Elemental

The Machine Will Never Triumph, part forty-six

The sea, the sea—

The sea dissolves so much
and the moon makes away with so much more than we know—

Once the moon comes down
and the sea gets hold of us
cities dissolve like rock-salt
and the sugar melts out of life
iron washes away like an old blood-stain
gold goes out into a green shadow
money makes even no sediment
and only the heart
glitters in salty triumph
over all it has known, that has gone now into salty nothingness.¹

We are living in the age of iron and silicon. These elements have seeped into our blood and are poisoning us spiritually—and physically. We urgently need a reinvigorated alchemy to transform the base elements of our lives into pure radiance. Our goal is not to turn lead to gold, but to turn iron and silicon into the waters and salts of life. If we make the moon our mistress, she will help to purify us; she will spiritually cleanse a certain part of our souls. People, look to the moon and sun and seas! They have the alchemical capacity to heal you. All of nature is inherently pure. The only impurities in nature come from the despicable and morally depraved things humans wreak upon the earth. “When the morning comes, and the sea runs silvery and the distant islands are delicate and clear, then I feel again, only man is vile. But man, at the moment, is very vile.”² And since man at the present moment is so prone to evil, it is time to turn to other forms of life and the great elements: earth, air, water, and fire. As Lawrence writes: “Basta! It is enough. It is enough of life. Let us have the vast elements. Let us get out of this loathsome complication of living humanly with humans. Let the sea wash us clean of the leprosy of our humanity: our humanness.”³ The vast oceans, the great mountains, and the flat plains may heal a man of his egoism if he gives himself up to the elemental spirits. Ultimately, we have been modern for a couple hundred years, but we have thousands of years of primitive life flowing through the blood in our veins. We can be far more in touch with daffodils, antelope, and even basalt, than we currently are with mechanical contrivances. As Klages writes: “The roots of my nature reach into antediluvian pre-history. There exists within me a sympathy with the most distant past, with the longest vanished stages of development, with the primitive basalt, with the oceans, clouds and storms.”⁴ Physically, we come from the elements, and to them we shall return, all elements being created from the same god-stuff as everything in existence. It is reassuring to know that the human has some form of eternal life after death, but the things we built in this world will be destroyed by the elements. Eventually, all the cities will crumble, and wind, water, earth, and fire will reclaim the territory that humanity dominated until this era comes to its end:

The polar ice-caps are melting, the mountain glaciers
Drip into the rivers; all feed the ocean;
Tides ebb and flow, but every year a little bit higher.
They will drown New York, they will drown London.
And this place, where I have planted trees and built a stone house,
Will be under sea. The poor trees will perish,
And little fish will flicker in and out the windows. I built it well,
Thick walls and Portland cement and gray granite,
The tower at least will hold against the sea’s buffeting, it will become
Geological, fossil, and permanent.
What a pleasure it is to mix one’s mind with geological
Time, or with astronomical relax it
There is nothing like astronomy to pull the stuff out of man,
His stupid dreams and red-rooster importance: let him count the
    star-swirls.⁵

Ancient forms of math and astronomy were intricately tied to spiritual practice, since the great teachers who transmitted our traditional wisdom knew that there exists beyond and behind corporeal manifestations a multitude of spiritual realities. Studied in the proper manner, astronomy is a great cure for egoism, but studied the modern way, looking at the sun as if it is nothing but a ball of gas, is a poison for the mind. If we get into a vital, organic touch with the elements, they can heal us, but if we assert ourselves as masters of the elements, they will eventually destroy us. R. S. Thomas clearly makes this point, as follows:

Cold beach, solitary
sea with its monotone
on the shingle; the ring
in the rock prohibiting
the conviction that no one
has been here before.

Man, is there anywhere
you can say this, peering
into the future under
the mushroom cloud? Mixed
with our oldest bones are
disturbing relics, too contemporary
to be there. In pre-history
someone came to this threshold
on which you hesitate
and crossed it, incinerating
the planet, leaving it
to life to lick its wounds
thousands of years. Thought
is as fast as light,
to exceed that brings annihilation
upon us.
        Yet wisdom
is at our elbow, whispering,
as at his once: Progress
is not with the machine;
it is a turning aside,
a bending over a still pool,
where bubbles arise
from unseen depths, as from truth
breathing, showing us by their roundness
the roundness of our world.⁶

To truly progress, we must progress away from the Machine, and back to the earth.

Fire

Fire is dearer to us than love or food,
hot, hurrying, yet it burns if you touch it.

