[Dean's World] Celia Farber: Erectile Dysfunction And The Modern Writer

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Posted by Celia Farber:
Erectile Dysfunction And The Modern Writer
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1169753573.shtml


   "Naturally," wrote the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, in one of her
   essays on poetry, "I prefer I writer who feels but doesn't write to
   one who writes but doesn't feel."

   I'm with her. The world is dying from repression, wherever you look. I
   know of no more brilliant prophecy of our castrated society than the
   novella "St. Mawr," by D.H. Lawrence, in which an American Aristocrat
   falls in love with a horse who throws her British, Upper U, perfectly
   ghastly, erudite, pithy, nothing-from-the-hips down husband off his
   back. Fixes it so he is liteally as well as figuratively paralyzed
   from the waist.

   An outtake--a scene between the society bound, depressed mother and
   the nature seeking, isolationist daughter, as they prepare to sail
   back to America, from England.

   "My dear daughter, whatever else the human animal might be, he'd be a
   dangerous commodity." "I wish he would, mother. I'm dying of these
   empty, dangerless men, who are only sentimental and spiteful."
   "Nonsense, you're not dying. "I am, mother."

   The deep, wild, merciless humor of D. H. Lawrence rarely gets
   acknowledged, I feel. Just as people can't seem to grasp that Ringo is
   a sensationally creative and gifted drummer. But what can you do,
   about people? They say things knowingly, en masse, so wrong, such as:
   "Ringo couldn't really...phlay...." (spelled with an "h.")

   This is when you realize millions of people are functionally deaf. And
   they are dangerous. But we are going to deal with them all, help them
   out, even.

   Since I am having so much fun, and before the net comes down and
   closes around me and lifts me thrashing to my next cage, let me quote
   the ever brilliant Mr. Lawrence on what he meant with that horse, St.
   Mawr, (and do read it if you haven't for it is Lawrence at his
   terrifying best.)

   In his last work, Apocalypse, written in 1931, Lawrence explained:

   "The horse is a dominant symbol...he links us, the first palpable and
   throbbing link with the ruddy-glowing Almighty of potency: he is the
   beginning even of our godhead in the flesh and as a symbol he roams
   the dark underworld meadows of the soul...Within the last fifty years
   man has lost the horse. Now man is lost...lost to life and power."

   Lawrence wrote that in 1931.

   So why do I bring this up? Because I am thinking of blood rush, rage,
   horses, war. Men. Women. The word. Lawrence's Mawr is said to be,
   "...a conflict between the raw vitality of wild nature and what he
   considered to be the sterility and sickness of modern industrial
   society."

   And thank Pan he is not here to see this. 

   We live in a world where we have permitted the pharmaceutical industry
   to govern even the blood flow of the male erection. In modern
   journalism, which I like to spitefully call Pottery Barn Journalism,
   we have de-weeded all words and sentiment that grow against
   prediction-- a very precisely measured height of grass blade. All else
   makes us panic and reach for our "crazy" metaphors. No wonder Hunter
   S. Thompson could take no more. When blood flows into language, when
   feelings get to be real feelings and not lies, sulphuric and
   ungovernable, we all rush in to close the wound, an instinctive
   tourniquet against blood flow. I do it too. But I have been alerted to
   the disingenuity of this reflex. An epistolary exchange, [1]here:

References

   1. http://barnesworld.blogs.com/barnes_world/2007/01/the_dissolution.html