Listening to Rachmaninoff

My first experience of a live performance of Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto occurred in Los Angeles when I was fifteen. Van Cliburn was the soloist with the L.A. Philharmonic. His playing of the noble, plaintive initial theme still rings in my mind, so assured and expressive in its shape, and needless to say, his command of the work’s surging virtuosity was compelling to my adolescent ears. This was a year after Cliburn won the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow, as he had a few years earlier won the Levintritt Competition in New York. His recording of the Rachmaninoff became a favorite of mine, to be partly supplanted first by Horowitz’s performance in the 70s and Argerich’s in the 80s. Here's a link to the Van Cliburn cd: https://www.amazon.com/Sergei-Rachmaninoff-Piano-Concerto-No-3/dp/B00AGU1S8M/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1547609140&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=rachmaninoff+piano+concerto+3+van+cliburn
- one to the Horowitz: Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No 3; and one to the Argerich performance: Rachmaninoff: Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30 / Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor, Op. 23.

At eighteen I took a couple of piano lessons from the great pianist Egon Petri, who lived then a few miles south of U.C. Berkeley, where I attended college. His recording of the late Beethoven piano sonatas had been a great favorite of mine (here is a link to the cd Beethoven Sonatas: Egon Petri in Recital; see my earlier post on other great performances of those sonatas). In awe I visited his apartment and absorbed all I could. He already was suffering from his last illness, and he connected me to one of his best pupils, Julian White – a brilliant pianist and generous teacher like Petri, offering particularly keen insights into the structure of phrases, passages, and movements. I took lessons from White for three years.

At one of our lessons, he told me about his experiences as a student at Julliard and his friendship with Van Cliburn. When Cliburn was training” for the Levintritt competition, Julian told me to my amazement, their mutual teacher Rosina Lhevinne asked White to be a sort of all-day coach. I was nineteen when I heard this story, and I made an assumption about White’s help, which I now realize was false. I imagined that White had served to prompt musical passion and engagement in the great young pianist, as if he were a sort of blank tablet. Listening again to Cliburn’s recordings from the fifties through the seventies, I realize that can’t have been true, for what Van Cliburn possesses at his core is passion, even to the point of violence. What White probably provided was an auditor to help in pacing practice and a sense of occasion for the discipline involved – and perhaps also what he provided for me: insights into structure, shaping and controlling the beauty of phrases, the passion of passages.

I’m prompted to think about all this because I’ve searched for a recorded performance of Rachmaninoff’s second piano sonata which echoes the extraordinary poignancy of Alexander Ghindin’s Master Class performance of the slow second theme of the first movement, a few weeks ago. Only Cliburn’s recording comes close (a link to that performance on cd: Great Pianists 19).

some plans

Over this past week, I've planned to write about Hemingway and Babel, about Walter Benjamin and Derrida, and about some performances I admire of classical music. I'll try in these next weeks to offer comments on each (though they'll be curtailed due to added commitments which have arisen).

I'm hoping to comment on the issue of how Hemingway and Babel differently portray ways of surviving in a hostile universe - and, with regard to the former, I'm struck by the bearing of two quotations on his work. One is Lawrence's remark the Hemingway fearlessly reveals what it feels like to lose all hope. The other remark is more obliquely relevant; it's W. C. Williams' idea in introducing the little magazine he edited in the early 1920s: "Contact" is a man without abstract analysis, parody, abstract ethics - with nothing but immediate contact with his world.

And I'm interested in how the French philosopher Jacques Derrida has made use of Walter Benjamin's thinking about repairing the broken world, attending to what disappears into its cracks and fissures, and defining the role of hope in human life. The link I'll try to explore is between Derrida's Spectres of Marx and Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in Illuminations.

Finally, I intend to comment on some of the musical performances which I've found most moving and illuminating - there are performances of Beethoven I'm tempted again to cite, but I'll let a single example about Schuber suffice for now: Sviatoslav Richter's performance of Schubert's last piano sonata (D. 960 in B-flat), playing the first movement at an unusually slow tempo which allows him to convey with great force the beauty in every phrase. [Here's a link to the cd: Schubert: Piano Sonatas D.958, D.960 ~ Richter .]

