- 1 Frieda Lawrence, in her memoirs, wrote that Lawrence intended to visit and write about all the cont (...)
- 2 All citations are from the Cambridge Editions. The following abbreviations will be used: Mornings i (...)
1D. H. Lawrence, accompanied by his German wife Frieda, spent much of his relatively short life living out of his travel case,1 and produced a significant corpus of travel writings, which includes three books about Italy (Twilight in Italy, Sea and Sardinia, Sketches of Etruscan Places), a series of sketches about Mexico and New Mexico known as Mornings in Mexico, but also a number of less well-known essays and reviews concerning travel, some of which will be drawn upon here.2 This study builds on the ideas expressed in Neil Roberts’ D. H. Lawrence, Travel and Cultural Difference and Stefania Michelucci’s Space and Place in the Works of D. H. Lawrence, both of which detail Lawrence’s quest to escape the European consciousness via his travel experiences, and his deliberate striving to find the kind of otherness which can open up the self. However, both of these studies are predominantly focused on Lawrence’s fiction (though Roberts does discuss Sea and Sardinia and Mornings in Mexico in some detail). L. D. Clark’s The Minoan Distance: The Symbolism of Travel in D. H. Lawrence argued that Lawrence’s travels were motivated by a kind of “spiritual quest, a pilgrimage” and “abandoning the known and outworn world for the new world”, but attributes it, reductively in my view, to an attempt to compensate for a psychological flaw, an approach which ignores the solid philosophical underpinnings of Lawrence’s thought.
- 3 For more detail on the readers’ reports, see Andrew Nash’s article “‘At the Gates’: New Commentarie (...)
- 4 It seems quite possible that Siegfried’s reflection in The Trespasser “As a boy he had experienced (...)
- 5 All the dates of Lawrence’s work given here refer to their known dates of composition.
- 6 Although a spinning wheel is not a straight line, the point is that its movement is regular, and no (...)
- 7 Einstein was still committed to the ideals of classical physics, but Lawrence discounts Einstein’s (...)
- 8 The vocabulary evokes Schopenhauer’s The World as will and Representation, of whom the young Lawren (...)
2For Lawrence was genuinely interested in philosophy from an early age as his childhood friend Jessie Chambers explained in detail; Lawrence even wrote a philosophical book during the First World War which has unfortunately been lost.3 His philosophical thinking is far more coherent and consistent than it has often been given credit for, as Daniel J. Schneider notes in D. H. Lawrence: The Artist as Psychologist, arguing that the suggestion that he is incoherent is “a view that ignores his detachment, his power of observation, his intelligence, his prolonged efforts to define and account for the deep psychological and moral problems of our age” . Given his interest from an early age in the intellectual currents of his era it is not entirely surprising that Lawrence had thought hard about the linearity underpinning classical mechanical science. Euclid’s three-dimensional geometry, with its axioms, perfect circles, triangles, and regular lines was now being challenged, and shown to be inadequate.4 It is in this regard that Michelucci’s assertion that Lawrence abandoned the line in favour of the circle in his last works needs nuancing, since Lawrence’s rejection of linearity dates back much farther. Thus, we find Lawrence heralding the discoveries of Einstein in his psychological treatise Fantasia of the Unconscious (1921):5 “WE ARE ALL very pleased with Mr. Einstein for knocking that eternal axis out of the universe. The universe isn’t a spinning wheel. It is a cloud of bees flying and veering round” (PFU 72:1).6 What is clear from Lawrence’s enthusiastic praise of Einstein is that he is particularly pleased—by the popular mind, he seems to really mean himself— that “now, the universe, according to the popular mind, can wobble about without being pinned down.” It is “really, an anarchical conclusion. […] We are glad to be driven from false, automatic fixities, anyhow” (PFU 190:33). By allowing the universe to deviate from the straight course that had been set by classical physics, a new way of thinking and living could be discovered.7 This is specifically stated by Lawrence in a remarkable passage from Mornings in Mexico (1927), in which, employing a particularly violent metaphor, Lawrence declares that “the straight course is hacked out in wounds, against the will of the world”:8
Strange that we should think in straight lines, when there are none, and talk of straight courses, when every course, sooner or later, is seen to be making the sweep round, swooping upon the centre. When space is curved, and the cosmos is sphere within sphere, and the way from any point to any other point is round the bend of the inevitable, that turns as the tips of the broad wings of the hawk turn upwards, leaning upon the air like the invisible half of the ellipse. If I have a way to go, it will be round the swoop of a bend impinging centripetal towards the centre. The straight course is hacked out in wounds, against the will of the world. (MM 49:33)
- 9 See for example in Psychology and the Unconscious: “the upper, intense realization of the other, a (...)
