Stephen Alexander
Window onto the Greater Day (2017)
Window onto the Greater Day (2017)
"'Beauteous is the day of the yellow sun which is the common day of men; but even as the winds roll unceasing above the trees of the world, so doth that Greater Day, which is the Uncommon Day, roll over the unclipt bushes of our little daytime. Even also as the morning sun shakes his yellow wings on the horizon and rises up, so the great bird beyond him spreads out his dark blue feathers, and beats his wings in the tremor of the Greater Day.'"
- D H Lawrence, The Flying Fish (1925)
I've always rather liked this poetic passage in which Lawrence suggests that the day-to-day world of man is not the only reality; that we might, in times of great crises and crack-up, glimpse something of the deeper blue that belongs to the Greater Day, wherein shines that other (darker) sun. It's liberating to think that there is something external to our own small and tight and over-furnished universe; something unconquerable and unknowable in its sheer immensity; the world in which flowers bloom and objects sparkle.
And it's strangely comforting to imagine like Lawrence a new type of humanity living in this fourth dimensional world without walls; that those who belong to the Lesser Day and cannot or will not leave their homes behind, will "'shudder and die out, like clouds of grasshoppers'". For the Greater Day belongs to those men and women who, like flying fish, are able to move between worlds on translucent wings, invisibly rejoicing as they do so.
The poorly protagonist of this unfinished tale gains his clearest insight into how astonishing life can be in the Greater Day, when witnessing a school of porpoises swimming alongside the ship on which he's sailing. Lawrence describes the scene in very beautiful detail as a "spectacle of the purest and most perfected joy in life". Although travelling at high speed, the marine mammals do so with carefree composure and serenity.
And that's the crucial thing; for you can't access the blue splendour of the Greater Day by an act of restless, noisy self-assertion. Rather, it requires qualities that many modern people no longer value: silence, stillness, and attentiveness ... One must, as it were, learn to enjoy watching paint dry and listening to the grass grow.
See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Flying Fish', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
