, and just as desirable a state, for many natures (even the bulk), as learnedness?" [95]

And in order to ensure this unlearnedness, Lawrence advocates the educational system be restructured from top to bottom along the following sensible lines:
 

Send all children to state schools aged seven for four hours a day; three hours given over to reading, writing, and arithmetic; one hour devoted to PE or domestic science. The schools will teach children of both sexes and all classes, so they might gain a radical understanding of one another both in their common humanity and essential differences.  

At the age of twelve, divide the children into two groups; the first shall be sent to secondary schools, "where an extended curriculum includes Latin or French, and some true science" [97]; the second group, who will not be sent to the secondary schools, will have their intellectual education reduced to two hours, "whilst three hours will be devoted to [...] martial exercises and the rudiments of domestic labour" [97]. This second group of children will form a "vigorous, passionate proletariat of indomitable individuals" [106] and artisans.

When the secondary students are about to turn fifteen, further divide them in two; those who "according to their own nature and capacity" [97] have learnt all they can from books, shall be given apprenticeships for "some sort of semi-profession" [97] and will form a reliable middle-class. The remaining students, who display a natural inclination for scholarship, shall be admitted into colleges at sixteen; they, says Lawrence, belong to the highest class and will become our doctors, lawyers, priests, professors, and artists of the future. 

"Such", concludes Lawrence, "is a brief sketch of a sensible system of education for a civilised people" [99]. 

 

 

IV.

 

It is, I think, a deeply disappointing model which basically reinforces the class system as it presently exists and continues to entrench the division between manual and intellectual labour, wherein the latter is socially privileged.

 

The only difference is that Lawrence seeks to remove the accident of money from his social system so that the classes will "derive through heredity, as the great oriental castes" [107]. Such a system, he says, is organic and vital; there's nothing automatic or mechanical about it. Oh, and it's also fundamentally religious in character, established upon the living religious faculty; i.e., the "inward worship of the creative life-mystery" [108]. 

 

Ultimately, Lawrence adopts the sow's ear/silk purse argument, insisting that we are all determined by our true nature and that it's dangerously mistaken to try and force all children to think or express themselves creatively: "Every teacher knows that it is worse than useless trying to educate at least fifty per-cent of his scholars" [96], writes Lawrence. 

 

Indeed, it might even be preferable to exclude them from elementary schools altogether and the "imbecile pretence of culture" [112] that only renders them neurasthenic. Better to keep them ignorant but robust - or as swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, and as hard as steel, as someone else also keenly interested in the education of the young would later put it.**  
  

 

V.

It will be surprising to some readers to learn that Lawrence was as opposed to self-expression in children as the development of smirking self-consciousness. Surprising too, to discover he also hates the cultivation of imagination:

"Down with imagination in school, down with self-expression. Let us have a little severe hard work, good, clean, well-written exercises, well-pronounced words, well-set-down sums: and [...] for the rest, leave the children alone. Pitch them out into the street or the playgrounds and take no notice of them. Drive them savagely away from their posturings.

       There must be an end to the self-conscious attitudinising of our children. The self-consciousness and all the damned high-flownness must be taken out of them, and their little personalities must be nipped in the bud. Children shall be regarded as young creatures, not as young affected persons."  [126-27]

 

Now, that's something I can agree with at last ...   

    

Notes

* Funnily enough, Lawrence submitted an earlier, much shorter version of 'Education of the People' to the Times Educational Supplement. Perhaps unsurprisingly the work was rejected.

 

** In a speech of 14 September, 1935, Hitler famously set out his vision of German youth; not only was it to be slender and supple, but Flink wie die Windhunde, Zaeh wie Leder, Hart wie Kruppstahl. This is not to suggest that Lawrence was a Nazi - or that Hitler was a Lawrentian.  

 

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Page references given in the text refer to this edition. 

 

Readers interested in a related post to this one on returning to school in the age of coronavirus, should click here. 

 

 

What Big Teeth You Have: Notes on D. H. Lawrence and Dental Morphology

The kind of woman D. H. Lawence dreams of ...
Emmanuelle Vaugier as Madison in the hit 
American TV series Supernatural [S2/E17] 

I.

If you ask your dentist about teeth, they'll probably bore on about the different types (incisors, canines, and molars), what their function is (to cut, tear, and crush items of food), where they're located (upper and lower jaws), what they're made of (enamel, dentin, cementum, and pulp) and why it's important for our health and wellbeing to take care of our teeth and gums (prone as they are to decay and disease). 