3The main thread of my discussion will be concerned with exploring what Lawrence meant by this, and how it underpins both his thinking and writing about travel. Yet Lawrence also makes another claim here, the claim that lines curve “round the swoop of a bend impinging centripetal”, finally converging (in some unspecified manner) to a centre. What is proposed, therefore, is, firstly, to make good my claim that Lawrence was interested in the concept of linearity and to explicate both what it meant to him, and how it led him to a certain vision of the purpose of travelling. Secondly, in more concrete terms, to explain how this translated into his travel writing; the way in which he sought to shift from a horizontal axis to a more vertical one (in other words, to not content oneself with exploring the surface, but rather seek out the hidden depths), in order to see the world in non-linear terms; and his interest in crossing dividing lines (what he often calls gulfs or abysses) 9during his encounters with people, places and things. Finally, to examine the way in which the lines shift back towards the centre. What exactly was Lawrence getting at when he states that all lines curve back to the centre? Before reaching that point, let us first turn to the important question of what straight lines meant for Lawrence, and how he arrived at this standpoint.
4To establish what straight lines meant for Lawrence, it is necessary to momentarily step away from the travel writing and to have a look at the intellectual context briefly mentioned above. On the one hand, the straight lines and regular curves of geometry which had been a fundamental part of classical physics were being increasingly superseded by modern maths and science. Sanford Schwarz notes in The Matrix of Modernism that:
In La science et l’hypothèse Poincaré claims that Euclidian geometry is neither a transcript of the forms of external space, as traditionally assumed, nor is it a necessary a priori form through which the mind orders spatial experience, as it was for Kant; instead, Poincaré argues that Euclidian geometry is one useful “convention” for organizing spatial relations. We should stop asking which geometrical system represents the actual order of the physical world. The question is simply meaningless.
- 10 Lawrence may well have been thinking about Blake’s painting The Ancient of Days, setting a Compass (...)
5In other words, the regular lines and shapes of Euclidian geometry were merely convenient conventions, though ones which had worked well enough for classical science. By the 1920s the geometrical basis of classical physics “still reigned over the world of ordinary experience, but at the cosmic and molecular scale they no longer held sway. The world had to adjust to definitions of time and space that were unimaginable just one generation before” (Schwartz 16). So, Lawrence was writing in a context in which the geometrical, linear way of representing the world was being increasingly challenged, something which he himself describes in his essay “The Novel” (1925): “Ay! Ay! Ay! — Man handing out absolutes to man, as if we were all books of geometry with axioms, postulates and definitions in front. God with a pair of compasses! Moses with a set square! Man a geometric bifurcation…” (STH 184:31).10
6Thus, Lawrence was also reacting against the dominant scientific model. In A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities the French mathematician Laplace had said the following:
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. (Laplace 4)
- 11 “Bergson’s ideas about art, intuition, and experience enjoyed an enormous vogue in the early twenti (...)
7It is unlikely that Lawrence had read Laplace, but he had almost certainly read Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907), first translated into English in 1911, for whom Laplace constituted in many ways the starting point for Bergson’s thought. Bergson was extremely well known in the beginning of the twentieth century and his ideas enjoyed an enormous vogue in the early twentieth century (Schwartz 30). Lawrence had read Bergson’s Creative Evolution (Sagar) and many of Bergson’s essays were published in the periodicals Lawrence was reading at an early age. When Bergson described this kind of conception of time as mechanical, he was referring to classical Newtonian physics in which tradition Laplace was firmly entrenched. Lawrence would certainly have encountered Bergson’s ideas during his formative years.11
- 12 Quinones mentions, amongst others, T. E. Hulme, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, Virginia W (...)
