D. H. Lawrence and Vaginal Ecosophy

 Manko-chan by Rokudenashiko (Megumi Igarashi) 
Click here for her official website

The physiological status of the vaginal milieu is important not only for the health and wellbeing of women, but also for those lovers who desire to enter such an environment in order to deposit their semen or simply for the pleasure of poking about.

Obviously, there are several factors that are conducive to the latter, including degrees of tightness and levels of lubrication, for example. When it comes to vaginas, one is always hoping to discover the Goldilocks zone ...  

According to D. H. Lawrence, however, speaking in the guise of an Old Testament Patriarch, the secret places of women are not to be wallowed in under any circumstance and it's never safe to penetrate the cunt unless one does so with God's blessing:

"I tell you again, whosoever goes in unto a woman, unless the Lord of Hosts goes with him, goes towards his own death."  

Thankfully, Lawrence immediately provides an oppositional voice to such misogynistic stupidity; someone who speaks up for love between men and women and who playfully points out that even if sex results in la petite mort, so too does every erection signify a kind of miracle and a triumph over death.   

Another dissenter goes further, and speaks powerfully in defence of the sons and daughters of men who act in the world and remain true to the earth - unlike those who claim to be the Sons of God and are desirous only of a spiritual afterlife:

"Sons of God, you look into the heavens. Sons of men, daughters of men, we sweep the bread beneath the fern-leaves, we put seed in the heavy earth. We watch the flocks, we take milk in gourds, we make cheese in the butter-skins. We weave white wool and dip it in colour. We build houses of wood, we press the glass of earth into knives. All these things we do, with wit and nimble fingers. We labour, and then we sing, we dance, we have pleasure among the limbs of women. All this is ours. - Sons of God, you toil not, neither will you dance. You dwell apart, and your silence is like a cloud. You speak to command  and to chide. Your hearts are dark to the children of men."

This Nietzschean-sounding passage is one we should recite before all those idealists who hate the flesh and subscribe to superterrestrial (and transhuman) fantasies.  
 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Noah's Flood, in The Plays, ed. Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1999), lines quoted are on pp. 565 and 566. 

Readers interested in a related post that discusses Lawrence's play should click here.

Megumi Igarashi, aka Rokudenashiko, is a Japanese sculptor and artist notorious for her work featuring female genitalia. See her memoir, What is Obscenity? The Story of a Good For Nothing Artist and Her Pussy, trans. A. Ishii, (Koyama Press, 2016).  

Probably I Should Want to Be Noah (Notes on an Unfinished Play by D. H. Lawrence)

It often seems such a pity that Noah and his party 

didn't miss the boat - Mark Twain

I.

I'm often obliged to make clear that the phrase torpedo the ark does not mean exterminate all life; it means, rather, destroy the attempt to coordinate life and consolidate a totalitarian system of theo-anthropic control over all other species.

If, in the attempt to resist this biblical process of Gleichschaltung the patriarch Noah and his family become collateral damage, well, that's too bad. He may, according to those who revere him, have been the first person to cultivate a vineyard and produce wine, but even as a child I disliked hearing about Noah and his ark (though to be fair, I was bored by all such Sunday School narratives).

And besides, here was a man who didn't stop to consider his fellow human beings or even pray for his neighbours when told of God's plan to undo Creation and flood the earth; he simply got on with the job of ensuring his own survival.          


II.

In an unfinished play which he probably began writing in mid-March 1925, D. H. Lawrence attempts to reconcile the Atlantis myth and the Old Testament story of Noah. [1] He reveals the central storyline in a letter to his friend Ida Rauh, the American actress and feminist who had helped found the Provincetown Players:

"I've got a very attractive scheme worked out for a play: Noah, and his three sons, his wife and sons' wives, in the decadent world: then he begins to build the ark: and the drama of the sons, Shem, Ham, Japhet - in my idea they still belong to the old demi-god order - and their wives - faced with the world and the end of the world: and the jeering-jazzing sort of people of the world, and the sort of democracy of decadence in it: the contrast of the demi-gods adhering to a greater order: and the wives wavering between the two: and the ark gradually rising among the jeering." [2] 

One can't help wondering what a thoroughly modern woman like Ida Rauh would have made of this ...? For my part, I don't find the idea very attractive at all and have grave concerns about any critique of the contemporary world that is articulated in terms of decadence and demi-gods.

Unsurprisingly, Lawrence lifted some of the material for Noah's Flood straight out of The Plumed Serpent, his disturbing theo-political novel which he had just finished writing in its final form about a month before sending the above letter. It might be noted, however, that the figure of Noah had long held special significance within Lawrence's apocalyptic imagination, as the title of his fourth novel clearly indicates.

In a letter to Ottoline Morrell, written in May 1915, Lawrence says: "It would be nice if the Lord sent another Flood and drowned the world. Probably I should want to be Noah. I am not sure." [3]

It's this humourous tone and uncertainty of his own position - is he one of the sons of God, or merely one of the sons of men - which is sadly lacking in his antediluvian play fragment and The Plumed Serpent. Everything becomes so overly earnest, as Lawrence develops his fantasy of a dark-eyed, hot-blooded, prehistoric race of men and a theocratic world order different in every respect to modern pale-faced humanity and democratic society. 

Happily, however, after one attempt at revision, Lawrence abandoned Noah's Flood and moved away from the rather absurd (and sinister) theo-political themes of The Plumed Serpent, perhaps realising that what the world of theatre was calling out for in the mid-late 1920s was not a tub-thumping religious work (the critical reception of his other biblical play, David, which was staged in London in May 1927, undoubtedly helped him reach this conclusion, even though he blamed the cast for the poor reviews and described those who found the play dull as eunuchs).

Notes

[1] In this, Lawrence was of course influenced by Madame Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine (1888).

[2] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), letter number 3362, (3 March, 1925), pp. 217-18.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), letter number 920, (14 May, 1915), pp. 338-40.

See: D. H. Lawrence, The Plays, ed. Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Appendix IV, Noah's Flood, pp. 557-567. 

Readers interested in another Bible study concerning Noah, should click here. 

And for a sister post to this one, click here.