What we ought to do
is not to add our love together, or our goodwill, or any of that,
for we’re sure to bring in a lot of lies,
but our fire, our elemental fire
so that it rushes up in a huge blaze like a phallus into hollow space
and fecundates the zenith and the nadir
and sends off millions of sparks of new atoms
and singes us, and burns the house down.⁷

Of all the elements, fire is the most divine. The God beyond being is the primordial Fire. Everything that exists, and especially anything that lives, is suffused with the divine Fire. As Malcolm de Chazal writes: “Water, air, the stratosphere have all been tamed and mounted like horses, and some day we may even ride the regions of outer space, but we will never succeed in riding fire. Fire can be imagined in the form of everything, including pure love, including even Hell, since fire is the symbol of symbols, the source-sun, the God-image. Symbols are always the riders, never the ridden. One cannot even imagine mounting fire.”⁸ Just as a worldly fire can bring us life, but can also bring us death, the primordial Fire is the source of the Gods, whose will should not be forsaken. If a person moves away from the Fire of life to the void of nothingness, pledging allegiance to the Machine, the Fire has the ability to make that nothingness a reality. But, if a person strives to live life fully, here and now, and bows down before the various manifestations of the divine Fire, then that person will have eternal life in a myriad of forms. Despite constant flux, the individual is maintained, since the fire never goes out. Each living person contains fire, and the more alive a person is, the more fiery is his blood. When multiple fiery people come together, the resulting spiritual power is greater than the sum of the parts, with each person fecundating fieriness in other individuals. When enough fiery people come together, the “house”—the Machine—will be burnt down.

Lawrence perceived that the earth itself is alive, not only the people, animals, and plants that inhabit it. Every part of the earth, and the earth itself, flows with life-force. The earth at her core is hot and fiery, and suffused with mystical fire. Getting in touch with the life-force pulsing through the earth, and revering the earth as a Goddess, invokes her blessing upon us and sends influxes of fiery life through our veins. But when we ignore her, and through industry and arrogance, hurt and maim her, then the earth sends great waves of punishment our way that will eventually drown us all. While our modern, scientific worldview teaches us that climate change and environmental collapse are purely impersonal responses to the ecological crimes of humanity, Lawrence sees the responses as highly personal and writes:

At the heart of this earth sleeps a great serpent, in the midst of fire. Those that go down in mines feel the heat and the sweat of him, they feel him move. It is the living fire of the earth, for the earth is alive. The snake of the world is huge, and the rocks are his scales, trees grow between them. I tell you the earth you dig is alive as a snake that sleeps. […] Yet he none the less lives. The earth is alive.

And if he died, we should all perish. Only his living keeps the soil sweet, that grows you maize. From the roots of his scales we dig silver and gold, and the trees have root in him, as the hair of my face has root in my lips.

The earth is alive. But he is very big and we are very small, smaller than dust. But he is very big in his life, and sometimes he is angry. These people, smaller than dust, he says, they stamp on me and say I am dead. Even to their asses they speak, and shout Arre! Burro! But to me they speak no word. Therefore I will turn against them, like a woman who lies angry with her man in bed, and eats away his spirit with her anger, turning her back to him.

That is what the earth says to us. He sends sorrow into our feet, and depression into our loins.

Because as an angry woman in the house can make a man heavy, taking his life from him, so the earth can make us heavy, make our souls cold, and our life dreary in our feet.

Speak then to the snake of the heart of the world, put oil on your fingers and lower your fingers for him to taste the oil of the earth, and let him send life into your feet and ankles and knees, like sap in the young maize pressing against the joints and making the milk of the maize bud among its hair.⁹

Fire [2]

Fire: did you ever warm your hands at the combustion of carbon and oxygen, or glow in the face from the formation of carbon dioxide by means of combustion? What do you see there, then, as the twigs crackle and the gold rushes out and ripples flapping brilliant to a peak of gold within the smoke? What is it then that lies red, and writhes a little, changes upon itself, glows upon you, gladdens the blood, faintly withdraws. What is it? Oh lovely Fire, what is it but you, lovely Fire, that was not and is, to my joy. Oh lovely fire on this chill day, as the sun goes down, I ask not how you nest and crackle so red, with pinions of swift gold, among the moving transfigured twigs! I ask not how nor whence nor whither, for if I ask I shall only answer myself with a thousand damp equivocations. I only ask that you shall be with me, bright, rustling, fierce-fanged fire, I only delight in your companionship that is nakeder and more interpenetrating than love, swift, swift ruddy one feathered with gold, that eludes every question forever. Elude then, elude their cold and mean little questions, these pale-lipped be-spectacled men! But for me, Oh again I am a wine-cup, and my chill heart is empty of wine. Oh pour, pour, pour in to the vessels of my heart, run in through the branched hands, hover like a butterfly ruddy on the cheeks that were chill, pulsing them with brilliant warmth, beautiful fire, beautiful fire, joy of my soul in this twilight, now the sun has gone and the blue shadow is thinking of hoar-frost, outside the house. But I am before the fire, and my heart is open.¹⁰

The previous poem is quite possibly the final poem Lawrence wrote, and it is a great, mystical, poem that surpasses the best of Rumi and other great mystical poets. First, Lawrence dismisses the scientific conception of fire. Though fire may, on the surface, be what science says, it is something much more profound that lies at the heart of fire. As such, Lawrence emphatically states that one should not inquire too much into things, since mental conceptions of primeval realities veil our hearts and minds to the true nature of things. This is why theology is not a fruitful science. To think too much about the Gods can withdraw us from their presence. All we really need to know is that the Gods are real, they are exceedingly near to us, and they are deserving of our love and worship. It is not helpful for us to ask what the Fire is. But if we can break our addiction to “thinking” and focus on simply being aware, then our awareness may come to encompass the living presence of the eternal Fire. And we need to empty ourselves of mental conceit, egoism, and the constraints of our socialization. When we become empty, the divine Fire can fill our cup—our heart and soul—to the brim with a life-nourishing nectar that will never be depleted. Few people today know the joy of the “peace that passeth all understanding,” but there are times when many people can experience both mental emptiness and the fullness of divine love, namely in the ecstasy of physical love. This, honed to an art, is an effective spiritual practice for those rightly guided by authentic tantric practitioners. Lawrence described his view of the tantric path as follows:

