D.H. Lawrence (whaddayu mean, NP?)

[Glenn Scheper]

Part 1 of 2.

> "A Would-Be-Dirty Mind": D.H. Lawrence as an Enemy of Joyce
> http://www.sfu.ca/%7Edelany/lawrjoyce.htm

> Should be at least interesting to Glenn.


Thanks, Otto. Yes indeed:

> "In this brief essay I attempt only to identify two major points
> of contention: realism as a method and sexuality as a subject."

> Joyce excites himself with a sacred love-object who
> displays for him her profane functions of excretion;

My primitive attempt at art for my wife, when I had fled north,
was a plan view of a toilet seat ring, showing her legs seated
upon it, from the top, also my penis over it, from the bottom,
which picture I labeled "Going together".

> ... would be for Lawrence prime examples of 'sex in the head,' the
> subordination of the physical act to a sophisticated consciousness of it.

> Joyce dwells obsessively on indirect or incomplete modes of consummation;

These two contrast the denunciation and celebration of tantric meditation.

> When Lawrence was twenty-two, he told a congregational
> minister that he had 'believed for many years that the Holy
> Ghost descended and took conscious possession of the elect--
> the converted one.

This I recognize as the right meaning of 'parousia', indwelling
of the Holy Spirit, rather than/also an epochal return of Christ.
But Lawrence rejected it, and Joyce chosing abjection embraced it.

> Lawrence ... making sexual union the center of his heterodox religion.

> But Joyce makes all sex sacramental in some degree...

> Lawrence makes distinctions and excludes. 
> ...the wrong kind of sex is the mark of preterition.

That is that same cutting-edge question that the always
doubly interpretable Paul asked of the Galatians:

2:21 I do not frustrate the grace of God:
for if righteousness come by the law,
then Christ is dead in vain.
3:1 O foolish Galatians,
who hath bewitched you,
that ye should not obey the truth,
before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth,
crucified among you?
3:2 This only would I learn of you,
Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law,
or by the hearing of faith?
3:3 Are ye so foolish?
having begun in the Spirit,
are ye now made perfect by the flesh?

I would not have known to quote it, but by dating my wife,
who has left the demanding pentacostal church and finds a
big hardly-a-murmer Baptist congregation more to her taste;
The first or second service the pastor spent the whole time
positioning Baptists as center, between legalism and license.
And then explains away exhortations to modesty, works, etc.,
are merely functional for an evangelical task. But I see they
have taken on this exteriority, this veneer of legalism, to
content themselves with a man's religion, and not search out
the tantric referents and Jesus' fundaments.

But the pentacostals fell on the other side of that divide.
I could no more tell the pentacostal pastor than the baptist
pastor about my tantric Christ. We are that taboo totem that
divides and puts the denominations at odds, neither accepting
Christ in the flesh. But their warring over the transcendental
spirit I liken to a U.S. tax law rule, that pledging an I.R.A.
as collateral constitutes a taxable early distribution of it.
That's how the rarefied spirit is to them both, no real dough.

In fact, it's Paul's excluded center (but which tantra he knows!)
given in the options above that are reflected in a Heart verse in
_Heartless_, "you never know how love dies when you crucify it so."
You will not hear the tantric matter, so kill Him, stop your ears.

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.