Old Writings
In old writings of some old writers there is a real, flowing emotion, such that the words become a thick sky, a thick dark sky about you that you breathe in deep as you read. The emotion engulfs you in your lungs, heaving in and out of you as you stare from word to word. They wrote in a poetry, even when they abandoned rhyme and meter; there was a rhythm of the sway and pull of life, like a close pagan sky. You can see this in parts of the King James Bible, it is there in the Oddessey, and in the medieval writings of men like Aelfric and Chaucer and William of Glouchester. Some of it is even there in turn of the century writers like T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence.
But today it seems to have been lost. We write from our head now, and our prose reads like gaudy abstract clouds being reeled in fashion across a slick blue-tinted glass. Our poets have lost all their poetry, and instead write smug lines of intellectual metaphors, as gaudy as any cloud reeled across any slick blue-tinted glass. We have left the flow of our hearts’ blood out of our writing, just as surely as we have banned it from our living. Any emotions we “feel” are carefully edited and trimmed to mesh with the little, current dalliances of our heads, the little ideas and hypotheses we live on.
In trying to be universal men, and universal women, we have only boxed ourselves into the locality of our small “modern” society. Small, as all words must be, that are isolated, amputated from the cycle of man, the ancient generations of men working their lives in the folds of the close blue sky, centuries of men living from the silent germ and knowledge of their bodies a part of earth and sky. Instead today we are living in the local little world of our minds and our face-mask personalities, in the small little circle of what we call “objectivity.” It’s but a small little circle of enclosure, squeezing us into the tight bone-hard sacks of our skulls. We can feel our table-lamp personalities emanating out of our eyes, mouths and noses in cellophane yellow rays of filmed, edited, produced, and distributed “emotions.” It is the light bulb of our head, as opposed to the flickering, burning, delicate flame of what used to be known as the heart, or breast, or flow of our blood.
And so we have the universal man, stretching out his eyes and tongue and ears into the modern sterile universe. And filling it. And at the same time being over-blown by it.
For it is a universe created by logos, out of logos, and steadied from within by the dacron thread guidewires of logos. Man become God and logos and circus acrobat. Both filled and emptied by the cellophane yellow ramp of his own eyes, his own noses, his own mouths.
So that our modern writing is but this logos on paper; all of our head, and not a bit from our close ancient sky-life in our lungs, or the rosy, wide sun that feeds the delicate warm flame in our breast. We are bereft of the warm flesh body below our necks. Though we worship it and exercise it, and push it to limits, and carry our pride in it, we are bereft of it, for we have stored and fitted it into the new modern prisons of our new modern heads. We can use our bodies in security, because of the surety and control of our modern prisons. There will be no mild riots or disorderlinesses: for we act from the logos stamped and sealed in our minds, within the tight bone-structure of our skulls, never from the little warm flame in our bodies—much to the detriment and waste of the stark, white, cyclic sun over our heads.
What we are missing is the strange, full emotion and pull of writing like this:
“Life with its smoky burning gone from him, had left him apart and utterly alien to her. And she knew what a stranger he was to her. In her womb was ice of fear, because of this separate stranger with whom she had been living as one flesh. Was this what it all meant—utter, intact separateness, obscured by heat of living? In dread she turned her face away. The fact was too deadly. There had been nothing between them, and yet they had come together, exchanging their nakedness repeatedly. Each time he had taken her, they had been two isolated beings, far apart as now. He was no more responsible than she. The child was like ice in her womb. For as she looked at the dead man, her mind, cold and detached, said clearly: “Who am I? What have I been doing? I have been fighting a husband who did not exist. He existed all the time. What wrong have I done? What was that I have been living with? There lies the reality, this man.” And her soul died in her for fear: she knew she had never seen him, he had never seen her, they had met in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they met or whom they fought. And now she saw, and turned silent in seeing. For she had been wrong. She had said he was something he was not; she had felt familiar with him. Whereas he was apart all the while, living as she never lived, feeling as she never felt.” D. H. Lawrence
We have never seen the sun, but with our heads, we have never tasted the wind, felt the damp earth, stared at the moon, smelled of the blood of the pine, but with the educated modern personality of our heads; as if they were cut free, independent lives all themselves. Little, cut free people of heads.