This is one way of transfiguration into the eternal flame, the transfiguration through ecstasy in the flesh. Like the tiger in the night, I devour all flesh, I drink all blood, until this fuel blazes up in me to the consummate fire of the Infinite. In the ecstasy I am Infinite, I become again the great Whole, I am a flame of the One White Flame which is the Infinite, the Eternal, the Originator, the Creator, the Everlasting God. In the sensual ecstasy, having drunk all blood and devoured all flesh, I am become again the eternal Fire, I am infinite.

This is the way of the tiger; the tiger is supreme.¹¹

Fire is a reality, not some physical or chemical process. Fire is fire, just as a God is a God. What can one state about the primordial Fire? Nothing save that it is the Fire. It just is. And all the small fires in our lives contain some of that primordial Fire. We also contain some of that Fire. It is woefully ignorant to claim, as moderns do, that we are nothing but an amalgam of amino acids, elements, etc. We are much more than the sum of our bodily parts. While science may investigate the human body, and say it is this or that, you are not what they say you are. Claiming that humans are nothing but what science can measure would be the same as claiming that a clay vessel containing wine is nothing but a clay vessel. Our bodies are vessels for our souls, and our souls are alive eternally with the life of the Fire. To look at things piecemeal distorts everything. Life is a great unity. As Lawrence writes:

Fire may be accompanied by combustion, but combustion is not necessarily accompanied by fire. All A is B, but all B is not A. And therefore fire, no matter how you jiggle, is not identical with combustion. Fire. FIRE. I insist on the absolute word. You may say that fire is a sum of various phenomena. I say it isn’t. You might as well tell me a fly is a sum of wings and six legs and two bulging eyes. It is the fly which has the wings and legs, and not the legs and wings which somehow nab the fly into the middle of themselves. A fly is not a sum of various things. A fly is a fly, and the items of the sum are still fly.

So with fire. Fire is an absolute unity in itself. It is a dynamic polar principle.¹²

The third thing

Water is H₂O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,
but there is also a third thing, that makes it water
and nobody knows what that is.

The atom locks up two energies
but it is a third thing present which makes it an atom.¹³

Truly, this short poem encapsulates within its few lines everything that need ever be said about science. All the advances into scientific inquiry will never change the fact that every scientific discovery is simply discovering more about the veil of maya (illusion), the outward, empirically observable characteristics of something, but not the essence of the thing itself. Beyond, behind, and within every phenomenon is a vital, spiritual force that animates and brings it to life. The sun may be a ball of gas according to science, but if you look past the veil, there is a deeper, spiritual reality to be beheld. Almost every religion, philosophy, and way of life acknowledged these underlying realities. Only in the technological era does man see fit to demean himself and the cosmos by looking at the surface and saying that there is nothing else, there is nothing beyond. As Heidegger writes: “[T]he approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.”¹⁴ The same thought has been marvelously framed by R. S. Thomas, as follows:

“Make my voice sharp
so it may rise to the clerestories
and pierce the ear
of the great God. And make
my sword sharp to enter
into the bowels of God’s foes.”

Forget it. The Middle Ages
are over. On a bone
altar, with radiation
for candle, we make sacrifice
to the god of quasars
and pulsars, wiping
our robotic hands clean
on a disposable conscience.¹⁵

The goal of most mystical traditions is to achieve some kind of unity with the Divine. In a certain sense, even modern science wants to come into touch with what it claims is real, but it doesn’t work. Modern science and modern life are failures! Modern man is a eunuch that even Venus herself couldn’t make procreative. “The whole of life is one long, blind effort at an established polarity with the outer universe, human and non-human; and the whole of modern life is a shrieking failure. It is our own fault.”¹⁶ Without the third thing, the spiritual force, which emanates constantly from the cosmic Fire, we are nothing, and all our efforts amount to nothing. As Lawrence writes:

[W]hen the oldest Egyptians carve a hawk or a Sekhet-cat, or paint birds or oxen or people: and when the Assyrians carve a she-lion: and when the cavemen drew the charging bison, or the reindeer, in the caves of Altamira: or when the Hindoo paints geese or elephants or lotus in the great caves of India whose name I forget—Ajanta!—then how marvellous it is! How marvellous is the living relationship between man and his object! be it man or woman, bird, beast, flower or rock or rain: the exquisite frail moment of pure conjunction, which, in the fourth dimension, is timeless. An Egyptian hawk, a Chinese painting of a camel, an Assyrian sculpture of a lion, an African fetish idol of a woman pregnant, an Aztec rattlesnake, an early Greek Apollo, a cave-man’s paintings of a Pre-historic mammoth, on and on, how perfect the timeless moments between man and the other Pan-creatures of this earth of ours!