8Bergson had been influential in describing how time had erroneously been seen in a linear, spatialized manner. According to Ricardo J. Quinones in Mapping Literary Modernism, Lawrence, like other modernists,12 associated linear thinking with stale traditions and with the kind of scientific thinking that they felt had led society into an impasse:
The first but not the final task of Modernism was to disrupt the temporal linearity that formed the basis of many nineteenth century preoccupations (history, bourgeois continuity, scientific causality and progress) [...] Modernists looked to leaps of experience, to juxtapositions that could be startling and unexpected. (Quinones 88)
- 13 See Bergson’s Creative Evolution: “The essence of mechanical explanation, in fact, is to regard the (...)
9Quinones contended that the Modernist period was characterized by a clash between two modes, a predictive and an innovative one—a distinction perhaps most clearly developed by Henri Bergson.13 By predictive (also called mechanistic), Quinones meant the “standardization or the routinization of experience” (Quinones 42), a “kind of repetitive sameness” (Quinones 32), committed to predicting and controlling events based on past experiences. On the other hand, what Quinones calls the innovative (or the intuitive) is an emphasis on the now, and a disruption of linear ways of thinking about time. The predictive and the innovative can therefore be seen as a clash between two ways of life.
- 14 Apart from Study of Thomas Hardy, cited below, see also the essay “Democracy” .
10Lawrence felt that Western man had been dominated by the predictive mode.14 By observing the regularities of nature, and identifying the apparent causal relationships, it had proved possible to obtain some measure of control over the environment and to render it safer and more accessible. Lawrence considered this predictive mode to be overly linear, and hence, as he put it in the earlier citation “against the will of the world.” This is what Lawrence is referring to in Study of Thomas Hardy (1914) as he asserts of man (in the general sense) that “when he thinks, when he moves, he is retracing some proved experience”:
He moves as it were in the trunk of the tree, in the channels long since built, where the sap must flow as in a canal. He takes knowledge of all this past experience upon which the new tip rides quivering, he becomes again the old life, which has built itself out in the fixed tissue, he lies in line with the old movement. (STH 34:25, italics mine)
11One example Lawrence cites is the character Phillotson in Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure, who, according to Lawrence, “could not create a single new movement or thought or expression. Everything he did was a repetition of what had been. All his study was a study of what had been. It was a mechanical, functional process.” This kind of causal thinking, predicting the future from past experience is linear because, as he says, it “lies in line with the old movement” (STH 33:37).
12Conventionally in European civilisation each year has been attributed a number, and divided up into months, weeks, days, minutes and so forth which all succeed each other. This assumes that time runs on a line from past through the present to the future. For Laplace, who believed in the existence of time as something absolute, “all the effects of nature are only mathematical results of a small number of immutable laws” (Laplace 177). But for Lawrence, the real way of the world, particularly as it manifests itself in living creatures, much more closely resembles the unpredictability of something like a source bubbling up, or lava surging up from a fault line, than the arrow-like trajectory of time.
13Lawrence was getting at something similar in his well-known poetry review “Chaos in Poetry” (1928), in which he developed an extended metaphor to convey the way in which mankind has used fixed forms to cover up the non-linear nature of the cosmos. To avoid seeing the chaotic nature of the world, man has put up an umbrella between himself and the sky to avoid seeing the truth, and the occasional slits which enable reality to be glimpsed are quickly patched up: “Man must wrap himself in a vision, make a house of apparent form and stability, fixity. In his terror of chaos, he begins by putting up an umbrella between himself and the everlasting whirl” (I & R 109:23). As a matter of fact, Lawrence believed that, despite all appearance, the world is not ordered and fixed but bubbles up anew in every moment like lava surging forth in an entirely unpredictable way from a fault line: “Man, and the animals, and the flowers, all live within a strange and for ever surging chaos” (I & R 109:14). Every living creature is travelling in its own direction, and by no means necessarily in a straight line, meaning that the way of the world is chaotic, and not regular.
- 15 Deleuze, in his introduction to the French translation, states that Apocalypse would not have been (...)
- 16 The original title of Study of Thomas Hardy, a philosophical book, was to be Le Gai Savaire, which (...)
