Winter Solstice with D. H. Lawrence

Winter Solstice by the Sea (SA/2023)

 

"Now in December nearer comes the sun

down the abandoned heaven ..."

 

I. 

 

I am always happy when the shortest day and longest night of the year have come and gone.  

 

Several cold months may still lie ahead, but it triggers a genuine transformation of mood to know that the sun has reached its lowest point in the sky and, having stood still for the briefest of moments, thereafter begins its slow ascent; that, no matter what happens, it can't get any darker. 

 

I know the birth of baby Jesus around this time of year excites the imagination of many, but it means nothing compared to the symbolic rebirth of the invincible sun and I understand why the winter solstice has been marked by ritual celebrations within many cultures for millennnia. 

 

The prehistoric pagans who erected Stonehenge - and even the modern day Druids who still meet there now - aren't idiots and Yule means more to me than the Nativity.     

 

 

II. 

 

As one might guess, D. H. Lawrence was another fan of the winter solstice, as he was of all events on the solar calendar that chart the movements of the sun and the wheeling of the year. In a poem written in November 1928, he speaks of how "As the dark closes round him" the sun "draws nearer as if for our company".

 

Interestingly, Lawrence also claims that there exists a tiny sun within him - situated at "the base of the lower brain" - that communes with the great star above, exchanging "a few gold rays" [1]. 

 

III.

 

It would appear, reading this verse, that for Lawrence - as for many others who share his predilection for philosophical vitalism - the sun is more than a material object that can be adequately described and understood by physicists and astronomers. 

 

And if, primarily, Lawrence is concerned with the relationships between men and women, he nevertheless insists on the crucial importance of the relation between humanity and the sun. Perhaps the term that best describes this relation is correlation. For there is clearly a notion of mutual interdependence between the sun and humankind in Lawrence's work; i.e., we can't think one without thinking the other. 

 

And yet, correlation doesn't sound a very Lawrentian term and I think he would be happier speaking about correspondence. For correspondence implies a far closer level of intimate proximity between terms; they become not merely interdependent, but analogous at a certain level:

 

"There certainly does exist a subtle and complex sympathy, correspondence, between the plasm of the human body, which is identical with the primary human psyche, and the material elements outside. The primary human psyche is a complex plasm, which quivers, sense-conscious, in contact with the circumambient cosmos." [2] 

 

What Lawrence really wishes to do is reverse the idea that life evolves from matter and argue instead that the material universe results from the breakdown of primary organic tissue. Unfortunately, as much as I love Lawrence's work, I cannot share his anti-scientific thinking. Thus, I don't believe, for example, that: "If it be the supreme will of the living that the sun should stand still in heaven, then the sun will stand still." [3] 

 

This is simply an occult conceit; the frankly preposterous fantasy that there can be a magical suspension of the laws of physics at the behest of human will power. It's one thing wishing to project oneself into the "the great sky with its meaningful stars and its profoundly meaningful motions" [4] in order to release the poetic imagination, but it's something else believing the astrological heavens revolve around the figure of Man.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, 'November by the sea', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 394-95. This poem can be found also in the LiederNet Archive: click here.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Two Principles', (First Version, 1918-19), Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 260.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance' (1920-1), Appendix IV: Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 395. 

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to The Dragon of the Apocalypse, by Frederick Carter', in Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 46. 

 

 

Some of the material in section III of this post is revised from the essay 'Sun-Struck: On the Question of Solar Sexuality and Speculative Realism in D. H. Lawrence', which can be found on James Walker's Digital Pilgrimage website: click here. 

 

Jagger is a Punk (2)

Mick Jagger punking it up whilst performing on set during the making 

of the video for 'Respectable' (dir. Michael Lindsay-Hogg, 1978) 

 

 

Some readers may recall the post dated 2 Sept 2018 in which I argued that, at heart, Mick Jagger is clearly a bit of a punk rocker: click here.

 

Mostly I based this on the fact that the Stones' 1966 single 'Paint It Black' [1] is one of the great nihilistic pop anthems and that whilst on tour of the US in the summer of 1978 Jagger (somewhat ironically and provocatively) wore a Seditionaries Destroy shirt on stage.

 

Anyway, I'm pleased to say that I'm confirmed in my view thanks to a recent interview with Keith Richards, in which he describes his bandmate of sixty-odd years as a punk (and occasionally an asshole). 

 

Speaking to a journalist from The Sun, Richards says (somewhat disapprovingly): "The punk side of Jagger has always been there and we'll never get rid of it." [2] 

 

It's there, for sure, in 'Paint It Black', and it's also there, for example, in the 1978 single 'Respectable' [3] and in the expletive-laden new track 'Bite My Head Off' [4].   

