Thursday, April 17, 2008
2
DH. Lawrence
Quotations
1. For whereas the mind works in possibilities, the intuitions work in actualities, and what you intuitively desire, that is possible to you. Whereas what you mentally or "consciously" desire is nine times out of ten impossible; hitch your wagon to star, or you will just stay where you are.
2. I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A bird will fall frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
3. I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.
4. One watches them on the seashore, all the people, and there is something pathetic, almost wistful in them, as if they wished their lives did not add up to this scaly nullity of possession, but as if they could not escape. It is a dragon that has devoured us all: these obscene, scaly houses, this insatiable struggle and desire to possess, to possess always and in spite of everything, this need to be an owner, lest one be owned. It is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease. One feels a sort of madness come over one, as if the world had become hell. But it is only superimposed: it is only a temporary disease. It can be cleaned away.
5. The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept.
First lines of Chapter One of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
“We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
Robert L. Fielding: What do you mean when you say that we have still got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen?
D. H. Lawrence: When we had come through the Hell of the first World War, those of us who had survived bodily, still had to come to terms with what had happened on the Somme.
We had been made to realize the extent of man’s inhumanity, of man’s senseless taste for annihilation and destruction.
Something dies in the human spirit when it is confronted with such horror, and so those of us left to carry on were forced to deal with that reality – that sky that had fallen down on us.
RLF: How do people do that – come to terms with the unthinkable, do you think?
DHL: They do not think about it – but not thinking about it does not remove the thought from our minds, it merely relegates it to the unconscious.
RLF: And how does that affect us? Does that mean that we forget – that it no longer infects us, so to speak?
DHL: The workings of the mind are not open to our scrutiny – we can only infer. But any thoughts – any knowledge we possess is never entirely eradicated from our minds, I believe, and so we hold a sort of residue, which is there and can be activated – brought to the forefront of our consciousness by events, words, I know not what, or how it occurs – I only know nothing never leaves us.
That is how I am able to delve into my own mind and produce what I think are insights into the workings of the female mind, for example, even though I am a male.
What I have observed, what I have thought or what has been said to me, has been stored, as we might like to say, to be used later.
I believe that only in dreams can these ephemera be accessed, and in writing too – my stock-in trade.
Writing has that property of forcing links to be forged between notions in the mind, only brought out of hiding by words. I maintain that words hold the deepest and densest of our associations, and the act of writing, which is the physical act of recording those words on paper, is nothing more or less than the bringing together of perhaps disparate concepts and ideas, which, in other forms and in other ways, does not readily occur – and this is called creativity – it is what writers – people who write – all people who write – do whenever they write.
Only through writing – and through speaking, to a much lesser extent, are those associations forged.
RLF: But why do you think writing produces many more links than say speaking to someone about something – does that not produce associations?
DHL: Yes, it obviously does, but not in the same way and not as intensely either.
Writing is a lonely activity – the loneliest, in my opinion, apart from sleeping. In writing, the writer is not inhibited by anything other than his own psyche, his own mind – he is not tethered to speech, which is subject to the scrutiny of interlocutors.
RLF: But so is writing.
DHL: Not whilst it is being penned, put down on the page. Then it is the writer’s own – as I have said, writing is an intensely lonely activity.
RLF: But when it is eventually read, then will it be discovered as having a ring of truth about it, will it not?
DHL: Or otherwise, as the case may be. I do think that writers prove the saying that the unexamined life is not worth living. Who was it that said that?
RLF: Socrates said it at his trial for heresy.
DHL: Yes, you are right. I wonder what he meant by it?
RLF: That those who examine their own lives, their motives and the actions that spring from them, are happier, in some ways, than those who do not.
DHL: Quite so, and it is my contention that the writer, the tenacious writer..
RLF: Like you?
DHL: Yes, like me – the conscientious writer delves into life in ways that are open to us in few if any other ways.
RLF: The psychoanalyst does so, does he not? Surely!
DHL: That is true – but with the existence of the cash nexus, how far does he go and how honest is he?
RLF: I suppose that is known only to himself.
DHL: Yes, but with the writer, the conscientious writer, his truths are open to scrutiny, are they not? If what he writes does not ring true with the reader, reading stops, or if it does continue, does so with skepticism hot on its heels to colour and discolour the reader’s reading.
RLF: But surely, you are referring to the honesty between you and your pen, are you not, heedless of being read?
DHL: That is true. I would say that the extent to which an author is true to himself, is the extent to which his work will be read.
RLF: But how do you square your own need to be honest and rigorous, I might even say ruthless, with the needs and demands of publishers? Do publishers not need to be as honest as you?
DHL: They do, though few are. I think a publisher must have confidence in his writers – so few do these days.
RLF: If so few do, then what happens to the reems of paper written, albeit truthfully and conscientiously, by those who are not famous?
DHL: As I have said, any writer, published or not, has the chance to explore his mind in ways that are not open to those that do not write. The question of whether or not their writing is publishable or not has nothing to do with the fact that their writing, if it is truthful, can display something of what is in their own minds, from the deepest levels of the subconscious to the surface.
That unexamined life becomes examined under the microscope of the pen, if you get my meaning.
RLF: Returning to what you said earlier about living after skies have fallen, and your insistence that things that we would rather forget in our past can forever haunt us, so to speak, my question is this one: Can writing be used to exorcise those things?
DHL: I am not sure what you mean by ‘exorcise’, but if I take you to mean can we re-examine them, thereby working towards healing ourselves in the process, I think we can, yes.