Conclusion of "Under Western Eyes" and Silence (plus a note on Alexander Ghindin)

On Friday (August 5^th), I was in the audience of a master class offered by the great Russian pianist Alexander Ghindin to three participants in the Cleveland International Piano Competition. Mr. Ghindin, a member of the competition jury, is a brilliant teacher as well as pianist, offering a wealth of insight and advice without diminishing the student. The second pianist had performed the Rachmaninoff Piano Sonata, op. 36 (original version) during the semi-finals of the competition, and when he played the first bar for Ghindin, the Russian immediately offered extraordinary suggestions to reconceive and release the power of the opening. The most poignant moment in this session occurred when the slow theme sounded out less than two minutes into the sonata. Again, Mr. Ghindin offered a suggestion, and when he illustrated how the passage should be phrased, he played with such sorrow and tenderness that tears came to my eyes. Then he spoke of a Russian notion of pathos – of the isolation of suffering, of sadness, compassion, and yearning for happiness all mixed together. But it was his playing of the single line of music which spoke most eloquently of these things, incredibly tender and piercing. [Here is a link to one of Ghindin's cds: Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos 1 & 4 (Original Versions).]

There is a powerful expression of such empathic sorrow in Conrad's creation of the Russian women characters in Under Western Eyes. These characters struggle for meaning in a world where meaning is silenced; in such a realm, the capacity to empathize and to perceive another without blinders is endangered, for in this world compassion is manipulatively selective or erased from consciousness. Apart from Razumov, most of the Russian men enact totalitarian roles, even the travestied revolutionary Peter Ivanovich, an unholy combination of Kropotkin and Bakunin. Russian women, however, join Razumov in choosing to cast off their erased and betrayed status and to emerge, even if into silence and suffering, "to burn rather than rot" (177), to struggle for meaning within its silencing in a totalized society. [Here, again, is the Amazon link: Under Western Eyes (Penguin Classics).]

These women characters - Sophia Antonovna, Tekla, Mrs. Haldin, and above all the daughter Natalia - ironically and unstably shift between opposed roles, and their ambiguity constitutes a crucial structural tension in the novel. Western romance conventions shadow Razumov’s realization of “the possibility of being loved” by Natalia, but his discovery prompts the nightmare realization of what Sophia calls the “ignominy” of existence in the East (266).  There is a Dostoyevskian role of women, which is searchingly intense, revelatory, yet nurturing – Peter Ivanovich voices the standard cliché: "Admirable Russian women!" (86) – and in this novel it collides with the image of women as traditional heroines from Western fiction, gifted in attuning the community to the "heart's" needs. The instability of these characters - correctively shifting between Eastern and Western images and conventions - reinforces the sense of modern emergency in characterization and narrative convention. The portrait of these women characters enacts a sense of crisis in the silenced and erased status of the "human," a crisis in sustaining the capacity for empathic comprehension in the modern world. 

Perhaps the best way to describe the critical and structural instability achieved by Conrad is to broach the notion of "playing dead" - as a means of exploring the deadnesses of modern existence. The self-hobbling, interiorized, Dostoyevskian confession is a form of such playing dead, simultaneously desired by the totalitarian state yet not perfectly fulfilling its wishes, for Dostoyevskian confession subverts the totalitarian version of confessional rhetoric, making it the instrument for an unpredictable disorder and fullness of possibility, for polyphony to use Bakhtin's resonant term. In the case of Razumov's journal, its apparent "deadness" (with its implicit acquiescence in the act of confession) masks a subversive, invigorating flux of possibility, above all the possibility of contact.

For the victims of such a world of numbing simulation and lies, it is no accident that these characters should exhibit "a generosity in their ardour of speech which removes it as far as possible from common loquacity," as the Professor observes (6). This Russian ethos of contact – this use of language and form – offers a model for many future efforts in modern fiction to draw a voice from the silence of the controlled, "totalized," insulated world its characters inhabit. Thus Natalie Sarraute writes: "[A] continual, almost maniacal need for contact ... attracts all such characters like dizziness and incites them on occasions to try, by any means whatsoever, to clear a path to the 'other,' to penetrate him as deeply as possible and make him lose his disturbing, unbearable opaqueness" (33). 