And by the way, speaking of cave-men, how did those prognathous semi-apes of Altamira come to depict so delicately, so beautifully, a female bison charging, with swinging udder, or deer stooping feeding, or an antediluvian mammoth deep in contemplation. It is art on a pure, high level, beautiful as Plato, far, far more “civilized” than Burne Jones.—Hadn’t somebody better write Mr. Wells’ History backwards, to prove how we’ve degenerated, in our stupid visionlessness, since the cave-men?

The pictures in the cave represent moments of purity which are the quick of civilisation. The pure relation between the cave-man and the deer: fifty percent man, and fifty per-cent bison, or mammoth, or deer. It is not ninety-nine per-cent man, and one percent horse: as in a Raphael horse. Or hundred percent fool, as when F. G. Watts sculpts a bronze horse and calls it Physical Energy.

If it is to be life, then it is fifty per-cent me, fifty per-cent thee: and the third thing, the spark, which springs from out of the balance, is timeless. Jesus, who saw it a bit vaguely, called it the Holy Ghost. Between man and woman, fifty per-cent man and fifty per-cent woman: then the pure spark. Either this, or less than nothing.¹⁷

Whatever it is called, whether the “pure spark” or the “Holy Ghost,” it is this that gives meaning to life. When two people are in love, true love, divine love, it is not just a human emotion that is felt, but a divine spark of godliness. This same spark is felt by all creatures, and by human children until it is snuffed out of them when they start attending school. When a young child experiences wonder at nature, there is the Holy Ghost, but we send them off to school where teachers grab their pitchforks and chase the Holy Ghost out of a child’s life forever. Lama Govinda contrasts natural, traditional ways of looking at the world with wonder, compared to the modern way of viewing things, as follows:

In spite of the feeling of smallness in the vastness and grandeur of the mountain landscape, in spite of the knowledge of human limitations and dependence on the whims of wind and weather, water and grazing-grounds, food and fuel and other material circumstances, I had never felt a sense of greater freedom and independence. I realised more than ever how narrow and circumscribed our so-called civilised life is, how much we pay for the security of a sheltered life by way of freedom and real independence of thought and action.

When every detail of our life is planned and regulated, and every fraction of time determined beforehand, then the last trace of our boundless and timeless being, in which the freedom of our soul exists, will be suffocated. This freedom does not consist in being able “to do what we want”, it is neither arbitrariness nor waywardness, nor the thirst for adventures, but the capacity to accept the unexpected, the unthought-of situations of life, good as well as bad, with an open mind; it is the capacity to adapt oneself to the infinite variety of conditions without losing confidence in the deeper connections between the inner and outer world. It is the spontaneous certainty of being neither bound by space nor by time, the ability to experience the fulness of both without clinging to any of their aspects, without trying to take possession of them by way of arbitrary fragmentation.

The machine-made time of modern man has not made him the master but the slave of time; the more he tries to “save” time, the less he possesses it. It is like trying to catch a river in a bucket. It is the flow, the continuity of its movement, that makes the river; and it is the same with time. Only he who accepts it in its fulness, in its eternal and life-giving rhythm, in which its continuity consists, can master it and make it his own. By accepting time in this way, by not resisting its flow, it loses its power over us and we are carried by it like on the crest of a wave, without being submerged and without losing sight of our essential timelessness.¹⁸

Time didn’t exist for ancient man in the same way time exists for modern man. For ancient man, time was an ever-flowing river, but also eternity. One was simultaneously at one with the eternal and caught up in the flow. But, life was always in the present, here and now. Moderns invented time by inventing the clock, and through that invention, they have placed themselves in a universal jailhouse. If we stop tabulating and regulating time, we have nothing to lose but our chains, but we have eternity to win.

Think—!

Imagine what it must have been to have existence
in the wild days when life was sliding whirlwinds, blue-hot weights,
in the days called chaos, which left us rocks, and gems!

Think that the sapphire is only alumina, like kitchen pans
crushed utterly, and breathed through and through
with fiery weight and wild life, and coming out
clear and eternally blue!¹⁹

Science doesn’t recognize that which is behind the veil of maya, but it also doesn’t recognize the reality of our subjective perceptions. A diamond may only be compressed carbon, but look at it: it is something radiant, and formed in the bowels of the earth. What does it matter how much hydrogen is in water? It doesn’t. All that matters is that it is water and that it quenches the thirst.

Elements also have mystical characteristics. We are not referring to new age theories about crystals and such, but about the fact that every element within the earth has a specific spiritual characteristic. Lawrence describes, as follows, how coal miners took on the characteristics of coal:

Forty years had made a difference, an appalling difference in manhood. The iron and the coal had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of the men.

Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only weird fauna of the coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration!²⁰

This explains why modern men don’t just act like computers, or think like computers, but each and every day seem to be more and more computer-like, to the point of almost being able to see the silicon in their veins. Most modern humans are being mystically transmuted into robots. May the Gods save us from this fate!

What are the wild waves saying—?

What are the wild waves saying
sister the whole day long?

It seems to me they are saying:
How disgusting, how infinitely sordid this humanity is
that dabbles its body in me
and daubs the sand with its flesh
in myriads, under the hot and hostile sun!
and so drearily enjoys itself!

