As torpedophiles will recall, D. H. Lawrence's short novel St. Mawr is the story of a young woman who, having quickly exhausted the limits of love in a conventional (all-too-human) sense, embarks on an affair with a stallion.
However, her search for a form of transpersonal sex doesn't end in the stable. For ultimately, even a relationship with a handsome bay horse doesn't quite meet her needs. She yearns for something else, something bigger, something that can only be found perhaps beneath the radiation of new skies.
Thus it is that Lou ends up living on a small tumble-down ranch near Santa Fe. She hasn't got and doesn't want a man in her life: "She wanted to be still: only that, to be very, very still, and recover her own soul. [...] Even the illusion of the beautiful St. Mawr was gone." [137]
Lou adopts an asexual - almost anti-sexual - position, beyond man and beast, with spooky-erotic elements of spectrophilia:
"Because sex, mere sex, is repellent to me. I will never prostitute myself again. Unless something touches my very spirit, the very quick of me. I will stay alone, just alone. Alone, and give myself only to the unseen presences, serve only the other, unseen presences." [138]
Unable to bear the triviality and superficiality of her human relationships - and finding that even a fling with a horse can only take you so far - Lou decides she will model her life henceforth on that of the Vestal Virgins:
"They were symbolic of herself, of women weary of the embrace of incompetant men, weary, weary, weary of all that, turning to the unseen gods, the unseen spirits, the hidden fire, and devoting herself to that, and that alone. Receiving thence her pacification and her fulfilment." [138-39]
"They were symbolic of herself, of women weary of the embrace of incompetant men, weary, weary, weary of all that, turning to the unseen gods, the unseen spirits, the hidden fire, and devoting herself to that, and that alone. Receiving thence her pacification and her fulfilment." [138-39]
And these unseen presences are manifested in the landscape of her new home; "it seemed to her that the hidden fire was alive and burning in this sky, over the desert, in the mountains. She felt a certain latent holiness in the very atmosphere ..." This despite the tourists in their motor-cars, the "rather dreary Mexicans" and the Indians lurking with "something of a rat-like secretiveness and defeatedness in their bearing" [140].
The question is: how do you come into touch with the spirit of place? That is to say, how does one polarise oneself with the vital effluence of the environment? It requires, as Lou recognises, submission above all else. One must consent to be seized by a new electricity and undergo a transformation of self - not just psychologically, but physically, as one's bones, blood, and flesh are all subject to a new molecular disposition.
It's a slow and terrible process in which one is essentially violated from behind and below by the destablising malevolence of the world. Loving a man, or a horse, is a piece of cake in comparison. Those environmentalists who, in their naive idealism and anthropocentric conceit, think there's nothing easier or more beautiful than communing with nature are laughably mistaken.
The earthly paradise they dream of is, in reality, inhuman and uncaring; not only does man not exist for it, but neither does a merciful deity watching over man. In the American Southwest: "There is no Almighty loving God. The God there is shaggy as the pine-trees, and horrible as the lightning." [147] Jesus isn't going to help you against the intense savagery of a world that contains mountain lions, pack-rats, porcupines, tumbleweed, and black ants in the kitchen cupboard.
It's a slow and terrible process in which one is essentially violated from behind and below by the destablising malevolence of the world. Loving a man, or a horse, is a piece of cake in comparison. Those environmentalists who, in their naive idealism and anthropocentric conceit, think there's nothing easier or more beautiful than communing with nature are laughably mistaken.
The earthly paradise they dream of is, in reality, inhuman and uncaring; not only does man not exist for it, but neither does a merciful deity watching over man. In the American Southwest: "There is no Almighty loving God. The God there is shaggy as the pine-trees, and horrible as the lightning." [147] Jesus isn't going to help you against the intense savagery of a world that contains mountain lions, pack-rats, porcupines, tumbleweed, and black ants in the kitchen cupboard.
This is something that Lou, like the woman from New England who owned the ranch before her, will have to learn: that the dark gods and fanged demons to whom she wishes to submit were "grim and invidious and relentless, huger than man, and lower than man" [150].
Whether she does learn - and whether she finds that something bigger that she desires (and which she conceives in terms of sacred sexuality) - isn't something we can say for sure, as Lawrence ends the story of Lou Carrington at this point, concluding with a little speech from the latter to her mother, in which she insists on her determination to henceforth keep herself to herself:
"'There's something else for me, mother. There's something else even that loves me and wants me. I can't tell you what it is. It's a spirit. And it's here, on this ranch. It's here, in this landscape. It's something more real to me than men are, and it soothes me, and it holds me up. I don't know what it is, definitely. It's something wild, that will hurt me sometimes and will wear me down sometimes. I know it. But it's something big, bigger than men, bigger than people, bigger than religion. It's something to do with wild America. And it's something to do with me. It's a mission, if you like [...] to keep myself for the spirit that is wild, and has waited so long here: even waited for such as me. Now I've come! Now I'm here. Now I am where I want to be: with the spirit that wants me. And that's how it is. [...] And it doesn't want to save me either. It needs me. It craves for me. And to it, my sex is deep and sacred, deeper than I am [...] It saves me from cheapness, mother. And even you could never do that for me.'" [155]
Whether she does learn - and whether she finds that something bigger that she desires (and which she conceives in terms of sacred sexuality) - isn't something we can say for sure, as Lawrence ends the story of Lou Carrington at this point, concluding with a little speech from the latter to her mother, in which she insists on her determination to henceforth keep herself to herself:
"'There's something else for me, mother. There's something else even that loves me and wants me. I can't tell you what it is. It's a spirit. And it's here, on this ranch. It's here, in this landscape. It's something more real to me than men are, and it soothes me, and it holds me up. I don't know what it is, definitely. It's something wild, that will hurt me sometimes and will wear me down sometimes. I know it. But it's something big, bigger than men, bigger than people, bigger than religion. It's something to do with wild America. And it's something to do with me. It's a mission, if you like [...] to keep myself for the spirit that is wild, and has waited so long here: even waited for such as me. Now I've come! Now I'm here. Now I am where I want to be: with the spirit that wants me. And that's how it is. [...] And it doesn't want to save me either. It needs me. It craves for me. And to it, my sex is deep and sacred, deeper than I am [...] It saves me from cheapness, mother. And even you could never do that for me.'" [155]
Notes
D. H. Lawrence, 'St. Mawr', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
For the earlier post in which I discuss Lou Carrington's affair with St. Mawr, click here.