14Moreover, there is compelling evidence that the German philosopher Nietzsche exerted considerable influence upon Lawrence.15 One thing that he learnt from Nietzsche was that it is sheer nonsense to assert that what makes a perspective true is that it in some ways corresponds to the way the world really is. In reality, there are only perspectives and representations, —what seems real to humans is a mere anthropological error. The classical, deterministic science which had been largely inspired by Newton’s geometrical underpinnings, postulated that space and time were absolute, and that things had positions in space. This absolute space could be represented on graph paper and movement represented by straight and curved lines (as is apparent on every page of his Principia). Nietzsche, and later scientists like Einstein, argued, to the contrary, that space and time were not absolute things really existing in their own right, but depended upon who was interpreting them. Indeed, for Nietzsche, each individual perspective is nothing other than a particular interpretation of the world. Thus, Nietzsche maintained that the linear scientific model was just one perspective like any other, as Babette Babich points out: “Nietzsche declares that mathematics ‘would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no real circle, no absolute magnitude’” (147). In reality, what makes a perspective believable is not that it corresponds to reality but rather that it empowers us, allowing us to better control our environment. The world in itself is probably nothing like the representations we form of it. Thus, in Gay Science Nietzsche had written: “We have arranged a world in which we can live by the postulating of bodies, lines, surfaces, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content. Without these articles of faith no one could manage to live at present” (123).16 Fundamental to Lawrence’s thinking, and hence his travel writing, is this idea that everything is relative to everything else, and that the mechanical, causal way of thinking runs counter to nature: “Man is not a little engine of cause-and effect. We must put that out of our mind forever” (STH 203:13).
15This brief look at why Lawrence was so interested in lines, shows us that he viewed the geometrical, the scientific, the causal views as human interpretations, which ran counter to the real nature of the world. Hence, travelling could and, indeed, should be about deviating from straight courses and fixed ideas. Thus, though it may not always be obvious that Lawrence is seeking to circumvent the kind of linear thinking that is merely one possible perspective amongst many, it always remains implicit in his search for a different manner of thinking. Here we will go on to look at some more concrete examples of the way in which this desire for the non-linear manifests itself in Lawrence’s travel writing.
- 17 See Chapter 5 of Chambers. See also Poplawski, and Worthen (168 - 179).
16As his childhood friend, as well as a number of critics have pointed out, Lawrence went through a spiritual and intellectual crisis sometime in his early twenties,17 and became disillusioned with human society as he found it, with its predictive models and linear, traditional patterns. His childhood friend Jessie Chambers recalls that the young Lawrence was fascinated with Samuel Butler’s Erewhon which “started like a book of travel” but then proceeded to “turn all our ideas of society upside down” (Chambers 120). Likewise, Lawrence’s desire in his travel writing was to turn human society upside down, as we will now go on to examine. In a review of Tomlinson’s travel book “Gifts of Fortune” (1926), Lawrence enthusiastically comments: “As Mr. Tomlinson makes very plain, a P. & O. liner will only take us from one hotel to another. Which isn’t what we set out for, at all” (I & R 288:9). Lawrence shows this by referring to Tomlinson’s description of the return back to a misty English port, and finally finding what one was looking for—an unexpected glimpse of another world—at the very point one had started from:
But behold, in the morning, England, England, in her own wan sun, her strange, quiet Englishmen, so silent and intent and self-resourceful! It is the coast of illusion, the other world itself. This is the gist of the Hints to Those About to Travel. You’ll never find what you look for. There are no happy lands. But you’ll come upon coasts of illusion when you’re not expecting them. (I & R 288:38)
17Lawrence notes approvingly that what motivates travelling for Tomlinson, is the “horror of disillusion in the world of man. We cannot get away from it, and we have no business to. Man has turned the world into a thing of horror. What we have to do is to face the fact.” Thus, travelling is actually about getting away from the world of man: “We do not travel to get from one hotel to another, and perhaps to see a few side-shows. We travel to get away from a world we hate, which is the world of man as we have made it” (I & R 294:21). The aim of travelling is to step out of the traditional line, to get a glimpse of another world, something that might ultimately transform who we are, rather than us always mechanically repeating the same movements like Hardy’s Phillotson. Travelling therefore can also be a liberation, as Lawrence points out, in a quite different field, in the review “Chaos in Poetry”: “a regulated cosmos is nothing but a wire bird-cage” (I & R 114:25). We see “there is a wide freedom […] sufficient to shake our faith in those realities we had supposed we were obliged to accept” (I & R 293:27).