Perhaps, if they really know their stuff, your dentist might even give you an insight into the evolutionary history of hominid teeth and their changing morphology. But mostly they'll just want you to upgrade your dental plan or agree to another series of X-rays.  

II.

Ask D. H. Lawrence about teeth, however, and you'll get a very different kind of answer. For although Lawrence wasn't a dentist - he's primarily remembered today (if at all) as a novelist and poet - he did have a fascination with teeth as the instruments of our sensual will.

What does that mean?

It means that their development is controlled from the two great sensual centres below the diaphragm; particularly the voluntary centre: "The growth and the life of the teeth depends almost entirely on the lumbar ganglion."

I don't know if that's true or not and don't really care. What interests me more - and what does have basis in scientific fact - is Lawrence's claim that the mouths of modern human beings have become smaller than those of their primal ancestors:

"For many ages we have been suppressing the [...] sensual will [... and] converting ourselves into ideal creatures, all spiritually conscious, and active dynamically only on one plane, the upper, spiritual plane. Our mouth has contracted, our teeth have become soft and unquickened."

Worse, they give us trouble all the time and many people end up having to wear false teeth - a sure sign for Lawrence of an individual who is "spirit-rotten and idea-rotten". In other words, dentures indicate degeneracy.

Perhaps not surprisingly to those who are familiar with his work, Lawrence also relates his dental philosophy to his thinking on race and ethnicity; it is white people who have no room in their little pinched mouths for the healthy teeth possessed by negroes.

The dark-skinned races have wisely resisted the urge to forfeit their flashing sensual power and submit to the self-conscious love-ideal. Lawrence envies them their strong, resistant teeth - as he does their fullness of lips and thickness of nose; these things being indicative to him of the sensual-sympathetic mode of consciousness and the primary centre from which an individual or a people live.

Lawrence being Lawrence, however, he doesn't stop here. Ultimately, even black people don't quite have the gnashers he lycanthropically fantasises: "Where [...] are the sharp and vivid teeth of the wolf, keen to defend and devour?"

Only if we possessed the large teeth of predators - including 2" fangs - would men and women find happiness, says Lawrence.

See: D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 99-100. 

Blood, Sex, and the Inviolable Nature of Objects

Still from the video for the song Animals by Maroon 5 

Featuring Adam Levine and his wife Behati Prinsloo 

Dir. Samuel Bayer, (2014)

The amorous subject of John Donne's metaphysically conceited poem The Flea, cleverly attempts to persuade his beloved into consenting to a premarital sexual relationship by drawing her attention to a parasitic insect that has suck'd and sampled them both. His argument is that since their separate bloodstreams are united within the body of the flea, then they have, essentially, already been joined as man and wife and so may as well fuck without any further hesitation, embarrassment, or feeling of shame.  

It's a witty and imaginative argument, that rests on the religious idea that sex is a form of blood covenant or physical union consummated between two people. But, like most religious arguments, it's a fallacy; one that even D. H. Lawrence, for whom coition is a vital experience providing a crucial clue to existence, has to concede at last ...  

In Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Lawrence describes how the blood of a man "acutely surcharged with intense vital electricity ... rises to a culmination, in a tremendous magnetic urge" towards the polarized blood of a woman. Thus, the desire on the part of both parties to engage in genital intercourse. And, in the act of coition, says Lawrence, "the two seas of blood ... rocking and surging towards contact ... clash into a oneness", resulting in a great flash of interchange, before the two individuals fall separate once more, reinvigorated and tingling with newness in their blood and being.

Writing in A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' (1930), however, Lawrence subtly qualifies his position; now, rather than talking about two seas of blood surging towards contact and clashing together into a oneness, he writes about marriage as a correspondence of blood and insists "the blood of man and the blood of woman are two eternally different streams, that can never be mingled ..." [my emphasis].

Thus, whilst the phallus may indeed be a column of blood that enters the valley of blood of woman, no matter how deeply the former penetrates the latter, neither breaks its bounds. In other words, there's a degree of communion, but there's no actual merging - and, if there were, it would be deadly to both parties; a horrible nullification of identity and singular being.

