lawrence on hawthorne
In the first place, Adam knew Eve as a wild animal knows its mate, momentaneously, but vitally, in blood-knowledge. Blood-knowledge, not mind-knowledge. Blood-knowledge, that seems utterly to forget, but doesn't. Blood-knowledge, instinct, intuition, all the vast vital flux of knowing that goes on in the dark, antecedent to the mind.
Then came that ( Read more... )
...Poe was going to get the ecstasy and the heightening, cost what it might... Poe tried alcohol, and any drug he could lay his hand on. He also tried any human being he could lay his hands on.
His grand attempt and achievement was with his wife; his cousin, a girl with a singing voice. With her he went in for the intensest flow, the heightening, the prismayic shades of ecstasy. It was the intensest nervous vibration of unison, pressed higher and higher in pitch, till the blood-vessels of the girl broke, and the blood began to flow out loose. It was love. If you call it love.
Love can be terribly obscene.
It is love that causes the neuroticism of the day. It is love that is the prime cause of tuberculosis.
The nerves that vibrate most intensely in spiritual unisons are the sympathetic ganglia of the breast, of the throat, and the hind brain. Drive this vibration over-intensely, and you weaken the sympathetic tissues of the chest - the lungs - or of the throat, or of the lower brain, and the tubercles are given a ripe held.
But Poe drove the vibrations beyond any human pitch of endurance.
Being his cousin, she was more easily keyed to him.
Ligeia is the chief story. Ligeia! A mental-derived name. To him the woman, his wife, was not Lucy. She was Ligeia. No doubt she even preferred it thus.
Ligeia is Poe's love-story, and its very fantasy makes it more truly his own story.
It is a tale of love pushed over a verge. And love pushed to extremes in a battle of wills between the lovers.
Love is become a battle of wills.
Which shall first destroy the other, of the lovers? Which can hold out longest, against the other?
Ligeia is still the old-fashioned woman. Her will is still to submit. She wills to submit to the vampire of her husband's consciousness. Even death.
...What he wants to do with Ligeia is to analyse her, till he knows all her component parts, till he has got her all in his consciousness. She is some strange chemical salt which he must analyse out in the test-tubes of his brain, and then - when he's finished the analysis - E finita la commedia!
But she won't be quite analysed out. There is something, something he can't get...
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One should be sufficiently intelligent and interested to know a good deal about any person one comes into close contact with. About her. Or about him.
But to try to know any living being is to try to suck the life out of that being.
Above all things, with the woman one loves. Every sacred instinct teaches one that one must leave her unknown. You know your woman darkly, in the blood. To try to know her mentally is to try to kill her. Beware, oh woman, of the man who wants to find out what you are. And, oh men, beware a thousand times more of the woman who wants to know you or get you, what you are.
It is the temptation of a vampire fiend, is this knowledge.
Man does so horribly want to master the secret of life and of individuality with his mind. It is like the analysis of proto- plasm. You can only analyse dead protoplasm, and know its constituents. It is a death-process.
Keep KNOWLEDGE for the world of matter, force, and function. It has got nothing to do with being.
But Poe wanted to know - wanted to know what was the strangeness in the eyes of Ligeia. She might have told him it was horror at his probing, horror at being vamped by his consciousness.
Chapter 6 Edgar Allan Poe
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i’m working on posting more excerpts from dana’s two years before the mast (“YOU CAN’T IDEALIZE BRUTE LABOR”) & the whitman chapter. the whitman chapter is almost too hilarious, from start to finish, to bother with an excerpt. (see: “Walter, leave off. You are not HE. You are just a limited Walter. And your ache doesn't include all Amorous Love, by any means. If you ache you only ache with a small bit of amorous love, and there's so much more stays outside the cover of your ache, that you might be a bit milder about it. “)
p.s. i'm glad you enjoyed it & thanks for taking the time to comment. i was afraid no one would read through it all.
