DH Lawrence

Funny, but only in reading do i not get the impatient feeling that film, bands, and often cds give me, the feeling of yeah, fine, that's great, I'm sick of merely participating, i wanna be doing, making it. It's an immersion.

Realising that there is no artistry as such, let alone genius or romantic myths of voices and inspirations, or airs, but purely the cultivation of a sensibility, of an ear, an eye, of a knowledge of what works well and how affects are constructed realistically, of acquiring a perception that isn't the same but somehow akin to a perspective of art, a divine in-between, generative, neither wholly pragmatic nor purely accidental, ideal, coincidental. A sensibility that approaches a current of greatness on one hand and faux-religion on the other. Lawrence is canny and dated by all standards, but his conception, his yearning for a vital and importantly organic structure to literature, failed though it may be in the attempt (such obvious equation with spring buds and colliery black death, and the endless battle of the sexes), yet always radiated by opposition, conflict and flux... is immense. As opposed to Miller's constant concern for what writing is and how begun, with the fluid itself, Lawrence never mentions it, but is always insistent upon the pure creation, the merge and rebirth with the darkness... with the reach for organic relation. And he capped it all off with an ironic, smarmy and yet tender book about fucking... The mystery of it is large, and hence the criticism is doubly gorged with wild speculation, and diverse ranges, claimed privilege of perspectives, Freudian hacks and feminists, yet never complete, total, because DHL is in many ways the modern enigma, unexplainable: we can only do him justice by deepening the mystery. The conflict in him is never either/or, he is always above it in some way, proof of an abstract spirituality, somehow greater than what he presents, and yet cloying in his snarling, and picking at the 'dirty little secret' with insistent give em what they want insistency. Enlarging the drives, explicating them, attempting to do justice to them for a new way of life, aligned with nature yet not regressive, a whole new architecture; not filling them with theory, analysis; opening them to rot, if need be, out in the open... the terms of revival are desperate of course, of the need for a rebirth, of a new aristocracy which noone would want to follow. An yet steering clear of the whole Messiah bag... That he could alternate between feminine and masculine with such... alacrity, penetrative insight... immense (is there not in JC an immense effeminate aspect?). The meaning of Lawrence is greater than any single idea, theory, or set of theories. Only a greater enigma. Or rather, greater relation.