Ultimately, it's not only a fallacy but also a fatal form of idealism to posit the idea of two-becoming-one (even within the body of a flea). Whether we accept it or not, man, like all other objects, is limited, isolate and alone and all the penetrative sex in the world - be it oral, anal, or vaginal in character - doesn't change this. We are, if you like, unfuckable at last; that is to say, we never encounter or touch one another in our deepest being, which is forever withdrawn and vacuum-sealed.

See:

John Donne, The Flea, click here to read online at the Poetry Foundation and click here to read my analysis of this verse on Torpedo the Ark.

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' and Other Essays, (Penguin Books, 1961).

Note: I am indebted to Graham Harman for the idea of vacuum-sealed objects existing in subterranean cellars of being beyond all relations - an idea that presents a serious challenge to the Lawrentian notion of touch as advanced in Lady Chatterley's Lover and elsewhere. 

See: Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Open Court Publishing Company, 2002).

If It Be Not True To Me ... Reflections on D. H. Lawrence's Phallic Epistemology

Portrait of D. H. Lawrence by the brilliant American 

scratchboard illustrator Bri Hermanson

bhermanson.com 

One of Lawrence's major philosophical concerns was with the question of knowledge. If he didn't produce a fully developed epistemology as such, he nevertheless mused frequently on this topic and the closely related theory of consciousness.

Indeed, he even wrote a poem in which he professed his love of thinking and set out five conditions that constitute legitimate thought:

(i) the welling up of unknown life into consciousness

(ii) the validating of statements according to conscious criteria

(iii) the observation and interpretation of natural phenomena

(iv) the careful examination of direct experience

(v) the ontological receptiveness of Dasein, or, as Lawrence puts it, man in his wholeness, wholly attending.

What thought is not, says Lawrence, is a trick or an exercise that involves playing with already existent ideas. He hates this and regards it not only as a form of mental conceit, but mechanical in operation; something which offends him as a vitalist.

Preferably, for Lawrence, thinking should take place in the body and not the mind; for whilst we can easily go wrong in the latter, what the former tells us is always true. Thus Lawrence posits some kind of instinctive and pristine form of blood-knowledge, untainted by idealism with all its abstractions and logical absurdities.

This libidinal irrationalism (and anti-rationalism) underlies Lawrence's hostility towards modern science and ultimately renders his theory of knowledge deeply suspect and philosophically untenable; unless of course one is an ardent devotee of Nietzsche, who also wrote in blood and advanced similar ideas.

Critics and commentators sympathetic to Lawrence who argue that his reputation as an enemy of intellect is an unjust (if pervasive) cliché are, alas, fooling no one; certainly not those of us who are intimately familiar with his writing. Nor does it really work to suggest that if Lawrence's theory of knowledge fails to convince, then this reveals inadequacies in our own thinking.

The fact is, Lawrence - as a novelist, as a poet, and even as an essayist - is not concerned with objective truth; he's concerned, rather, with his own feelings and experiences of the world (i.e., of the world not as it is, but as it is for him). And so he gaily dismisses evidence for evolution or the expansion of the universe, for example, simply on the basis that it doesn't accord with his own instinctive-intuitive (i.e. fanciful) understanding of life's development and cosmology.

This is summed up in the first two lines of the little song that Lawrence gives us to sing in Fantasia; a four-line ditty which he obviously finds amusing in its chirpy insouciance, but which I find anything but: If it be not true to me / What care I how true it be ...?                  

Such art-speech hardly demonstrates a powerful and lifelong commitment to furthering knowledge and exploring inhuman reality. Rather, it reveals that Lawrence is not only sceptical but indifferent about the possibility of such. What's more, he's betraying a surprisingly solipsistic side to his nature; the universe may not be mind-dependent in Lawrence's Weltanschauung, but it's permanently correlated with his precious solar plexus (the great dynamic centre of what he calls primary consciousness and which houses the wisdom of the soul).

Either that, or it's dependent in some manner upon the phallic principle that he promotes in his later work, contrasting cerebral consciousness with phallic consciousness; the former a way of knowing the world scientically in terms of apartness and the latter a way of knowing it mytho-poetically in terms of togetherness.

And this, rather strangely, is where Lawrence concludes his epistemology; with one hand pressed firmly on his abdomen and the other gripped tightly round his cock so as to know the categorical difference between a rubber-ball and a pomegranate ...                

