You'll Never Turn the Vinegar Into Jam: On the Figure of the Tiger in the Philosophy of D. H. Lawrence

Most of their time, tigers pad and slouch in burning peace.

Yet they also drink blood. [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Although I wouldn't name it as one of Lawrence's totemic animals, nevertheless the tiger often appears within his work and held an important place in his philosophical imagination as one of the great realities of reality; i.e., a living thing that has come into its own fullness of being: 

 

"The tiger blazed transcendent into immortal darkness." [2]

 

"The tiger is the supreme manifestation of the senses made absolute." [3]

 

For Lawrence, in other words, the tiger is physical perfection and counters the bodiless idealism of those who, like Shelley, sought pure spiritual consummation: 

 

"The tiger was a terrible problem to Shelley, who wanted life in terms of the lamb." [4]  

 

 

II. 

 

In the the first essay of the Genealogy, Niezsche argues that it's perfectly natural for lambs to hate and fear tigers, wolves, and eagles. But mistaken to believe that they are morally superior to those animals that prey on them; the latter are not evil and act out of instinctive necessity, not cruelty.    

 

To expect fierce and powerful carnivores to lie down with meek and mild herbivores is as absurd as thinking you can turn the vinegar into jam; "a tiger is a tiger not a lamb, mein herr" [5] and cannot behave otherwise (and nor can the lamb - a creature which acts from weakness, not goodness).   

 

What's more, Lawrence argues that just as the tiger requires the lamb for sustenance, the lamb needs the tiger; for only the juxtaposition of the tiger "keeps the lamb a quivering, vivid, beautiful fleet thing"  [6]. 

 

Take away or exterminate the tiger, and all you're left with is a flock of letzte Schafe; happy, but little more than woolly clods of meat. Fear and suffering are vital principles; they help concentrate the soul, in man as well as lamb. 

 

Thank God, says Lawrence, for the tigers who liberate us from the "abominable tyranny of these greedy, negative sheep" [7]. And not only does he affirm the spirit of the tiger, he dreams of becoming-tiger and of making the tiger's way his own:

 

"Like the tiger in the night, I devour all flesh, I drink all blood, until [...] in the sensual ecstasy, having drunk all blood and devoured all flesh, I am become again the eternal Fire ..." [8]   

 

 

III.

 

Lawrence being Lawrence, however, he soon starts to oscillate from one pole of delirium to another and concede that the tiger's way - the way of the flesh and becoming "transfigured into magnificent brindled flame" [9] - is not the only form of ecstasy. 

 

Man can also become-deer, become-lamb, or, indeed, become-Christian, and move beyond the tiger, finding consummation not in the devouring of those who are weaker, or even in the negative ecstasy of offering non-resistance and being eaten oneself, but in acknowledging otherness:

 

"The Word of the tiger is: my senses are supremely Me, and my senses are God in me. But Christ said: God is in the others, who are not-me. In all the multitude of others is God, and this is the great God, greater than the God which is Me. God is that which is not-me. 

      And this is the Christian truth, a truth complementary to the pagan affirmation: 'God is that which is Me.'

      God is that which is Not-Me. In realising the Not-Me I am consummated, I become infinite. In turning the other cheek I submit to God who is greater than I am, other than I am, who is in that which is not me. This is the supreme consummation. To achieve this consummation I love my neighbour as myself." [10]

 

But then, having said that, Lawrence warns of the danger of pushing this ideal too far; of becoming too selfless whilst, somewhat paradoxically, identifying oneself with all that is other, like Walt Whitman, who aches with amorous love and insists with false exuberance on grasping everyone and everthing to his bosom, believing as he does in One Identity as the great desideratum [11]. 

 

For this path ends in nihilism and the triumph of the Machine and it's a "horrible thing to see tigers caught up and entangled in machinery [...] a chaos beyond chaos, an unthinkable hell" [12].   

  

IV. 

 

Ultimately, Lawrence's sharp-clawed feline philosophy can probably be best construed as tragic in the Nietzschean sense; one which understands according to the desire of death as well as according to the desire of life and is true for all things that emerge from the matrix of chaos, including "the tiger and the fragile dappled doe" [13].  