18When viewed in this light, the purpose of travel is no longer merely pursuing a linear journey from one destination to another, but rather, exploring the depths of the world, and hence implying a vertical axis rather than a horizontal one, as Lawrence makes very clear in the opening lines of the travel essay “New Mexico” (1928):
Superficially, the world has become small and known. Poor little globe of earth, the tourists trot round you as easily as they trot round the Bois or round Central Park. There is no mystery left, we’ve been there, we’ve seen it, we know all about it. We’ve done the globe, and the globe is done. This is quite true, superficially. On the superficies, horizontally, we’ve been everywhere and done everything, we know all about it. Yet the more we know, superficially, the less we penetrate, vertically. It’s all very well skimming across the surface of the ocean, and saying you know all about the sea. There still remain the terrifying under-deeps, of which we have utterly no experience. The same is true of land travel. (MM 175:1)
19Since travel is not just about pursuing a straight line from one place to another, one of Lawrence’s Italian travel books Sea and Sardinia (1921) actually begins with a series of questions, an insight into the thought-processes engaged by Lawrence in his decision to travel to any particular destination, and an insight into how he finally settles upon the destination of Sardinia:
Where does one go? There is Girgenti by the south. There is Tunis at hand. Girgenti, and the sulphur spirit and the Greek guarding temples, to make one madder? Never. Neither Syracuse and the madness of its great quarries. Tunis? Africa? Not yet, not yet. Not the Arabs, not yet. Naples, Rome, Florence? No good at all. Where then? Where then? Spain or Sardinia. Spain or Sardinia. Sardinia, which is like nowhere. Sardinia, which has no history, no date, no race, no offering. Let it be Sardinia. They say neither Romans nor Phoenicians, Greeks nor Arabs ever subdued Sardinia. It lies outside; outside the circuit of civilisation. (SS 8:37)
20So, the reason why Lawrence ultimately chooses Sardinia as his next destination is because it is “outside of the circuit of civilisation”, with no history, no dates, no chronological timelines (as we will see, it is the manner in which Sardinia seems to stand outside of time which interests him). Likewise, the life of the people there, according to Lawrence is “centripetal, pivoted inside itself, and does not run out towards others and mankind” (SS 88:22). Lawrence finds a charm in these Sardinians, who have not yet been absorbed by “hateful homogeneous world-oneness” (SS 89:16).
21This desire to escape a regulated cosmos is the reason why Lawrence is always on the lookout for what, in Sea and Sardinia, he twice calls “dividing lines”. Dividing-lines designate for Lawrence the thresholds of encounters between people, between men and animals, or even between man and place. One such example is the encounter with Mount Etna itself:
If you would see her, you must slowly take your eyes from the world […] There are so many photographs, there are so infinitely many water-colour drawings and oil paintings which purport to render Etna. But pedestal of heaven! You must cross the invisible border. Between the foreground, which is our own, and Etna, pivot of winds in lower heaven, there is a dividing line. You must change your state of mind. A metempsychosis. (SS 8:1)
22In other words, Mount Etna is so different, such a different world, that it cannot be accessed through ordinary conventional thinking, and all the painters and photographers are unable to render it. To do so requires the crossing of “an invisible border”, a “dividing line”; and an accompanying transformation of one’s soul.
23Similarly, Lawrence is always fascinated by those people he meets who are most unlike himself, like the pedlar he comes across in Sea and Sardinia: “that mysterious division between a respectable life and a scamp’s life divided us. There was a gulf between me and him, between my way and his” (SS 106:28). He uses very similar language when discussing the Native Americans in Mornings in Mexico: “The Indian is not in line with us. He’s not coming our way. His whole being is going a different way from ours” (MM 61:5). As we will see, for Lawrence, this is in part because the Indians do not have the same geometrical conception of the universe. Again, similar language is also employed in Twilight in Italy (1915) for the rather Satyr-like figure known as “Il Duro” whose radical otherness is the focus of Lawrence’s attention throughout the chapter. Il Duro (his real name is Faustino) likes to be near the Lawrence couple, although “he was quite helpless in the relation. Only by mechanical attraction he gravitated into line with us. But there was nothing between us except our complete difference. It was like night and day flowing together” (TI 178:21, italics mine).