Razumov's desperate act of "contact" is his confession to the very persons he has betrayed. In this way he subverts and silences the totalized expectations of his speech; after he is deafened for his troubles, he exists in a world of exterior silence, "playing" or appearing dead in terms of the fabrications and prefabrications of the totalized society. Yet as a result he is himself contacted, cared for, and listened to by Sophia, Tekla, and others, and he becomes a source of meaningful speech for the alienated inhabitants outside and silenced by the totalized field. Razumov and his fragile circle of survivors face the haunted, illusory specter - the deadness - of their society, and their role is not only to tell the dangerous, potentially immolating truths, to grieve in advance for all the betrayals their society suffers and enacts; their role is also to testify to the possibility of just and compassionate relations.

In "Autocracy and War," Conrad writes that - in the face of societal delusion and oppression - it is only by using "our sympathetic imagination" that we may glimpse the possibility of any "triumph of concord and justice" (84) [see this link to Conrad's Notes on Life and Letters]. In the end, Razumov and his listeners inhabit the land of the silenced where they struggle to imagine and communicate fragmentary, forecasting images of what community, freedom, truth, and justice might be. These characters thus embody a sort of waiting described by later writers - from Walter Benjamin (264) and Adorno (247) to Derrida (168) - a waiting which places their suffering and grief in the perspective of possibility: that the future may yet exist, obliterated though it now is, decipherable perhaps in the paradoxical cracks and crevices of a narrative which allows the significance of Razumov's silence to manifest itself. 

The idea of "playing dead" - and all it may signify - applies even to the British professor. Concerned always with detachment in manner and sentimental propriety in plot, his narration is "dead" to the motives and issues of the scenes he observes, issues we discover from Razumov's juxtaposed journal. As one reads the professor's narration, its deadness - its clichés, its imperceptions, its incapacity to comprehend or express the lives it attempts to render - becomes a structural paradox, for it is only in the West - inside Geneva and this Professor's denying, sentimentalizing narration - that the utterances of the novel exist at all. The novel thus becomes a model of how to balance East and West with and against one another, in order to allow for the mutual survival of human beings on both sides of the Slavic/Western or any imperial, racial, or national divide. The denials and deadnesses of the West become equally, then, a rhetoric of "playing dead," a paradoxical cover for the struggle to use speech to utter meaning. For Conrad, only in ironic tension and perspective can either language - Slavic or Western - be retrieved from its deadnesses; only so can silence produce meaning. (Rather different approaches to the significance of “silence” in Conrad can be found in studies by Carabine, Fogel, and GoGwilt.)

Conrad's art is based in a language which plays on the edge of silence. This is the core paradox of his modernism: his art would use language as if it utters meaning in order simultaneously to expose language's failure to convey meaning and sustain the vanishing possibility that meaning can be conveyed. Hence, silence becomes the sign of truth, of escape from the being and world of lies: the deaf Razumov at novel's end is visited by the characters whose endurance is nurtured by hearing him utter some form of truth from within his silence. Once again, the narrative emerges from silence and honors its origins. Conrad offers here an image of tragically belated romanticism; when Razumov writes in his journal on Rousseau's Island in Lake Geneva, he asks the same questions which Rousseau's Solitary Traveler posed there a century and a half before (206). Can we use silence and irony, the suspension and negation or "forgetting" of the self's roles, to create meaning?

In the answer offered by modernism's language for the arts, silence becomes speech, fragmentation suggests an absent wholeness, absence implies presence, dissonance is all the harmony there is, and descent into the heart of darkness can yield visionary illumination. In Under Western Eyes, Conrad employs modernist strategies akin to those in Heart of Darkness, where the totalitarian abomination is racist imperialism rather than autocracy. In each text, Conrad indicts the symbiosis of colonizer and colonized, master and servant, the former transformed - with god-like presumption and absolutism - into an instrument of barbaric domination, the latter struggling with desperate absoluteness to overcome dehumanized subjection. In the dialectical vision of each text, the reader is located at the focal point of modernist paradox, where endless interrogation dominates and exposes every facet of the human, where the "human" is driven into silence and negation and the literary text forced into fragmentation and perspectivism. 