Robert L. Fielding
Quotations
1. For whereas the mind works in possibilities, the intuitions work in actualities, and what you intuitively desire, that is possible to you. Whereas what you mentally or "consciously" desire is nine times out of ten impossible; hitch your wagon to star, or you will just stay where you are.
2. I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A bird will fall frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
3. I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.
4. One watches them on the seashore, all the people, and there is something pathetic, almost wistful in them, as if they wished their lives did not add up to this scaly nullity of possession, but as if they could not escape. It is a dragon that has devoured us all: these obscene, scaly houses, this insatiable struggle and desire to possess, to possess always and in spite of everything, this need to be an owner, lest one be owned. It is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease. One feels a sort of madness come over one, as if the world had become hell. But it is only superimposed: it is only a temporary disease. It can be cleaned away.
5. The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept.
First lines of Chapter One of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
“We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
Robert L. Fielding: What do you mean when you say that we have still got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen?
D. H. Lawrence: When we had come through the Hell of the first World War, those of us who had survived bodily, still had to come to terms with what had happened on the Somme.
We had been made to realize the extent of man’s inhumanity, of man’s senseless taste for annihilation and destruction.
Something dies in the human spirit when it is confronted with such horror, and so those of us left to carry on were forced to deal with that reality – that sky that had fallen down on us.
RLF: How do people do that – come to terms with the unthinkable, do you think?
DHL: They do not think about it – but not thinking about it does not remove the thought from our minds, it merely relegates it to the unconscious.
RLF: And how does that affect us? Does that mean that we forget – that it no longer infects us, so to speak?
DHL: The workings of the mind are not open to our scrutiny – we can only infer. But any thoughts – any knowledge we possess is never entirely eradicated from our minds, I believe, and so we hold a sort of residue, which is there and can be activated – brought to the forefront of our consciousness by events, words, I know not what, or how it occurs – I only know nothing never leaves us.
That is how I am able to delve into my own mind and produce what I think are insights into the workings of the female mind, for example, even though I am a male.
What I have observed, what I have thought or what has been said to me, has been stored, as we might like to say, to be used later.
I believe that only in dreams can these ephemera be accessed, and in writing too – my stock-in trade.
Writing has that property of forcing links to be forged between notions in the mind, only brought out of hiding by words. I maintain that words hold the deepest and densest of our associations, and the act of writing, which is the physical act of recording those words on paper, is nothing more or less than the bringing together of perhaps disparate concepts and ideas, which, in other forms and in other ways, does not readily occur – and this is called creativity – it is what writers – people who write – all people who write – do whenever they write.
Only through writing – and through speaking, to a much lesser extent, are those associations forged.
RLF: But why do you think writing produces many more links than say speaking to someone about something – does that not produce associations?
DHL: Yes, it obviously does, but not in the same way and not as intensely either.
Writing is a lonely activity – the loneliest, in my opinion, apart from sleeping. In writing, the writer is not inhibited by anything other than his own psyche, his own mind – he is not tethered to speech, which is subject to the scrutiny of interlocutors.
RLF: But so is writing.
DHL: Not whilst it is being penned, put down on the page. Then it is the writer’s own – as I have said, writing is an intensely lonely activity.
RLF: But when it is eventually read, then will it be discovered as having a ring of truth about it, will it not?
DHL: Or otherwise, as the case may be. I do think that writers prove the saying that the unexamined life is not worth living. Who was it that said that?
RLF: Socrates said it at his trial for heresy.
DHL: Yes, you are right. I wonder what he meant by it?
RLF: That those who examine their own lives, their motives and the actions that spring from them, are happier, in some ways, than those who do not.
DHL: Quite so, and it is my contention that the writer, the tenacious writer..
RLF: Like you?
DHL: Yes, like me – the conscientious writer delves into life in ways that are open to us in few if any other ways.
RLF: The psychoanalyst does so, does he not? Surely!
DHL: That is true – but with the existence of the cash nexus, how far does he go and how honest is he?
RLF: I suppose that is known only to himself.
DHL: Yes, but with the writer, the conscientious writer, his truths are open to scrutiny, are they not? If what he writes does not ring true with the reader, reading stops, or if it does continue, does so with skepticism hot on its heels to colour and discolour the reader’s reading.
RLF: But surely, you are referring to the honesty between you and your pen, are you not, heedless of being read?
DHL: That is true. I would say that the extent to which an author is true to himself, is the extent to which his work will be read.
RLF: But how do you square your own need to be honest and rigorous, I might even say ruthless, with the needs and demands of publishers? Do publishers not need to be as honest as you?
DHL: They do, though few are. I think a publisher must have confidence in his writers – so few do these days.
RLF: If so few do, then what happens to the reems of paper written, albeit truthfully and conscientiously, by those who are not famous?
DHL: As I have said, any writer, published or not, has the chance to explore his mind in ways that are not open to those that do not write. The question of whether or not their writing is publishable or not has nothing to do with the fact that their writing, if it is truthful, can display something of what is in their own minds, from the deepest levels of the subconscious to the surface.
That unexamined life becomes examined under the microscope of the pen, if you get my meaning.
RLF: Returning to what you said earlier about living after skies have fallen, and your insistence that things that we would rather forget in our past can forever haunt us, so to speak, my question is this one: Can writing be used to exorcise those things?
DHL: I am not sure what you mean by ‘exorcise’, but if I take you to mean can we re-examine them, thereby working towards healing ourselves in the process, I think we can, yes.
Robert L. Fielding
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