In the 1980s I read everything D. H. Lawrence wrote, scribbling long quotes. They ended up in a manuscript, “Lorenzo in Cosmos.” It would never be published – I lost interest. Copyright permission hunting was not to be. Today I read it again and have excavated the following nuggets. The manuscript – well, into the trash it goes!
From a letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith:
But for yourself, you must learn to believe in God. Believe me, in the end, we will unite in our knowledge of God.
From a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell:
We must centre in the knowledge of the Infinite, of God.
From Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious:
Religion was right and science is wrong. Every individual creature has a soul, a specific individual nature the origin of which cannot be found in any cause-and-effect process whatever. Cause and effect will not explain even the individuality of a single dandelion.
From Fantasia of the Unconscious:
Let us pronounce the mystic Om, from the pit of the stomach, and proceed.
From Kangaroo:
Any more love is a hopeless thing, till we have found again, each of us for himself, the great dark God who alone will sustain us in our loving one another.
From St. Mawr:
To go South! Always to go South, away from the arctic horror as far as possible!
From Phoenix, “Pan in America”:
A conquered world is no good to man. He sits stupified with boredom upon his conquest.
We need the universe to live again, so that we can live with it. A conquered universe, a dead Pan, leaves us nothing to live with.
You have to abandon the conquest, before Pan will live again. You have to live to live, not to conquer. What’s the good of conquering even the North Pole, if after the conquest you’ve nothing left but an inert fact? Better leave it a mystery.
It was better to be a hunter in the woods of Pan, than it is to be a clerk in a city store. The hunter hungered, laboured, suffered tortures of fatigue. But at least he lived in a ceaseless living relation to his surrounding universe.
Below what we think we are
we are something else,
we are almost anything.
From David:
On earth move men and beasts, they nourish themselves and know not how they are alive. But in all the places moves Unseen Almighty, like a breath among the stars, or the moon, like the sea turning herself over. I eat bread, but my soul faints, and wine will not heal my bones. Nothing is good for me but God. Like waters He moves through the world, like a fish I swim in the flood of God Himself.
From “There Are Too Many People”:
Now we have to return. Now again the old Adam must lift up his face and his breast, and un-tame himself. Not in viciousness nor in wantonness, but having God within the walls of himself. In the very darkest continent of the body there is God. And from Him issue the first dark rays of our feeling, worldless, and utterly previous to words: the innermost rays, the first messengers, the primeval, honourable beasts of our being, whose voice echoes wordless and for ever wordless down the dark avenues of the soul, but full of potent speech. Our own inner meaning.
Now we have to educate ourselves, not by laying down laws and inscribing tables of stone, but by listening. Not listening-in to noises from Chicago or Timbuktu. But listening-in to the voices of the honourable beasts that call in the dark paths in the veins of our body, from the God in the heart. Listening inwards, inwards, not for words nor for inspiration, but to the lowing of the innermost beasts, the feelings, that roam in the forest of the blood, from the feet of God within the dark, red heart.
This we know, now, for good and all: that which is good, and moral, is that which brings into us a stronger, deeper flow of life and life-energy: evil is that which impairs the life-flow.
All goals become graves.
We live in a multiple universe. I am a chick that absolutely refuses to chirp inside the monistic egg. See me walk forth, with a bit of egg-shell sticking to my tail!
The Greeks, being sane, were pantheists and pluralists, and so am I.
Too much anthropos makes the world a dull hole.
From Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, “Him With His Tail in His Mouth”:
There are too many people on earth
insipid, unsalted, rabbity, endlessly hopping.
They nibble the face of the earth to a desert.
From “All-Knowing”:
All that we know is nothing,
we are merely crammed waste-paper baskets
unless we are in touch with that
which laughs at all our knowing.
From The Plumed Serpent:
Gods should be iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm. Man creates a God in his own image, and the gods grow old along with the men that made them. But storms sway in heaven, and the god- stuff sways high and angry over our heads. Gods die with men who have conceived them. But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard. Like the sea in storm, that beats against the rocks of living, stiffened men, slowly to destroy them. Or like the sea of the glimmering, ethereal plasm of the world, that bathes the feet and the knees of men as earth-sap bathes the roots of trees. Ye must be born again. Even the gods must be born again. We must be born again.
The soul! If only the soul in man, in woman, would speak to her, not always this strange, perverse materialism, or a distorted animalism. If only people were souls, and their bodies were gestures from the soul! If one could but forget both bodies and facts, and be present with strong, living souls!
From Etruscan Places:
You cannot dance gaily to the double flute and at the same time conquer nations or rake in large sums of money.
But the soul itself, the conscious spark of every creature, is not dual; and being the immortal, it is also the altar on which our mortality and our duality is at last sacrificed.
