Wrenching Laurentian setting with D.H. Lawrence and…? Clarify for Ox?

*Almost all of my other articles are “activist-oriented” pieces. This is so…only obliquely.*

*I will add to what’s here over the next few days….*

In Beckett’s *Murphy* there’s a passage which describes the protagonist’s attitude toward life. It expresses something very similar to what an old girlfriend of mine once said about her job as an attendant at a hospital for the insane. Her words ran parallel to Murphy’s feeling for the patients at *his* hospital and

“his loathing of the textbook attitude towards them, the complacent scientific conceptualism that made contact with outer reality the index of mental well-being…. All this was duly revolting to Murphy, whose experience as a physical and rational being obliged him to call sanctuary what the psychiatrists called exile and to think of the patients not as banished from a system of benefits but as escaped from a colossal fiasco.”

That’s the passage. And I pray that it’ll serve as *a passage* out of what we’ve all been mired in of late…for my readers.

My readers, ruled by so-called rationalists, out of touch with their solar plexus insights.

Consider what Burgess said of Lawrence: “He did not understand rational argument, or even wish to: it was a kind of weak concession to reality, which had to be approached through visceral conviction and not the pale reductions of ratiocination.”

It is gorgeous to live and forget

And to feel quite new.

See the bird in the flowers?

He thinks the whole sky blue

Much less than his bit of blue egg.

In our nest’s

What’s true.

– Tortured *truncation* of a D.H. Lawrence poem

Response to poetry

Should always be physical

Whiskers bristling

Impeding the razor

A shudder down the spine

A tightening of the scrotum

Tears.

– Twisting the words of Anthony Burgess and A.E. Housman