What is it about D. H. Lawrence's writing? Certainly it is beyond me to know. I am no threat to him. His words are not just alive, they are actual living animals. They heave with the respiration of a million little breasts.
Me, I am in awe, I can't believe.
The cold wind, once, waited in my own breath for me, with the slow patient awaiting of a wildflower for the sun to run its day; it once waited in my breath to heave the whisper ghost-heave that was vital breath to me, the coarse lungeing of my upper body, the air pulse and flow of my dappled breast; it once seethed in me, the chill, sprite wind, breathed its seed in me, ghost warmth-seed of my respiration. Once, and I gasp breath til it again.
Their blood was a cold protoplasm, like soggy cold cereal, all sugared up.
. . . soggy cold blood!
They were all like that, with their straitjacket suits—their arms hung but dead lumps at the sides, shriveled tame and white, blood all cut off. Absolute white and shriveled, like delicate glass inmates of a menagerie.
What was needed was a little rosy blood in them, and this the suits could not abet: for what the suits did, by design, was to pinch you at the neck and the shoulder nubs, pinch off your blood, that it could not, would not flow. And so men's arms turned white and soggy dead, and their heads, cut off, estranged from the body at the neck, turned mental and perverse, full tin-metal grey.
But, strange thing, once they were home resting in their chairs, suits off, in the ease of home-life, then the full blood ought to have flowed back, flowed back, renewing the channels in the arms, surging and filling them again: a flood. But it was not so. Their suits were innocently in the closet, hanging, their arms were erect and stiffened strong again—at least they ought to have been so. But no.
No, in their minds, in the minds of these sterile-white flopped-arm men, like habit, their suits were still roped around them; it was the constriction and the strickening off of the vital veins at the joints, so that no blood came. Their suits hanged innocently in the closet; but on the men remained still the soggy, rubbery, white lumps called arms. Hung on the hangers of their shoulders like limp penises.
Dawn and the sea. Thousand green-eyed dawn! Rippling mosaic, like a billion clover leaves.
Anyone who can say 'The clothes make the man' has no idea even what a man is. Clothes may be a part of a man's pretensions—but a man cannot be what he pretends to be: he cannot will himself into something. He can only alienate himself; he is then man alienated, nothing else. He is never a banker, no matter what he wears or how he talks or how he structures his mind, or where he prefers to stay all day.
Clothes do not make a man but they can hide him, disguise him, and leave him a life-forsaken creature, impotent and alone.
Well, the fact that the divorce rate in modern civilization is so high, tells me that it's so, he answered. Tells me that their love is half mental worship—like worship of God—worship of some abstract entity. The mental worship sort of love. It's obvious—from the red lipstick, shaved bare legs and face, narrowed eyebrows, perfumed cheeks—it's not so much the physical, natural girl they love—it's some idealized girl.
The ideal woman with her red red lips, bare plastic legs, and so on. No wonder they drool over Miss America contests—they're looking for the girl that most nearly fits this mental abstraction in their heads that they worship. The ideal girl, like an ideal triangle. Their love is mental. And it works vice versa of the women's love for men. They love “ideal qualities”, not men.
No wonder the divorce rate is so high—it's love in the minds—mental worship—but we change our minds so easily. So quickly sometimes. They turn out not to match our ideal abstraction of them—and this fowls up our worship-love.
The whole business is obscene, he said, obscene , and strikes deep inside at me. It disturbs me so. A real, physical and mental offensiveness to it.
Girls with plastic-smooth hairless legs. It's promiscuous.
A part of and sign of men's impotency and women's promiscuity.
CoffeeandTeaShow