In Conrad's novel of 1911, the reader experiences a far-reaching deconstruction of conceptions of the Slavic and of Russia; we are made to explore a paradoxical field where all "truths" are revealed to be compounded with illusion, all speech compounded with silence. Conradian perspectivism exposes the implacable insecurity of basing the struggle for meaning in any national, ethnic, or societal images; meaning is achieved only, if at all, in the shared recognition that it emerges from silence, from its own erasure. Compassion is an imaginative act in this regard, for it operates against all societal prompts to the contrary: "sympathetic imagination" - as Conrad calls it - locates the human and imagines meaning within the silenced and erased "other" who faces one across the divides which society erects. To act "as if" meaning exists, with a continual awareness of its emergence from erased images and silenced voices, is what can be achieved in a world where all manifestations of individual and community are shown to be either instruments or victims of interrogative domination. For Conrad, any conception of individual or community which now arises or endures can emerge only from the resulting silence. As if silence were a form of speech. 

Conrad's Under Western Eyes and Silence, continued (first section is an 11-2010 post):

Here's the continuation of the November 2010 post containing the start of my essay, which was published in Slavic and Eastern European Journal (issue 45:2, pp. 231-242).

The deepest terror exhibited and forecast by Under Western Eyes’ images of terrorism, autocracy, and the struggle to endure in Russian life is that, under circumstances of total simulation and dissimulation, truth disappears into silence, and reality undergoes an absolute erasure and substitution. Here we enter the region of Conrad's "néant," of negation. Conrad's readers are themselves made to experience a version of this negation, for the self-reflexive effect of the British professor's unreliable narration is to place them in the position of questioning the Western assumptions embedded in the text as a document written in English.

The resulting self-conscious and paradoxical perspectivism destabilizes our reading which depends on the Western professor's on-going narrative even when, for example, we realize that the compassion and perception he refuses to most of the Russians are what their struggle with erasure and suffering requires and embodies. "I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and hopeless cynicism," he writes even about the Russian with whom he sympathizes the most, Natalia Haldin (76).

The concept of Russian cynicism helps us again to observe how a motif is made to break down in the novel, and reveal instability and negation. On one side is the Professor's condescension for Natalia's "naive and hopeless cynicism" - his snide "key-word" for his chronicle (49). On the other, we find the protagonist Razumov's paradoxical formulation, contorted by fear and despair, of Russian suffering: '''Stoicism! That's a pose ... We are Russians, that is - children; that is - sincere; that is - cynical, if you like. But that's not a pose!'" (147). Further, there is the revolutionary Sophia Antonovna's comment that "'women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action'" (197). The novel's ironic questioning of irony is as brilliantly dislocating as it is compelling, for these carefully designed structural collisions and negations prompt readers to become as morally alert and delving as possible.

Found everywhere on this vertiginous landscape of dislocation is the primary mechanism of communication at work within a totalizing system and practiced even by Conrad's central, English narrator: that is, "interrogation" – detached, reductive, and imposing, for example, the Englishman's censure and sentimentality on the interrogated. Interrogation in his case is a metaphor to characterize the British professor's point of view on "things Russian," but in Conrad's vision of Russian life interrogation is more than metaphoric. It is at the core of experience itself, and most of the novel's key scenes involve acts of interrogation: the revolutionist Haldin's testing of Razumov and then the Intelligence bureaucrat Mikulin's questioning of both of them, the myriad interrogations of Razumov by the Geneva Russians - the Haldins, Sophia Antonovna, not to mention Peter Ivanovich - and finally Razumov's own self-interrogation in his Dostoyevskian journal.

Why is the intrusion and inquisition of interrogation essential in a totalized society like the Russian autocracy? It is the tool that allows the Intelligence apparatus (the brain of a totalitarian body politic) to confront the silence - and shape the speech - of the totalized Russian society presented by Conrad. The passive, impervious, even moribund nature of this body politic informs the recurrent image of a body - drunk, dead, or asleep - suspended in a vast frozen waste, and this image of groundless suspension in a frozen blank white void applies above all to Razumov. Silence is the meaning of these many encompassing images of being frozen alive, and is the focus of Conrad's interrogation of Russia and, finally, of language itself. The haunted fatality of this vision is confirmed by its echoing of Adam Mickiewicz's classic Polish critique of Russia eighty years earlier, the "Digression" in Forefather's Eve of 1832; Czeslaw Milosz writes that Conrad "seems to repeat its contents line for line in . . . Under Western Eyes" (225)

Silence is a signal characteristic of the frozen Russian wastes here. The novel's images of suspended corpses are silent, and as well the holders of power - Prince K, Councilor Mikulin, etc. - mumble or are silent; the key words in their sentences are ellipses, erasures, silences. The "truths" of Razumov's story are silenced, and by the end of the novel his world is literally silence: his eardrums are shattered by the counterspy Nikita’s gun. This final silence of Razumov's world merely makes manifest its actual condition: all previous hearing and speech have been invalidated by lies, within himself and within the world he inhabited; both the official story or history and his personal version are compounded of falsifications. The brunt and import of the novel's interrogation, then, reveal that language capable of uttering meaning is silenced in the Geneva of the revolutionaries, the Petersburg of the autocracy, and indeed the Europe of modernity.