24Crossing the dividing-line towards those who are deviating from the traditional routes can broaden our perspective. The more an individual incarnates a “particular and individual fullness of being” (PFU), the more we may be transformed through its contact. This is why Lawrence is always searching for someone that will shock him, or surprise him—to create a new a “living connexion” as he often describes it. Contact with objects and places can also lead to some sort of revelation. As he comes across the wood-sculpture of a Bavarian peasant he writes in Twilight in Italy: “I was startled into consciousness one evening” (TI 91:39). Or again, in Twilight in Italy Lawrence describes the experience of becoming suddenly aware (“realizing”) of the presence of the church as follows: “Yet it did not occur to me to ask where these bells rang. Till at last my everyday trance was broken in upon, and I knew the ringing of the Church of San Tommaso. The church became a living connexion with me” (TI 103). This spontaneous experience, which erupts into one’s consciousness, is the opposite of the deterministic, linear world of someone like Laplace, it is the way of the world itself, and a way of liberating oneself from the linearity of modern man. This is the impression we get in Sea and Sardinia, when Lawrence emphasizes the trembling, non-inertial movement of the boat on its way to Cagliari, describing the ship’ voyage as “the flight against the inertia of our terra firma”, “the trembling of never-ended space”. It is, he writes, a kind of freedom, “not to be clogged to the land any more. Not to be any more like a donkey with a log on its leg, fastened to weary earth that has no answer now” (SS 47:33). And to emphasize the importance of getting away from this human world, he enthuses: “let me wander aimless across this vivid outer world, the world empty of man, where space flies happily” (SS 48:5, italics mine).
25Finally, in a kind of thought-experiment in Mornings in Mexico, Lawrence tries to defamiliarize the linear, quantitative world of the white man, by assuming the Mexican Indians’ point of view, describing the white man as some sort of “white monkey” who has
learnt lots of semi-magical secrets of the universe, and made himself boss of the show. Imagine a race of big white monkeys got up in fantastic clothes, and able to kill a man by hissing at him; able to leap through the air in great hops, covering a mile in each leap; able to transmit his thoughts by a moment’s effort of concentration to some great white monkey or monkeyess, a thousand miles away: and you have, from our point of view, something of the picture that the Indian has of us. (MM 36:24)
26The white man, seen from this point of view “has a horrible, truly horrible, monkey-like passion for invisible exactitudes” (MM 37:9). The white man’s way of cutting up the day horrifies the Indian since “to the white monkey, horrible to relate, there are exact spots of time, such as five o’clock, half past nine. The day is a horrible puzzle of exact spots of time” (MM 36:37). Spatially too, the white man has
horrible invisible distances called two miles, ten miles. To the Indians, there is near and far, and very near and very far. There is two days or one day. But two miles are as good as twenty to him, for he goes entirely by his feeling. If a certain two miles feels far to him, then it is far, it is muy lejos! But if a certain twenty miles feels near and familiar, then it is not far. (MM 37:1)
27In this manner, Lawrence problematises the quantitatively-based, linear nature of modern existence. Hence, his travel writing is about shifting lines, by shifting into a different plane altogether, or perhaps more precisely, shifting out of planes, to where one starts to see “the strangeness and the beauty of life”:
Once be disillusioned with the man-made world, and you will see the magic, the beauty, the delicate realness of all the other life […] it is a world where all things are alive, and where the life of strange creatures and beings flickers on us and makes new strange developments. (IR 290)
28This shift towards what he calls here the magic, the beauty, the realness of other life is a shift towards the mystery of creation itself, and it lies at the very heart of Lawrence’s thought.
29In the essay “Democracy” (1919), Lawrence writes the following:
Either a great Mind floats in space: God, the Anima Mundi, the Oversoul, drawing with a pair of compasses and making everything to scale, even emotions and self-conscious effusions; or else creation proceeds from the forever inscrutable quicks of living beings, men, women, animals, plants. The actual living quick itself is alone the creative reality. Once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism. (RDP 76:34)
- 18 Lawrence was extremely familiar with the theological debates of the 18th and 19th centuries from hi (...)