 

The former is a blossom of pure significance, born of the sun. But the tiger, like the leopard, needs to quench herself with the blood (or soft fire) of Bambi, so that she too might know tenderness when nursing her young and dreaming her dreams in stillness:

 

"For even the mother-tiger is quenched with insuperable tenderness when the milk is in her udder; she lies still, and her dreams are frail like fawns." [14]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] A misremembered couple of lines from 'Glory', by D. H. Lawrence; The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University press, 2013), p. 430.   

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 270. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Lemon Gardens', Twilight in Italy, in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert, (Cambridge Univrrsity Press, 1994), p. 117. 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fenimore Cooper's Anglo-American Novels', in Studies in Classic American Literature (First Version: 1918-19), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen , (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 214.

 

[5] I'm quoting here from the brilliant Kander and Ebb song 'Mein Herr', from the musical Cabaret (1966). 

      To expect a tiger or leopard or lion to lie down with its prey is, says Lawrence, as vain as hoping "for the earth to cast no shadow, or for burning fire to give no heat". See 'The Reality of Peace', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays ... p. 49. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'Fenimore Cooper's Anglo-American Novels', in Studies in Classic American Literature ... p. 214. 

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays ... p. 42.

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Lemon Gardens', Twilight in Italy, in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays ... p. 117.

 

[9] Ibid.

 

[10] Ibid., pp. 119-120. 

 

[11] I have discussed Walt Whitman and his fatal idealism elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark: click here.

 

[12] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Lemon Gardens', Twilight in Italy, in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays ... p. 121.

 

[13] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays ... p. 38. 

 

[14] Ibid., p. 48. 

 

 

For a related post which anticipates this one and in which I evoke the spirit of the Champawat Tiger, click here.  

 

 

Post 1500: Reflections on the Extinct British Wolf and the Triumph of the Sheep

Illustration of a wolf in George Shaw's  
Musei Leveriani (1729)

I.

This is post 1500: a number which means nothing to me, but which many 16th-century Christians thought significant; having failed to kick off at the millennium, they figured that the end of the world might commence half-time after the time (an obscure phrase found in the Book of Revelation).

Sadly for them - but happily for the rest of us - 1500 merely marked (somewhat arbitrarily) the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Early Modern Era (though don't suggest this to Bruno (nous n'avons jamais été modernes) Latour, or he'll kick off).  

I'm not, however, going to write here of apocalyptic Christian eschatology; nor do I intend to discuss the concept of modernity. Rather, I would like to say something about the extinction of a magnificent mammal species from these islands: for 1500 is also thought to be the year in which the last wolf in England was killed ...[1]


II.

Not only were wolves once present throughout the British Isles, they were present in large numbers. And, unlike other British animals, skeletal remains suggest they were not subject to insular dwarfism (i.e., the phenomenon whereby large animals evolve a smaller body size when their range is limited due to living in restricted circumstances, such as on an island for example).

Despite being large in number and big in size, wolves were exterminated from Britain thanks to a combination of deforestation and ruthless, unrestricted hunting and trapping (for skins and for the sadistic pleasure human beings take in killing animals, including defenceless cubs). 

King Edward I (1272-1307) was not only the Hammer of the Scots, he was also the monarch who ordered the total extermination of the wolf and personally employed a wolf-hunter with instructions to begin by killing them in the counties close to the Welsh border where they were particularly numerous thanks to the density of forest [2]. 

Later kings were just as merciless when it came to the wolf question and one wonders at the reason for this lycophobia ...

That is to say, why were wolves - more than any other wild beast - so widely feared and hated (not just in Britain, but across Europe). It can't just have an economic cause, although it's true that wolves kill livestock and compete with humans for game; there's surely something else going on here to explain this murderous animosity.

Maybe, as highly intelligent and social animals who live in extended family groups, they are rather too much like us - only stronger, faster, and with bigger teeth. Maybe, as we became ever-more civilised and ovine, bleating about our righteousness and exceptionalism, we grew to resent their wild nature. Maybe we secretly desire to be a bit more ferocious - thus the centrality of the werewolf myth in European folklore. Who knows? 