The interrogatory rhetoric - of the nearly mute aristocrats and of the strategically mumbling Intelligence chief in Russia - plays at a silence which invites the interrogated to fill the gaps, to accede to and participate in a totalized societal speech. What the society evokes is, then, not only passivity and imperviousness, but also a sort of participation taking the peculiar form, however, of confession. Though, as we saw, Conrad was highly critical of Dostoevsky, this novel has characters who echo Crime and Punishment; and of course Razumov's confessional journal represents a development of the novel genre modeled by Dostoevsky, not least in Notes from Underground. Mikulin's interrogation of Razumov draws from him what is desired, confession, collusion, and betrayal, but in a Dostoyevskian confessional form which the interrogating apparatus does not expect and cannot decipher. Against the interrogating rhetoric of the totalized Slavic society, this "Slavic" English novel pits an alternative equally characteristic of Slavic culture - a confessional rhetoric based in a sort of silence.

Totalitarian speech, in sum, ironically and unstably calls forth the upwelling confessional speech it requires, but in a hybrid form undecipherable to it. In a further irony, the opacity of Razumov's confession complicates and reinforces what we have noted is the ironic doubleness of his character, making him simultaneously a haunted Petersburg hero of Eastern genre and origin and a coldly "English" rational Western temperament, though the latter recedes by novel's end. Finally, the novel's narrative structure ironically juxtaposes Razumov's Dostoyevskian confession with the British professor's narration and "translation" of that narrative. A Slavic literary form, then, is paired against and interacts with a more traditional, conventionally Western version of the novel genre, and a mutually deconstructive tension results, measuring Eastern and Western rhetoric against each other.

I'll post the conclusion of this essay next week. 

Here are Amazon links to Conrad's novel and to Dostoyevsky's two works cited above: Under Western Eyes (Penguin Classics) and Crime and Punishment (Penguin Classics)  and Notes from Underground and The Double (Penguin Classics).

Notes on the modern period -29 - Apocalypse and the modern imagination

During and after the First World War – with its ten million dead – modern writers contemplated the bearing on their time of the idea of apocalypse, its violent abnegation of life and its apparent rejection of all that is living and whole. The engagement of this idea resulted in part from having witnessed European civilization’s hurling itself into what seemed an abyss of self-destruction. I want to describe the illuminating parallel between two such visions of apocalypse, one by Walter Benjamin in his first book, written in 1925, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and the other by D. H. Lawrence in his last book, written in 1929, Apocalypse. (Here's an Amazon link to the Lawrence: Apocalypse (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D.H. Lawrence) .

Walter Benjamin’s book is a study of the German baroque drama, but his argument ranges beyond the nature of baroque tragedy to the idea of “the state of emergency” and the quite modern antithesis between an encompassing “catastrophe” and the “restoration” of life. Lawrence’s book is a study of John of Patmos’ “Book of Revelations” in the New Testament, but his discussion also ranges beyond the Biblical idea of apocalypse to address the crucial modern tension between catastrophe the hope for restoration.

Benjamin describes the baroque yearning for a transcendent order designed to reign in and ultimately negate the vitality of the Renaissance and its restoration of Classical humanism and its “pagan glorification.” In the baroque era, the sought-for metaphysical order aims for a “complete stabilization” of “the worldly and despotic aspects of [the energy intrinsic to] the rich feeling for life characteristic of the Renaissance.” In fear of the recurrence and “restoration” of that “feeling for life,” the baroque develops a conception of the “state of emergency” as the last and terrible means to trap and regulate the vital chaos of life. Similarly, the baroque version of “heaven” becomes an antithetical instrument for fearful purgation and regulation, whereby the “hereafter is emptied of everything which contains the slightest breath of this world.” (Here's an Amazon link to Benjamin's book: The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Radical Thinkers).)