30In this citation Lawrence demonstrates his understanding of the eighteenth-century enlightenment deism of Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau and many others who understood the universe to be a great machine, initially set up by God, but which then operated according to the physical laws of nature without any need of further divine intervention.18 In another reference to deism in the first version of Studies in Classic American Literature (1917), God (as Lawrence contends Benjamin Franklin conceived him) turns out to be “only the inventor and director of the universe […] dispensing with the mystery of creation […] the universe once set up, it only has to be kept running” (SCAL 182:1). Again, the point is that the world is not regular as the deists thought it was, but that “the mystery of creation” is what makes the world continue to exist and to surge up anew, and unpredictably, at every moment: “The immediate moment is not a drop of water running downstream. It is the source and issue, the bubbling up of the stream”. Whereas the Deists, who were also classical physicists, believed that the world could be understood mathematically, as Lawrence understands it, it is the unpredictability, not the predictability, of life that powers the cosmos (this is the way of the world): “Augustine claimed that God created the universe new every day and every day dawns upon an entirely new universe” (LCL 323:9). Without the new, the universe must inevitably grind to a halt since “without this constant creation, darkness would cover the face of the earth” (STH 11:40). “The central mystery” is therefore the always self-renewing present moment.
31This distinction between deism and the mystery of creation is a fundamental one in Lawrence’s philosophy, and in his approach to life as a whole. The mystery of what brings forth things is what Heidegger calls “the Being of beings”. Heidegger himself refrains from employing any kind of religious terminology, asserting in Basic Questions that “thoughtful questioning is not the intrusive and rash curiosity of the search for explanations; it is the tolerating and sustaining of the unexplainable as such” (Heidegger 148). Lawrence, on the other hand, has no qualms about doing so, such as in the essay “New Mexico” for example, where “you will feel the old, old root of human consciousness still reaching down to depths we know nothing of” (MM 179:13). A vivid description of this central mystery, bubbling up in every moment, is to be found in the first version of Studies in Classic American Literature:
within the living body of the universe, and within the living soul of man, central and omnipresent, in the fingers and lips and eyes and feet, as in the heart and bowels, and in the marshes as in the stars, lies the Presence, never to be located, yet never to be doubted, because it is always evident to our living soul, the Presence from which issues the first fine-shaken impulse and prompting of new being, eternal creation which is always Now. All time is central within this ever-present creative Now. (SCAL 182)
- 19 Lawrence never uses the word phusis, but his idea of the central mystery is substantially the same (...)
32Both Heidegger and Lawrence consider that the question of the origin of things has now been occulted by science, and that the problem of phusis,19 the question of how being arises, is considered so obvious that it is no longer even a question for us:
for centuries, the Being of beings, which was for the Greeks the most wondrous, has passed as the most obvious of everything obvious, and is for us the most common: what everybody already knows. For us, who is supposed not to know what he means when he says the stone is, the sky is overcast? (Heidegger 159)
- 20 For the similarities between Heidegger and Lawrence, see Michael Bell’s Language and Being (Bell).