Whilst it still slightly pains me to admit it, I think Joe Taysom is right to say of the Rolling Stones that "few bands have embodied the spirit of punk more" [5] and that Jagger is, at eighty, a far better - certainly far fitter - frontman than sixty-seven year old Johnny Rotten. 

 

Indeed, it might even be the case that the former has always been the more interesting figure ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I have written about this song in a post published on 29 Oct 2017: click here.

 

[2] Keith Richards speaking to Simon Cosyns in an interview in The Sun (13 Oct 2023): click here.  

[3] 'Respectable', by the Rolling Stones, is a single release from the album Some Girls (Rolling Stones Records, 1978): click here.

      Jagger would later admit that the fast and aggressive nature of the track was due to the influence of punk on the band at that time, describing the loud three-chord rock song as punk meets Chuck Berry. See note [5] below for more about the influence of punk on the Rolling Stones. 

 

[4] 'Bite My Head Off', by the Rolling Stones (feat. Paul McCartney), is a track on the album Hackney Diamonds (Polydor, 2023): click here.

      Jagger explained of the song: "'I was kind of surprised Paul wanted to play on that track, actually. I wrote so many punk songs for the Stones, and I could never get away with them, but Paul is a very open-minded person - musically speaking.'" Quoted by Joe Taysom; see note [5] below.

 

[5] Joe Taysom, 'The Rolling Stones song Mick Jagger called "punk"', Far Out Magazine, (28 October 2023): click here. In this interesting article, Taysom goes on to write: 

 

"When the punk phenomena took off in the late 1970s, Jagger was intrigued by the prospect, even if The Rolling Stones weren't involved in the scene. While the group have never made a fully-throttle punk record, they did introduce elements of the genre into their sound on the 1978 album Some Girls. Jagger told Rolling Stone that the album's main inspiration was New York City, which injected the LP with 'an extra spur and hardness'. [...] However, despite Some Girls taking influence from New York, Jagger preferred the British version of punk to the American incarnation."

On the Sex Life of Robinson Crusoe 3: Becoming the Perverted Sun Angel

Edvard Munch: The Sun (1910-11)
Photo © Munchmuseet

 

O Sun, deliver me from the pull of gravity! 

Is my transformation not sufficiently in the manner of your own radiance?

 

 

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Everything starts and finishes with the sun [a]. 

 

No surprises then that Michel Tournier's Robinson Crusoe [b] should eventually abandon all terrestrial forms of love, weighed down as they ultimately are by the spirit of gravity, and seek to discover the solar sexuality that lies beyond; learning to walk, as Lawrence would say, in his own sun-glory with bright legs and uncringing buttocks [c].     

 

In a sense, Crusoe effects a becoming-minoritarian [d]. Dissatisfed with his own sombre and melancholy white face, he prays to his new god:

 

"O Sun, cause me to resemble Friday. Give me Friday's smiling countenance, his face shaped for laughter. [...] The eyes in which there is always a hint of derision, a touch of mockery [...] The curved, avid, animal mouth with its uptilted corners." [202-03]

 

At other times, he observes his negro companion with crazed intensity, marvelling at his physical presence and otherness:

 

"I watch Friday as he walks toward me with his untroubled, steady pace over the shining sand of the lagoon [...] 

      Shall I ever learn to walk like him with his natural majesty? Do I sound absurd if I say that he seems clothed by his nakedness? He carries his body like a sovereign affirmation, he bears himself like a monstrance of flesh. His animal beauty proclaims itself, seeming to create a nothingness around it." [205-06]      

 

Friday has grace, as well as rippling muscles and strong knees. He is one of those solar aristocrats that Lawrence dreams of, drawing his nobility and his strength directly from the sun. Watching Friday emerge one day from the ocean, Crusoe admires the "gleam of  wet, firm flesh" [210] which brings to mind thoughts of Venus rising from the waves. He is quick to note in his Journal, however, "that at no time has Friday inspired me with sodomite desire" [211].

I don't know if that's true. But Crusoe makes an interesting case to support his denial of homosexual feelings:

"For one thing, he came too late, when my sexuality had already become elemental and was directed toward Speranza. But above all, Venus, or Aphrodite, did not emerge from the waves and tread my shores in order to seduce me, but to drive me into the realm of her father, Uranus, the 'sky crowned with stars' [...] It was not a matter of turning me back to human loves but, while leaving me still an elemental, of causing me to change my element. This has now happened. My love affair with Speranza was still largely human in its nature; I fecundated her soil as though I were lying with a wife. It was Friday who brought about the deeper change. The harsh stab of desire that pierces the loins of the lover has been transformed for me into a soft jubilation which exalts and pervades me from head to foot, so long as the sun-god bathes me in his rays. There is no longer that loss of substance which leaves the animal, post coitum, sad. My sky-love floods me with vital energy which endows me with strength during an entire day and night. If this is to be translated into human language, I must consider myself feminine and the bride of the sky. But that kind of anthropomorphism is meaningless. The truth is that at the height to which Friday and I have soared, difference of sex is left behind. Friday may be identified with Venus, just as I may be said, in human terms, to open my body to the embrace of the sun." [211-12]