What are the wild waves saying (Unfinished)²¹

What would the earth wind, water, and fire say if they could talk? What would the waves say to a man who entered its hallowed waters? They would probably chastise man for the pollution he dumps both into the ocean, rivers, and streams, as well as the poisons he puts in and on his body. Truly, the ocean of the Mycenaean Greeks would have welcomed their well-honed bodies, glistening with oil of the olive. As Malcolm de Chazal writes:

There is no rosary more wonderful than a string of waves. Once upon a time there were fire worshippers, someday we will have sea believers heralding their wave symbol of divinity like all those who still bow down before that God-statue, the sun.²²

Modern man is a different beast, and so the oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, and streams shrivel in disgust. Is it any wonder we are having more hurricanes, etc.? Ancient man was at one with all the elements, whereas modern man separates himself off from nature as much as possible. When some few moderns decide to spend time in nature, it is a form of recreation and nothing else. They get there with their automobiles, and they hike wearing petroleum-derived clothing. Sundering ourselves from the elements brings us all grave harm. What could be more horrific, more diabolical than dying in a metal box on wheels, internal organs crushed from impact forces, yet modern man still choses the automobile over the horse, showing that he must be insane! A good description of this tension is Lawrence’s following description of the difference he felt in a train compared to an old, wooden ship:

To tell the truth there is something in the long, slow lift of the ship, and her long, slow slide forwards which makes my heart beat with joy. It is the motion of freedom. To feel her come up—then slide slowly forward, with a sound of the smashing of waters, is like the magic gallop of the sky, the magic gallop of elemental space. That long, slow, waveringly rhythmic rise and fall of the ship, with waters snorting as it were from her nostrils, oh God what a joy it is to the wild innermost soul. One is free at last—and lilting in a slow flight of the elements, winging outwards. Oh God, to be free of all the hemmed-in life—the horror of human tension, the absolute insanity of machine persistence. The agony which a train is to me, really. And the long-drawn-out agony of a life among tense, resistant people on land. And then to feel the long, slow lift and drop of this almost empty ship, as she took the waters. Ah God, liberty, liberty, elemental liberty. I wished in my soul the voyage might last forever, that the sea had no end, that one might float in this wavering, tremulous, yet long and surging pulsation while ever time lasted: space never exhausted, and no turning back, no looking back, even.²³

Storm in the Black Forest

Now it is almost night, from the bronzey soft sky
jugfull after jugfull of pure white liquid fire, bright white
tipples over and spills down,
and is gone
and gold-bronze flutters beat through the thick upper air.

And as the electric liquid pours out, sometimes
a still brighter white snake wriggles among it, spilled
and tumbling wriggling down the sky:
and then the heavens cackle with uncouth sounds.

And the rain won’t come, the rain refuses to come!

This is the electricity that man is supposed to have mastered
chained, subjugated to his use!
supposed to!²⁴

Man claims to have mastered the elements. Some futurists even claim that man will have the ability to create and destroy worlds. Well, he is certainly doing a good job of destroying the world we’ve got. Even the hydrogen bomb and nuclear fission don’t show a mastery of the elements, but a lack of mastery of man over his own soul; a lack of mastery that may very well destroy us all. Each streak of lightning should remind us of the Gods. It is not without reason that every ancient religion had a thunder and lightning God. Instead we pathetic moderns are taught to think of Ben Franklin and light bulbs: What bosh! We are farther from mastering the elements than we ever have been, since the elements don’t respond to force. Ancient peoples may have been able to achieve some level of control over certain elements for a short period of time, through prayer and magic, but modern man attacks the elements with brute force, and they attack man back with an equal and opposite force. Think of it this way: one can never force a person to love. One can try to gently, and lovingly come into touch with another person, and that other person may respond in kind, but to do so with force kills all hope for reciprocation. It is the same with the sun, moon, lightning, fire, and all the elements: if they are truly alive, as Lawrence and generations of the ancients understood, one can only utilize them lovingly, and only by gently coming into touch with them. This is opposite the method utilized by modern man, and is contrary to the orthodox teachings of the Semitic faiths. Lawrence describes, as follows, the Native American way of viewing the world and interacting with the elements, which he considers much closer to the true path people should take in life:

Now the Sun, the rain, the shine, the thunder, they are alive. But they are not persons or people. They are alive. They are manifestations of living activity. But they are not personal gods.

Everything lives. Thunder lives, and rain lives, and sunshine lives. But not in the personal sense. How is man to get himself into relation with the vast living convulsions of rain and thunder and sun, which are conscious and alive and potent, but like vastest of beasts, inscrutable and incomprehensible. How is man to get himself into relation with these, the vastest of cosmic beasts?

It is the problem of the ages of man. Our religion says the cosmos is Matter, to be conquered by the Spirit of Man. The yogi, the fakir, the saint try conquest by abnegation and by psychic powers. The real conquest of the cosmos is made by science.

The American-Indian sees no division into Spirit and Matter, God and not-God. Everything is alive, though not personally so. Thunder is neither Thor nor Zeus. Thunder is the vast living thunder asserting itself like some incomprehensible monster, or some huge reptile-bird of the pristine cosmos.