33The power of being that brings things into existence at any given moment is what may be glimpsed during one’s travels. Although Lawrence and Heidegger’s terminologies and approaches differ greatly, they have much in common,20 and the Greek word aletheia (ἀλήθεια)—usually translated as truth—deconstructed by Heidegger (who takes it to mean revealing, or what he calls unconcealedness), is a useful concept for Lawrence too. For both Heidegger and Lawrence, the concept of truth is understood as a glimpse into the mystery of existence, of what it is that surges up in and through beings. In the face of such a revelation, there is not mere astonishment or surprise, but genuine wonder, a sort of transcendence, achieved when “what is most usual of all and in all, i.e., everything, becomes the most unusual” (Heidegger):
As disposed in wonder, he can perceive nothing else than beings as beings. That is to say, as moved by wonder, man must gain a foothold in the acknowledgement of what has erupted, and he must see it in a productive seeing of its inscrutable disclosure, and must experience and sustain ἀλήθεια, unconcealedness, as the primordial essence of beings. For what we must above all come to know is that ἀλήθεια, unconcealedness, is for primordial Greek thinking the essence of Being itself. (Heidegger 146)
34This central presence, mystery, power, the holy ghost (Lawrence uses many different terms to describe it) lies in time, but is also timeless. As he writes in the essay “Morality and the Novel” (1925), “the relation between all things changes from day to day […] At the same time, that which exists in the non-dimensional space of pure relationship is deathless, lifeless and eternal. That is, it gives the feeling of being beyond life or death” (STH 171:29). Lawrence often calls this the fourth dimension since it is something apart from the three-dimensional world of time and space. Perceiving the fourth dimension requires diving down vertically to plunge the depths of the world we encounter. Thus, we always find Lawrence searching for this non-temporal, non-spatial feeling throughout his travel writings. One of the striking features, for instance, of Sea and Sardinia is this feeling of time being almost irrelevant, such as when Lawrence catches sight of peasants in traditional costume in Cagliari and is somewhat perturbed:
that curious, flashing, black-and-white costume! I seem to have known it before: to have worn it even: to have dreamed it. To have dreamed it: to have had actual contact with it. It belongs in some way to something in me — to my past, perhaps. I don’t know. But the uneasy sense of blood-familiarity haunts me. I know I have known it before. It is something of the same uneasiness I feel before Mount Eryx. (SS 63:16)
35Confronted by this vision of the peasants, he experiences a kind of nostalgia for “something I have known, and which I want back again” (SS 64:13).
36In the “Indians,” too, Lawrence finds what he calls a true sense of religion. Again, this requires drawing a distinction between surface and depth. On the surface, the modern “Indian” is often thoroughly objectionable, but it is necessary to get beyond this:
But in this article, I don’t want to deal with the everyday or superficial aspect of New Mexico, outside the mucous-paper wrapping, I want to go beneath the surface. But therefore the American Indian in his behaviour as an American citizen doesn’t really concern me. What concerns me is what he is — or what he seems to me to be, in his ancient, ancient race-self and religious-self. (MM 178:21)
37Religion as Lawrence means it, refers to an “experience deep down in the senses, inexplicable and inscrutable” (MM 179), or in other words, a glimpse of the central mystery of life. Thus Lawrence, as he watches the “Indians” dance, sees them “so stealthily, timelessly rhythmic, and silent, with the ceaseless down-tread, always to the earth’s centre” (MM 179:22), and hears the “wonderful deep sound of men calling to the unspeakable depths” (MM 179:27).
38Ultimately, all these references to the “earth’s centre” and to “the unspeakable depths” bring us back to the question posed at the outset: why does Lawrence say that all lines curve round to the centre? As we have seen, the reason is that the centre is being itself, so that everything must derive from the mysterious force that is the creative mystery, the central mystery of life. In other words, there is a difference between on the one hand, existence (beings), and on the other, being (phusis or the mystery of creation). Lawrence himself was well aware of this distinction, and understanding it is key to unlocking his philosophy in general, as we can see in the essay “Reflections on the death of a porcupine”: “We still find ourselves in the tangle of existence and being, a tangle which man has never been able to get out of, except by sacrificing the one to the other” (RDP 359). For Lawrence agrees with Spinoza that, “the more we understand particular things, the more we understand God” (Ethics V, 24).
- 21 Discussing Van Gogh’s art, for example, Lawrence calls the sunflowers a “revelation (of being),” wh (...)
39Hence, for Lawrence, travelling, as for life in general, is ultimately a way of shifting lines. Existence itself being chaotic, it bubbles up unpredictably and is hard to get hold of: “What is more chaotic than a dappled leopard trotting through dappled shade! And that is our life, really” (I & R 116:32). So, Lawrence contends, existence should really be left “wobbling about without being pinned down” (as quoted in the opening lines). On the other hand, being, or life itself, is “something that gleams, that has the fourth dimensional quality” (STH 173:34), meaning atemporal, without any dimensions at all.21 The lines of three-dimensional existence curve round till they finally meet in the non-dimensional centre. Any new encounters, especially the surprising ones, lead to a transformation of the self, a widening of one’s existence that equates to no less than a glimpse of God—not the God of the Deists, of the classical physicists, but rather, as has already been seen in “New Mexico,” “an uncontrollable, sensual experience […] an experience deep down in the senses, inexplicable and inscrutable” (I & R 178:4), an experience which always remains outside of the human parameters of linear time and space.
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