On Lawrence the Lemon Lover

 Citrus Fresh DHL ... l'amante del limone 

  

D. H. Lawrence was someone who appreciated the beauty of the lemon - particularly the lemons that grow in Italy - more than most ... 

 

In Sea and Sardinia, for example, he writes of the lemons hanging "pale and innumerable in the thick lemon groves", where the trees press close together, because, "Lemon trees, like Italians, seem to be happiest when they are touching one another" [1]. 

 

He also notices the heaps of pale yellow lemons lying on the ground: 

 

"Curious how like fires the heaps of lemons look, under the shadow of the foliage, seeming to give off a palid burning amid the suave, naked, greenish trunks. When there comes a cluster of orange trees, the oranges are like red coals among the darker leaves. But lemons [... are] speckled like innumerable tiny stars in the green firmament of leaves." [2] 

 

Whilst in a section of Twilight in Italy, Lawrence writes of tall lemon trees "heavy with half-visible fruit" that look like "ghosts in the darkness of the underworld" [3] and whose flowers give off a subtle and exquisite scent. 

 

They trigger thoughts in him of "the ancient world still covered in sunshine [...] where there is peace and beauty" [4] and none of the black dissonance that belongs to the modern industrial world. 

 

Reading this, one wishes one could either sip un poco di chiar' di luna, con canella e limone [5] or even, indeed, rub a little olive oil on one's naked skin and "wander a moment in the dark underworld" [6] of the citrus grove, balancing a lemon flower in one's navel and laughing, like Juliet, the sun-woman.

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'As far as Palermo', in Sea and Sardinia, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 13.

 

[2] Ibid., pp. 13-14.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Lemon Gardens', in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert (Cambridge University Press), p. 129. 

 

[4] Ibid., p. 132. 

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'A Little Moonshine with Lemon', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 99. 

 

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

 

 

For a citrus fresh sister post to this one, click here.

 

Eye of the Tiger

Thou hast no speculation in those eyes ...[1]

 

 

It's disconcerting enough when Phoevos the cat sits and stares at me, particulary if naked like Derrida [2], so it must be almost unimaginably awkward (and significantly more frightening) to be caught in the gaze of a tiger ...

 

I'm told that thanks to a mirror-like structure behind the retina called the tapetum lucidum their night vision is far superior to ours, but that they don't see such a wide range of colours. It's movement that catches their attention and shape that they focus on; not hues, tints, and tones. But then, tigers are primarly concerned with stalking prey, not admiring the chromatic splendour of their environment. 

 

According to D. H. Lawrence, who knows a good few things on the subject of animal vision, the tiger is, in a sense, almost blind to the rest of the world, absorbed as it is in its own fullness of being:

 

"The eyes of the tiger cannot see, except with the light from within itself, by the light of its own desire. Its own white, cold light is so fierce that the other warm light of the day is outshone, it is not, it does not exist. So the white eyes of the tiger gleam to a point of concentrated vision, upon that which does not exist. Hence its terrifying sightlessness." [3]   

 

The tiger, inasmuch as it sees us at all, sees nothing but a rather insubstantial meal. The superior being which we like to think we are, is rendered null and void; we are almost hollow in his eyes, like animated scarecrows, or, at best, creatures that have lost their healthy animal reason [4]:

"It can only see of me that which it knows I am, a scent, a resistance, a voluptuous solid, a struggling warm violence that it holds overcome, a running of hot blood between its teeth, a delicious pang of live flesh in the mouth. This it sees. The rest is not." [5]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 3, scene 4, line 94.

 

[2] See Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (Fordham University Press, 2008). 

      In this work, Derrida discusses his experience of being stared at by his cat, Logos, whilst undressed. He describes a sense of discomfort - even shame - of being gazed upon in his all too human nakedness and all too naked humanity. 

      See also the post on TTA dated 5 Jan 2018 entitled 'When I Play With My Cat ... (Notes Towards a Feline Philosophy)': click here.  

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 118.

 

[4] I'm thinking here of a famous section in Nietzsche's, The Gay Science (III. 224), where he writes: 

      "I fear that the animals consider man as a being like themselves that has lost in a most dangerous way its sound animal common sense; they consider him the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal." 

      This is Walter Kaufmann's translation of the original German text (Vintage Books, 1974), p. 211. 

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy ... p. 118.

      Readers interested in what else Lawrence writes about tigers, might like to see the post on TTA dated 4 Oct 2023: click here. Although not 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.