 

Whatever you may think of this passage, dear reader, I think you'll admit it's an interesting one - not least of all because it offers us a model of sex that is solar in origin and "so much more than phallic, and so much deeper than functional desire" [e]. It's a model that feminises Crusoe and gives him a tantric experience of sex involving semen retention and non-localised orgasm, allowing solar-sexual energy to radiate throughout his entire body.   

 

I think it's Deleuze who best understands what it is Tournier is attempting to do in his novel and where Crusoe's process of dehumanization leads; namely, "the discovery of a cosmic energy or of a great elemental Health" [f]. 

 

Anyway, shortly after this, a ship arrives at the island of Speranza and, after twenty-eight years, it seems that Crusoe might finally be rescued ... But, of course, having become a sun-man or solar-aristocrat, there's no going back and he finds the company of the ship's captain and crew nauseating:

 

"What principally repelled him was not so much the coarse brutality, the greed and animosity that emerged so clearly [...] It was easy to imagine encountering men of a different stamp, mild-mannered, benevolent, and generous. For Robinson the evil went deeper, and he defined it to himself as the incurable pettiness of the ends to which all men feverishly devoted their lives." [224]  

 

These men had no conception of or reationship with the sun; for them, it was just a bright light in the sky or a big ball of flame. How could they know of the sun "as possessing a spirit that could irridiate with eternity those who had learned to open their hearts to it?" [224] 

 

One might paraphrase Lawrence at this point: 

 

"With [his] knowledge of the sun, and [his] conviction that the sun was gradually penetrating [him] to know [him], in the cosmic carnal sense of the word, came over [him] a feeling of detachment from people, and a certain contemptuous tolerance for human beings altogether. They were so un-elemental, so un-sunned. They were so like graveyard worms." [g]

 

That's almost exactly how Crusoe felt. So no surprise then that he chooses to stay on his island (although Friday, moving in the opposite direction, decides to leave aboard the ship):

"The truth was that he was younger today than the pious and self-seeking young man who had set sail in the Virginia, not young with a biological youth, corruptible and harbouring the seeds of its decrepitude, but with a mineral youth, solar and divine. Every day was for him a first beginning [...] Beneath the rays of the sun-god, Speranza trembled in an eternal present, without past or future. |He could not forsake that eternal instant, poised at the needle point of ecstasy, to sink back into a world of usury, dust, and decay." [226]

 

And so Crusoe returns to Speranza and enjoys a new sunrise:

 

"Drawn up to his full height, he was confronting the solar ecstasy with a joy that was almost painful, while the bright splendour in which he bathed washed him clean of the grime of the past day and nigt. A blade of fire seemed to penetrate his flesh, causing his whole being to tremble. Speranza was shedding her veil of mist, to emerge unsullied and intact. Indeed, it was as though the agony and the nightmare had never taken place. Eternity, reasserting its hold on him, had effaced that ugly but trivial interlude. He drew a deep breath, filled with a sense of utter contentment, and his chest swelled like a breastplate of brass." [234]   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] I think I first said this in a Treadwell's paper entitled 'Sun-Fucked: On the Question of Solar Sexuality and Speculative Realism in D. H. Lawrence' (2012). An extract from this essay can be found in a post on Torpedo the Ark: click here. Or you can find a revised and edited version of the text published in full on James Walker's Digital Pilgrimage by clicking here. This being the case, I'll not attempt to summarise the essay or incorporate ideas from it here, though it should be noted that I express a much less golden-rosy view of solar sexuality than either Tournier or Lawrence.   

 

[b] Michel Tournier, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Éditions Gallimard,1967). The text I'm using here is the English translation, simply entitled Friday, trans. Norman Denny, (John Hopkins University Press, 1997). All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition.

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, 'Sun-men', in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 456. This is one of a series of related poems; see also 'Sun-women', 'Democracy, 'Aristocracy of the sun', 'Conscience', and Immorality', ibid., pp. 456-58.    