How to conquer the dragon-mouthed thunder! How to capture the feathered rain!

We make reservoirs, and irrigation ditches and artesian wells. We make lightning conductors, and build vast electric plants. We say it is a matter of science, energy, force.

But the Indian says No! It all lives. We must approach it livingly, with profound respect, but also with desperate courage. Because man must conquer the cosmic monsters of living thunder and live rain. The rain that slides down from its source, and ebbs back subtly, with a strange energy generated between its coming and going, an energy which, even to our science, is of life: this, man has to conquer. The serpent-striped, feathery Rain.

We made the conquest by dams and reservoirs and windmills. The Indian, like the old Egyptian, seeks to make the conquest from the mystic will within him, pitted against the Cosmic Dragon.

We must remember, to the animistic vision there is no perfect God behind us, who created us from His knowledge, and foreordained all things. No such God. Behind lies only the terrific, terrible, crude Source, the mystic Sun, the well-head of all things. From this mystic Sun emanate the Dragons, Rain, Wind, Thunder Shine, Light. The Potencies or Powers. These bring forth earth, then reptiles, birds, and fishes.²⁵

If only we would have approached more things of nature with a sense of their aliveness, so as to come into an organic relation with them, we would have never built the vast aberrations of modernity. Everything that is, partakes of being and a form of life, even things that we do not normally think of as living, such as rocks, oceans, mountains, and the stars. Everything is alive. And, everything that is alive has something of the cosmic Fire within itself. As such, we, as living beings with limited vitality, would do well to increase our life-force by getting into touch with all other living things. We literally should become tree-huggers who come into a living, vivid, vital relation with trees through the power of touch. This is the purest and most ancient form of religion. It was a religion without need for priests or intermediaries, and without any need for Gods. Certainly, the Gods existed, just as the mountains existed, but people could come into direct contact with the Fire that is the source of all life, including the life of the Gods, through trees. As Lawrence writes:

In the oldest religion, everything was alive, not supernaturally, but naturally alive. There were only deeper and deeper streams of life, vibrations of life more and more vast. So rocks were alive, but a mountain had a deeper, vaster life than a rock, and it was much harder for a man to bring his spirit, or his energy, into contact with the life of the mountain, and so draw strength from the mountain, as from a great standing well of life, than it was to come into contact with the rock. And he had to put forth a greater religious effort. For the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into direct contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life. To come into immediate felt contact and so derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy. This effort into sheer, naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the real meaning of religion. And at the sacred races the runners hurled themselves in a terrible cumulative effort, through the air, to come at last into naked contact with the very life of the air, which is the life of the clouds, and so of the rain.

It was a vast and pure religion, without idols or images, even mental ones. It is the oldest religion, a cosmic religion the same for all peoples, not broken up into specific gods or saviours or systems. It is the religion which precedes the god-concept, and is therefore greater and deeper than any god-religion.²⁶

We must get in touch with all that lives, but not solely for a future nirvana, but for more vivid life here and now. Nothing is without meaning, and the Gods have created a world that is overflowing with tear-inducing beauty. To reject this beautiful world, as is common with many forms of Eastern mysticism—such as Vedanta and Buddhism—and less commonly certain forms of Western mysticism, or to reduce this world to a giant clockwork device, as is common with modern sciences and philosophies, is a great sin against the Mother from which we all emanated. The soul is eternal, and there is, for those beings who are in touch, eternal life in the future. But we get in touch here and now, and we need to live here and now. Future reward does not depend on current abnegation of life. That is not to say a monastic life is bad. The simple life of many saints, such as Saint Francis, was in fact a far fuller form of life. But, certain ultra-strict forms of self-denial are to be frowned upon, since it is an insult to the Gods who have given us the gift of life. As Edward Abbey writes:

[T]he Yogi and the physicist come close together, and both, I would like to suggest, are mistaken, guilty of the most obvious reductionism, insofar as either insists on the fallacy that existence, nature, the world, is nothing but the flow of process, and that the beings of this life whom we know and love—a woman, a child, a place, a tree, a rock, a cloud, a bird, the great sun itself—are mere ephemera, illusory shadows, nothing.

They are wrong. Even a rock is a being, a thing with character and a kind of spirit, an existence worthy of our love. To disparage the world we know for the sake of grand abstractions, whether they are called mesons and electrons or the vibrations of an endlessly slumbering and reawakening Brahma, is to be false to the mother who sustains us. The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to disavow and deny this lone but gracious planet on which we voyage through the cold void of space. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow’s reality. Be true to the earth, said Nietzsche.²⁷

We should be true to the earth, sky, and waters. Instead, we, who are losing sight of the Gods and godliness, are trying to harness the powers of the Gods without understanding them or being in touch with them. What we attempt to do with fire, electricity, and the harnessing of the power of the atom, is akin to what would happen if you placed a trigger to all the world’s nuclear arsenal in the hands of a baby chimpanzee. As Lawrence writes:

All our familiarity with the electric forces has not brought us any nearer to a realisation of their mystic or vitalistic action on the human psyche. We have profaned the worship of the Thunderer, the terrifying Zeus. We are vulgar in our familiarity. We play with the weapons of the gods, we who are not gods, only impudent mechanics.²⁸