Notes:

D. H. Lawrence, 'Thought', in The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
 
D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Readers interested in Lawrence's haemo-epistemology might also like to see the related posts Haemostasis (18 Dec 2012) and On Haematolagnia, Feelings and Freethinkers (7 Jan 2016).

 

D. H. Lawrence and the Question of Spermism

Although D. H. Lawrence wasn't a biologist in any conventional or objective sense of the term, that didn't stop him from sharing his often peculiar ideas on human reproduction and the development of the embryo. In Fantasia of the Unconscious, for example, whilst confessing his ignorance of the sex cells in terms of chemical composition and function, he's perfectly happy to describe how the parental gametes sparkle with potency and send forth dark currents of vital energy attracting one another.

But if he acknowledges the importance of the large and mysterious mother-germ, one gets the impression that it's the father-spark that really excites his interest and he is at heart something of a spermist. For it's the much smaller sperm cell, writes Lawrence, that is most vivid and even more intrinsic to procreation. So whilst we should readily admit our indebtedness to our mother and her ovum, we should not deny the father-quick of ourselves, which is maybe the most essential element.   
   
Of course, this is not to suggest that Lawrence fully subscribed to the now obsolete and ludicrous-seeming notion that the head of each sperm cell contains a tiny human being - a theory of preformationism, widely accepted in the late seventeenth century after sperm (or seminal animalcules) were first identified under the microscope c.1677.

Although never as dominant an idea as the opposing (and earlier) model of ovist preformationism, spermism nevertheless had some influential supporters, including the German philosopher Leibniz, whose writings on the subject helped shape the development of embryology long into the eighteenth century.

There were major concerns with the spermist theory, however, not the least of which was the fact that it implied a colossal waste of human life on the part of a supposedly loving God: there are around 100 million sperm in each millilitre of semen and a healthy male adult will normally ejaculate between two and five ml. Conception, of course, only requires a single sperm cell. Attempts to get around this problem - arguing, for example, that sperm cells which failed to penetrate the ovum evaporated into the air and floated around until such time they could be recycled - failed to convince most critics.             

Later spermists abandoned this idea of panspermism, and argued instead that the homunculus present in sperm, although perfectly formed physically, had no soul; this would enter either at, or soon after, conception. If this rather neatly solved the moral issue, it unfortunately invoked the competing theory of epigenesis by making both sperm and egg necessary for the development of full human life.  

Ultimately, spermism was abandoned by the scientific community, not least of all because no one ever managed to find a little person existing ready-made in a sperm cell. But it nevertheless forms an interesting and amusing episode in the history of embryology - one that writers such as Lawrence still seem to be drawn to many years after its debunking.      


See: 

Cera R. Lawrence, 'Spermism', entry in the Embryo Project Encyclopedia (Arizona State University, 2008): click here. 

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

On Embryology, Ensoulment and Stem Cell Research

By his own admission, D. H. Lawrence wasn't an objective scientist or a scholar of any kind; neither an archaeologist, nor an anthropologist. Nor was he an embryologist, but that didn't deter him from sharing his thoughts on human fertilization and the development of the embryo and fetus. 

In Fantasia of the Unconscious, for example, whilst not knowing anything about sex cells, he's happy to assert that the parental gametes continue to exist - sparkling and potent - within the zygote, forever sending forth vibrations and dark currents of vital energy. In other words, although Lawrence accepts that the sperm and ovum fuse at the moment of conception, he believes that the original parent nuclei somehow survive within the new diploid cell and function as well-heads of vivid life.

I'm not sure that's the case and, indeed, even for Lawrence this is only a preliminary rather than an intrinsic truth: this, the intrinsic truth - the truth that really matters to him, as to many religiously-minded people - is that emanating from the fusion of the father-quick and mother-germ is a new unit of unique individuality. Lawrence thus shares the papal belief that conception is the crucial  moment at which the Holy Spirit enters and a new human soul is born, nine months prior to the birth of the actual baby.

Such a mystical line of thinking wouldn't really matter or particularly concern me, if it didn't have an effect on public policy and often inhibit scientific and medical research - such as embryonic stem cell research, for example. The problem with this research, from a religious perspective, is clearly a moral one: it entails the destruction of human embryos and the souls they embody and is therefore a form of murder.

In order to demonstrate how unreasonable such a view is, we need to remind ourselves just what stem cell research actually involves and what potential benefits it offers ...