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As soon as Walt knew a thing, he assumed a One Identity with it. If he knew that an Eskimo sat in a kyak, immediately there was Walt being little and yellow and greasy, sitting in a kyak.
Now will you tell me exactly what a kyak is?
Who is he that demands petty definition? Let him behold me sitting in a kyak.
I behold no such thing. I behold a rather fat old man full of a rather senile, self-conscious sensuosity.
DEMOCRACY. EN MASSE. ONE IDENTITY.
The universe is short, adds up to ONE.
ONE.
I.
Which is Walt.
His poems Democracy, En Masse, One Identity, they are long sums in additions and multiplication, of which the answer is invariably M Y S E L F.
He reaches the state of ALLNESS.
And what then? It's all empty. Just an empty Allness. An addled egg.
Walt wasn't an Eskimo. A little, yellow, sly, cunning, greasy little Eskimo. And when Walt blandly assumed Allness, including Eskimoness, unto himself, he was just sucking the wind out of a blown egg-shell, no more. Eskimos are not minor little Walts. They are something that I am not, I know that. Outside the egg of my Allness chuckles the greasy little Eskimo. Outside the egg of Whitman's Allness too.
But Walt wouldn't have it. He was everything and every- thing was in him. He drove an automobile with a very fierce headlight, along the track of a fixed idea, through the dark- ness of this world. And he saw everything that way. Just as a motorist does in the night.
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he spends the first several pages teasing whitman then praises him. that’s the best part: lawrence teases everyong a little, but with whitman, he really goes there. chapter twelve is full of “aww shit” moments such as this:
"A woman waits for me-
He might as well have said: 'The femaleness waits for my maleness.' Oh, beautiful generalization and abstraction! Oh, biological function."
however lawrence also goes beyond the "oh walts!" to say
"Whitman, the great poet, has meant so much to me. Whitman, the one man breaking a way ahead. Whitman, the one pioneer. And only Whitman. No English pioneers, no French. No European pioneer-poets. In Europe the would-be pioneers are mere innovators. The same in America. Ahead of Whitman, nothing. Ahead of all poets, pioneering into the wilderness of unopened life, Whitman. Beyond him, none. His wide, strange camp at the end of the great high-road."
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"Whitman was the first to break the mental allegiance. He was the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something 'superior' and 'above' the flesh. Even Emerson still maintained this tiresome 'superiority' of the soul. Even Melville could not get over it. Whitman was the first heroic seer to seize the soul by the scruff of her neck and plant her down among the potsherds.
‘There ! ' he said to the soul. 'Stay there!’
Stay there. Stay in the flesh. Stay in the limbs and lips and in the belly. Stay in the breast and womb. Stay there, Oh, Soul, where you belong.
Stay in the dark limbs of negroes. Stay in the body of the prostitute. Stay in the sick flesh of the syphilitic. Stay in the marsh where the calamus grows. Stay there, Soul, where you belong.
The Open Road. The great home of the Soul is the open road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not 'above'. Not even 'within'. The soul is neither 'above' nor 'within'. It is a wayfarer down the open road.
Not by meditating. Not by fasting. Not by exploring heaven after heaven, inwardly, in the manner of the great mystics. Not by exaltation. Not by ecstasy. Not by any of these ways does the soul come into her own.
Only by taking the open road.
....It is a new great doctrine. A doctrine of life. A new great morality. A morality of actual living, not of salvation. Europe has never got beyond the morality of salvation. America to this day is deathly sick with saviourism. But Whitman, the greatest and the first and the only American teacher, was no Saviour. His morality was no morality of salvation. His was a morality of the soul living her life, not saving herself. Accepting the contact with other souls along the open way, as they lived their lives. Never trying to save them. As life try to arrest them and throw them in goal. The soul living her life along the incarnate mystery of the open road.
This was Whitman. And the true rhythm of the American continent speaking out in him..."
you can read the full chapter here: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/LAWRENCE/dhlch12.htm
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