[d] Becoming-minoritarian is a philosophical concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari. In a molecular nutshell, it's an attempt to abandon molar configurations of identity (i.e., escape the face) and resist the predominant norms enforced by a majoritarian state machine. It can involve a becoming-woman, becoming-animal, or, indeed, as in this case, a becoming-negro. Each of these affective becomings involves deterritorialization and a constant process of change; they do not involve pretence, posing, or imitation. It's important to understand that Crusoe is not simply an 18th-century wigger attempting to emulate Friday and steal his style. Nor is he erotically fetishising Friday's blackness - although, at times, it might seem that way - and has no desire to either fuck or be fucked by the latter.

 

[e] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Novel', Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 189.  

 

[f] Gilles Deleuze, 'Michel Tournier and the World Without Others', in The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, (The Athlone Press, 1990), Appendix II, section 4, p. 303.  

      This notion of die große Gesundheit is, of course, taken from Nietzsche, who writes of "a new health, stronger, more seasoned, tougher, more audacious, and gayer than any previous health". See The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), Section 382.  

[g] D. H. Lawrence, 'Sun', in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 23-24.     

 

To read part one of this post - on Crusoe's dendrophilia - click here. 

 

To read part two of this post - on Crusoe's ecosexuality - click here. 

 

 

Good Husbands Make Unhappy Wives

According to a report in The Sun, a woman is seeking a divorce from her husband because he smothers her with affection and showers her with gifts. He also refuses to argue, takes care of the housework, and generally makes her life unbearable with his loving behaviour.

When she complained about his weight, he even put himself on a strict diet and exercise regime - what a monster! And I say that not in a joking manner, but in all seriousness; he is a monster of kindness, perhaps, but a monster all the same and I can understand the woman's frustration and her longing for conflict in order to keep the relationship spicy. 

D. H. Lawrence often writes about this in his work; about the boredom experienced by modern women married to husbands who are perfectly polite and decent at all times, but who grind on the nerves.

In one short verse (or pansy), he writes:   

Good husbands make unhappy wives

so do bad husbands, just as often;

but the unhappiness of a wife with a good husband

is much more devastating

than the unhappiness of a wife with a bad husband.

I don't know if that's true, but, if so, then we can rule out good husbands as the answer to Freud's famously exasperated question: What do women want? 

See: 

Alahna Kindred, 'Smothered with Affection', The Sun, (24 August 2019): click here.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Good husbands make unhappy wives', The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 395.  

Some Dark Solar Reflections on a Grey Morning in September

UV image of the sun taken by NASA

Everything starts with the sun. And everything will end with the sun. The sun is our alpha and omega. And God, we might say, is nothing other than a typical main sequence yellow dwarf star, approximately 93,000,000 miles away, composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Essentially a thermonuclear machine, the sun generates vast quantities of electromagnetic energy which is discharged into space without aim or design, providing the earth with all the light and heat needed to create and sustain that "feverish obscenity we call ‘life’".

Above all, the sun is big. In fact, the sun accounts for 99.8% of all mass in the solar system and, were it hollow, you could easily fit over a million earth-sized planets inside it. It’s the ultimate object and yet, ironically we can’t look at it without going blind or mad, or both. It’s like a woman’s cleavage: one peek and look away – that’s the rule; no staring. It’s different for flowers: they open to face the sun. But we must avert our eyes, for we are not flowers.

The sun is also pretty bright as stars go and has been shining brilliantly for around 4.6 billion years. And as it gets older, it gets hotter. In a billion years from now, it’ll be so bright and so hot that there’ll be no water left on the surface of the earth and life as we know it will be compromised. Eventually, the sun will enter its red giant phase and the earth will be engulfed entirely. It will then shrink back down in size to live out its days as a white dwarf. At such a time, as Nietzsche says, the clever animals who invented knowledge will be no more.

D.H. Lawrence, whose cosmology is idiosyncratic to say the least, is right in at least one respect; the sun is not simply a ball of blazing gas with a few spots. For it also has a dark and complex internal structure. And the visible surface, known as the photosphere, is by no means where the real action is taking place. It’s at the core where things really heat up and molecules of hydrogen are fused into helium at a rate of 620 million tons per second.

If you like, it is this invisible sun, this dark sun, that philosophically most interests. We are bored of Plato’s Ideal sun that serves only to empower and enlighten mankind; “a sun which is the very essence of purity, the metaphor of beauty, truth and goodness”. It’s the black sun of Lawrence, or the rotten sun of Bataille that induces solar delirium and acts of sacrificial madness, that most interests and disconcerts:

"From this second sun – the sun of malediction – we receive not illumination but disease ... The sensations we drink from the black sun afflict us as ruinous passion, skewering our senses upon the drive to waste ourselves."

- Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992).

This is the sun the Aztecs knew. And we might ask of Lawrence’s sun-women what they might demand in the end of those men who dared to love them: semen or blood? Would they bring forth children from their sun-opened wombs, or obsidian knives? For in belonging to the sun, they ultimately belong to death.