First of all, it's important to remember that the embryos used will have been cultured in vitro and are not harvested directly from a woman's body. Secondly, we should recall that they are at an incredibly early stage of development, just a few days old, and consisting of no more than around 150 cells; we're talking blastocysts not babies here.

A small group of the cells inside the microscopic blastocyst are embryonic stem cells and these have two properties that make them of such great interest to scientists: (i) they can remain in an unspecialized state for long periods of time and (ii) they are pluripotent - which means they have the potential to become any specialized cell in the human body.

Clearly such cells have much to teach us about cell division and cell differentiation, which, as Sam Harris points out, would "almost certainly shed new light on those medical conditions, like cancer and birth defects, that seem to be merely a matter of these processes gone awry". Harris also powerfully addresses the issue of embryonic termination. There is not the slightest reason to think that embryos at the 150-cell stage "have the capacity to sense pain, to suffer, or to experience the loss of life in any way at all".

On the other hand:

"What is indisputable is that there are millions of human beings who do have these capacities and who currently suffer from traumatic injuries to the brain and spinal cord. Millions more suffer from Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. Millions more suffer from stroke and heart disease, from burns, from diabetes, from rheumatoid arthritis, from Purkinje cell degeneration, from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and from vision and hearing loss. We know that embryonic stem cells promise to be a renewable source of tissues and organs that might alleviate such suffering in the not too distant future."

But, thanks to the faithful - and to writers like Lawrence who share their superstitions and seemingly endorse their pro-life views - biologists and doctors are dragged before ethics committees and forced to justify their work and explain why a fertilized egg shouldn't in fact be accorded all the rights and protections of a fully developed child.

Again, to quote from Sam Harris if I may and to conclude in full agreement with him:

"Of course, the point at which we fully acquire our humanity, and our capacity to suffer, remains an open question. But anyone who would dogmatically insist that these traits must arise coincident with the moment of conception, has nothing to contribute, apart from his ignorance, to this debate. Those opposed to therapeutic stem cell research on religious grounds constitute the biological and ethical equivalent of a flat-earth society." 

 

See: 

Sam Harris, The End of Faith, (The Free Press, 2006), pp. 166-67. 

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

D. H. Lawrence's Dendrophilia

DHL sitting under an olive tree in Italy (1926)

Lawrence is very fond of trees and there are many trees in his writings. In fact, at times, he feels there are too many trees crowding round and staring at him, interfering with his attempts to think about subjects other than trees (such as human babies and the complicated story of their unconscious life). 

The trees, he says, seem so much bigger and stronger in life than we are; so overwhelming in their silence and rather sinister arboreal presences. Lawrence writes, for example, of the magnificent cruelty or barbarous nature of the huge fir trees that grow in the Black Forest:

"It almost seems I can hear the slow, powerful sap drumming in their trunks. Great full-bodies trees, with strange tree-blood in them, soundlessly drumming."

He continues:

"Suppose you want to look a tree in the face? You can't. It hasn't got a face. You look at the strong body of a trunk; you look above you into the matted body-hair of twigs and boughs; you see the soft green tips. But there are no eyes to look into, you can't meet its gaze."

Thus it's pointless staring at a tree in an attempt to know it. All you can do is "sit among the roots and nestle against its strong trunk" in a form of insouciant tree worship and fantasise about becoming-tree, full of root-lust but completely mindless. 

If, at one time, he were frightened of the trees and felt them to be primeval enemies, now Lawrence says they are his "only shelter and strength" and that he is happy to lose himself amongst them and to be with them "in their silent, intent passion and great lust", feeding his soul with their non-human life and indomitable energy. He concludes this rather beautiful (and somewhat erotic) meditation on trees by saying:

"One of the few places that my soul will haunt, when I am dead, will be this. Among the trees here near Ebersteinburg ... I can't leave these trees. They have taken some of my soul."

But we should note, however, that Lawrence's trees - here, and most certainly in his poetry - are not simply natural phenomena; they are also ornamental figures of Gothic resistance forming part of an allegorical landscape that, as Amit Chaudhuri points out, "brings together the natural and the unnatural". 

Ultimately, Lawrence's thinking on trees (and flowers) owes more to Ruskin than to Wordsworth ...

Notes:

The quotations from Lawrence are from Chapter IV of Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). pp. 85-88.

The quote from Amit Chaudhuri is from D. H. Lawrence and 'Difference', (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 208.