III.

As readers of Pagan Magazine will recall, I've always loved wolves [3], and so naturally support their proposed reintroduction into parts of the UK.

In fact, I think we should bring back the lynx too - and maybe even release a family of brown bears into the mix; the more large carnivores prowling around the better in my view, and not simply to help control the ever-expanding numbers of deer and wild boar.

For mostly I want wolves back in the hope that they might devour a few fat sheep who understand nothing of life or death, but exist in swollen nullity. To paraphrase D. H. Lawrence, it's not the howl of the wolf that we have to fear today, but the masses of rank sheep and what he terms the egoism of the flock [4] ...


Notes

[1] Reports of wolves sighted in more rural areas of England continued until the 18th-century and they certainly hung on for an extended period in the Scottish Highlands (officially, the last wolf was shot in Perthshire, in 1680).   

[2] For those, like me, whose geography isn't great, that's the counties of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire, and Staffordshire.

[3] See issue XI: 'Ragnarok: Twilight of the Gods and the Coming of the Wolf', (1986).

[4] See D. H. Lawrence. 'The Reality of Peace', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 25-52. The lines I paraphrase and refer to here are on p. 43.

Ovinophobia: Reflections on D. H. Lawrence's Fear of Sheep

Curious Flock of Sheep

art.co.uk 

One of the more amusing things about the man who loved islands is the intensity with which he hates the half-a-dozen sheep who share his tiny third island:

"What he disliked most was when one of the lumps of sheep opened its mouth and baa-ed its hoarse, raucous baa. He watched it, and it looked to him hideous and gross. He came to dislike the sheep very much. [...] They were accustomed to him now, and stood and stared at him with yellow or colourless eyes, in an insolence that was almost cold ridicule. There was a suggestion of cold indecency about them. He disliked them very much. And when they jumped with staccato jumps off the rocks, and their hoofs made the dry, sharp hit, and the fleece flopped on their square backs, he found them repulsive, degrading."

And so the man who loved islands decides they have to go. But the "hustle and horror of getting the sheep caught and tied [...] made him loathe with profound repulsion the whole of animal creation." Even several days after the flock were disposed of, he was still nerve-wracked and would sometimes start with repulsion, "thinking he heard the munching of sheep". What evil deity, he wondered, created these foul-smelling, woolly beasts; "an uncleanness on the fresh earth".   

Now, of course, it's true that the man who loved islands is a character in a story and not to be confused with either the narrator or the author - whom, for convenience's sake, let us agree is D. H. Lawrence. Just because Cathcart suffers from ovinophobia, it doesn't mean that Our Bert was himself full of fear and loathing for sheep. However, even a cursory examination of Lawrence's non-fiction reveals that he did, in fact, have an extremely negative view of them.

In his 1917 essay 'The Reality of Peace', for example, Lawrence argues that sheep are a form of life that knows nothing of transcendent being. They are born, they live, and they grow fat like large green cabbages, but they never blossom. Their only reason for being is to provide food for more vital organisms - and thank God, writes Lawrence, "for the tigers and the butchers that will free us from the abominable tyranny of these greedy, negative sheep".

Ultimately, he says, it's not the great beasts of prey we have to fear, but "the masses of rank sheep" and other herd animals that are nibbling the earth into desert. Obviously, Lawrence is writing metaphorically here - it's actually sheep-like modern humanity he's attacking - but I'm not sure this really matters; the fact remains that it's the hideous myrmidons of sheep to which he compares mankind in all its obscene nullity. 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Man Who Loved Islands', The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 168, 169.

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 42, 43. 

Arguably, Lawrence is at his most Nietzschean in this essay and the fact that Christians are collectively referred to as a flock - and Jesus often described as the Lamb of God - is undoubtedly a factor in his ovinophobia.    

Musical bonus: The Clash, 'Shepherd's Delight', from the album Sandinista! (CBS, 1980): click here.