When we say that the elements live, and that all things are full of Gods, we mean it literally. Prior to anthropomorphic representations of the Gods, there were far older, far deeper, and darker religions, which worshiped the dark Gods, namely all the Gods both high and low, both seen and unseen. For the ancients all was God, and all things were pulsing with the reverberation of the Gods, even those things now thought of as inanimate. At that time, in our Edenic state, we too were like unto the Gods. Then we stole some knowledge and lost even more wisdom; we achieved the power to wreak death, and lost the power to live. The surest path back to our Edenic state is to give up our egotism, hubris, and excessive knowledge, and to learn to live fully, and fully in touch with all that is, knowing that all that is, is divine. Klages states this as follows:

The illustrious historian Herodotus tells us that at Dodona he learned that the original inhabitants of Hellas, who were called the “Pelasgians,” had certainly honored the gods and offered sacrifices to them, but they did not know their names, which were only later discovered by the Egyptians. After these divine names were recognized by the Oracle at Dodona, they were in due course transmitted to the Hellenes. What is the deeper implication of this account of Herodotus? Consider the following: for the Pelasgians, as for any similar people in the primordial phase of cultural development, all of the following entities possessed a sacred character—heaven, earth, the sea, the stream, the mountain, the tree, the soil, the animal, the stone, the rustling of the treetop, the moaning of the wind, the passing cloud, light and darkness, the fructifying rain, burning passion, sun and moon, the orbit of the star, the arrival of the seasons, morning and evening, brightness and darkness, the house, the herd, the kindling of the flame, the livestock and the harvest, the bath, drinking and eating, the nuptial feast, pregnancy and birth, the bond between parents and their children, dying, sleeping, dreaming, quarrel and atonement, promise and betrayal, coming to be and passing away, melancholy and joy, welfare and misfortune, longing and loathing, the blessing and the curse, guilt and revenge, health and sickness, high spirits, madness, and so very much more!²⁹

The Rainbow

Even the rainbow has a body
made of the drizzling rain
and is an architecture of glistening atoms
built up, built up
yet you can’t lay your hand on it,
nay, nor even your mind.³⁰

Our mind is an organ of sense, just as are our eyes, ears, and hands. When we exalt our minds over the other organs, and even over our souls, a cloud descends upon us, and we become lost in confusion. Instead, we should simply see things for what they are, without interpretation, and learn to be aware, fully aware of their overwhelming presence. Interpretations of a rainbow destroy the rainbow for us. Instead we should simply be with the rainbow, coming to feel it, and never try to understand it. If enough people start living in this way, the world may finally experience an apocalypse—in the original meaning of the word, namely an unveiling—and the rainbows may open our eyes enough to expose us to the wretchedness of our mechanical world systems. Lawrence describes this as follows:

And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.³¹

They say the sea is loveless

They say the sea is loveless, that in the sea
love cannot live, but only bare, salt splinters
of loveless life.

But from the sea
the dolphins leap round Dionysos’ ship
whose masts have purple vines,
and up they come with the purple dark of rainbows
and flip! they go! with the nose-dive of sheer delight;
and the sea is making love to Dionysos
in the bouncing of these small and happy whales.³²

Those aspects of nature that we think of as harsh, are harsh because we fight against them and don’t grasp their true nature. The great dark seas that may crash a wooden ship to splinters, are the same as the sea that made love to Dionysos, and are the realms of Poseidon. Creating the community that Lawrence called Rananim may be difficult, but if it achieves the goal of rewilding nature, the Gods should smile upon our ventures. To begin, we must find others, even just a few other souls to set sail with. Let us build Rananim as an ark that can carry through the storm, in hopes it will enable us to sail towards a brighter future. As Lawrence writes:

To find three masculine, world-lost souls, and world-lost saunter, and saunter on along with them, across the dithering space, as long as life lasts! Why come to anchor? There is nothing to anchor for. Land has no answer to the soul any more. It has gone inert. Give me a little ship, kind gods, and three world-lost comrades. Hear me! And let me wander aimless across this vivid outer world, the world empty of man, where space flies happily.³³

If our efforts to create Rananim on earth fail, then most life on this planet may die, and we are likely destined to suffer the same fate as the humpback whales. The intelligent whales and dolphins could not stop the human onslaught, and it looks possible that humans won’t be able to stop the end of the world either. R. S. Thomas puts this thought as follows:

What do the whales say
calling to one another
on their extended wave-lengths?
Why suppose that it is language?
It is pain searching for
an echo. It is regret
for a world that has men
in it. Shadows are without
weight in water yet bleed
their litres to the harpoon.
They have reversed human
history, so that land
is the memory of whence
they once came. They are drawn
to it to drown, as we are
to the sea. Their immense
brain cannot save them;
can ours, launching us
into fathomless altitudes, save us?³⁴

Ezra Pound’s Cantos start with the sea, and move swiftly to the Gods, passing through Hell on the way to a proposed paradise. It was meant to be—and is—an epic Odyssey for our times, so we may set sail on the seas away from savage modernity. For this crime of his, they locked him away for thirteen years in St. Lizzies—goddamn them, the bloodless bastards!