The modern version of the baroque apocalypse connects the eradication of life with the suicidal advances in the mechanization of war (not to mention the soulless mechanization of mass society). Both the baroque’s orderly purgation of life and the rationalized suicide of modern Europe’s wars yield the apocalyptic sensation of living in a world that “is being driven along to a cataract.” This world, headed for the abyss, is “haunted by the idea of catastrophe,” of life being wiped out.

In the baroque period, an elaborate, sometimes grotesque art results; such art “clings closely” to the smallest, most discarded things in life, which exist under the threat of the world’s eradication. As a result, baroque art, rather like modern art, “extracts a profusion of things which customarily escaped the grasp of artistic formulation and, at its high point, brings them violently into the light of day, in order to clear the way for an ultimate heaven, enabling it, as a vacuum, one day to destroy the world with catastrophic violence.” The “violence” of such art zeroes in on any signs of “pagan glorification” and reproduces them even as it distorts these signs of life’s vitality.

That paradox is embedded in the façade of the baroque Mexican cathedral dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe, with its unholy mix of Christian and native pagan iconography, just as it is at work in Benjamin’s portrait of the baroque German tragic drama, with its demented sovereigns and its apocalyptic final acts.

When we turn to modern art and literature, we can find a similar paradox whereby the gestures and images of ordinary life are estranged and often beautifully deformed – the nude body or  box of unsmoked Gauloises in a Matisse or Picasso painting, the mud-dripped church or the vacant streets of modern cities in a Gaudi building or an Eliot poem. To an extent, as Carlos Fuentes argues, America itself is a paradoxically baroque construct invented in the seventeenth century, and the modern manifestations of America reproduce – to an exaggerated extreme – the baroque conjunction of puritanism and paganism, of sun-desiccated metaphysics and darkly lush sensuality, of abstract ideals and the earthy vista of freedom.  In modernity as in the baroque, there is an unstable embrace of such contradictions, simultaneously contemplating the wiping away of the things of this world and their distorted “glorification.”

D. H. Lawrence developed a similar conception in his Studies in Classic American Literature (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)  and above all in his last work, Apocalypse. In the former work, America is seen as haunted by the apocalyptic death of the old world and the challenge of creating the new world; for example, in Lawrence’s view of Whitman and Melville, death surrounds the human being who must use his isolated will to transform the bare force of nature and construct himself and his ties to other humans from the encounter. But for our purposes, Lawrence’s last work is most relevant and illuminating.

In Apocalypse, Lawrence identifies the deadly danger of modernity, which impedes the affirmative contact with nature and the resulting potential for self-creation. His description of “The Book of Revelations” parallels Benjamin’s portrait of the baroque, even with regard to the two Christian visions of the state, for in “Revelations,” the worldly operations of the state, let alone of the body, are anathema and must be apocalyptically purged. Yet this “dark side,” this “resistance” to “the things that the human heart secretly yearns after,” is a refusal of “what man most passionately wants…his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of the ‘soul.’” “By the very frenzy with which the Apocalypse destroys the sun and the stars, the world, and all kings and all rulers, all scarlet and purple and cinnamon, all harlots, finally all men altogether who are not ‘sealed,’ we can see how deeply the Apocalyptists are yearning for the sun and the stars and the earth” and the rest of life.

How can the great rush toward death be stopped? Can human beings restore their sense of life, of vital consciousness, and “what the old Greeks meant by…theos”? In a wonderful passage about the restoration of language itself from his 1929 book, Lawrence again parallels Benjamin, who in “On Language as Such and the Language of Man” asserts that in the act of “naming, the mental being of man communicates itself to God.” (Here is a link to the book containing Benjamin's essay - Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings). Lawrence describes the “old Greek” way of naming the water which overcomes thirst, of naming the cold of the water in one’s mouth, “whatever struck you was god.” If the water was cold “as you touched it: then another god came into being, ‘the cold.’” For Lawrence, the names themselves, the words, are sacramental “things themselves, realities, gods, theoi. And they did things,” they restored human consciousness and imagination to life in a way similar to what Lawrence hoped the language itself of his lyrical and incantatory poetry and fiction would achieve.

Let the language of Lawrence’s own conclusion end this post: “What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.”