The Four

To our senses, the elements are four
and have ever been, and will ever be
for they are the elements of life, of poetry, and of perception
the four Great Ones, the Four Roots, the First Four
of Fire and the Wet, Earth and the wide Air of the world.

To find the other many elements, you must go to the laboratory
and hunt them down.
But the Four we have always with us, they are our world.
Or rather, they have us with them.³⁵

Lawrence does not deny all of the modern elements, but he does claim that they are unimportant for a man’s experience. This may sound far-fetched, but it is an absolute truth. Man only started discovering elements, chemically, through modern processes, starting in 1669. For all of human history prior to that, we got by just fine with “the four.” Four is a supremely important mystical number: four is the number of points at the base of the great pyramids, and it is the division set up by both Heidegger (the Fourfold) and William Blake (the Four Zoas) for their respective cosmologies. There may be an infinite number of elements, but that is irrelevant if we do not or cannot experience them. We do experience earth, water, fire, and air. The value of all the matter of the world is in the religious response that they can generate, not in their monetary value. Lead and sulphur, those great alchemical symbols, and gold, which has raised empires and brought them to their knees, were originally known by the people as being full of a specific form of life. Gold was valued for its resplendence, which was a sign of the luminous nature of the Divine. All the most ancient, prehistoric peoples would have felt that putting a monetary value on such a thing cheapened it greatly. As Lawrence writes:

I don’t laugh at you about the stone. I’d rather people believed in a suave red stone than in some wretched abstraction. The principle of life is in stones too, and if in stones we can get into communication with it, then good, it is surely healing. I’m certain the old people—the so-called palaeolithic people—felt the life-principle in massive stones, and got a vivifying response: and I’m sure for thousands of years man loved gold for its own golden life, its yellow life-stuff, and drew power from it: and that’s how it came to have its value, which mankind can’t get over. But the real value is religious, not monetary.³⁶

For all of history up until a few hundred years ago, all men and women had to contend directly with the elements—thank the Gods—and through the elements of earth, air, fire, and water, one was able to form a communion with the Real through some of its physical manifestations. Even a few decades ago, villagers in less developed countries would experience a God in each thing they encountered, whether it was an erupting volcano, or a blade of grass. Now, we intervene machinery between ourselves and the natural world, and in so doing, we cut ourselves off from the Gods. And when we are cut off from the Gods, we are nothing, we are not authentic men and women, but eunuch robots. As Lawrence writes:

The more we intervene machinery between us and the naked forces, the more we numb and atrophy our own senses. Every time we turn on a tap to have water, every time we turn a handle to have fire or light, we deny ourselves and annul our being. The great elements, the earth, air, fire, water, are there like some great mistresses whom we woo and struggle with, whom we heave and wrestle with. And all our appliances do but deny us these fine embraces, take the miracle of life away from us. The machine is the great Neuter. It is the eunuch of eunuchs. In the end it emasculates us all. When we balance the sticks and kindle a fire, we partake of the mysteries. But when we turn on an electric tap there is as it were a wad between us and the dynamic universe. We do not know what we lose by all our labour-saving appliances. Of the two evils it would be much the lesser to lose all machinery, every bit, rather than to have, as we have, hopelessly too much.³⁷

Even the most strident environmentalist today will state that the earth is in peril, but that we must develop more technology and more machinery to fix the problems we created. Lawrence, in the preceding passage, makes it clear that it would be far better if we gave up all machinery—all of it! Nearly everything modern, artificial, technical, mechanical is a poor substitute for the arts, crafts, tools, and practices it displaced. A candle is better than a lightbulb, but the sun is better than a candle: “Electric bulbs are stupid because they are fixed, unwinking, unalive, giving off a flat, lifeless light. They are like brass nail-heads on furniture, just about as midsummerish and frisky.”³⁸ This is not to say that we should not think, nor that we should not make, but simply that we should measure our thinking and doing by their compatibility with the bounties of Nature that the Gods have provided us. Klages writes, as follows, that there are two kinds of knowledge:

There is a knowledge that kills and a knowledge that awakens. The first can be seen in the verbal jugglery of our intellectuals; the second blossoms in the dithyrambic creativity of the poet and the visionary. As has been said of the latter type, he lives his life to the full as long as he inhabits the earth. He renews himself as if by a perpetual series of rebirths. The other sort is merely the mummified ash-heap of a once-living fire, the fossilized relic of a perished substance. His knowledge does produce mechanized results, but as he manipulates his carcasses, he speaks as if this dead matter were yet among the living. One sees with horror how he deludes himself into believing that he finds life only within his clockwork mechanisms.³⁹

Sometimes it is best if we do not know, or if we were to leave off knowing. Our current knowledge of the cosmos is a great handicap. Many ancient peoples believed that at night the sky was covered as if with a great blanket, and the stars were holes in the blanket through which the radiant heavens shone through. The modern scientific view of the cosmos is true in a very limited sense. The ancient views may be false, but only in the severely limited sense of modern science. In other ways, they are more significant as symbols that can guide us on our spiritual path, and far more beautiful. When we unveil a mystery of the cosmos through empirical science, we place two veils over our hearts. We have sundered all veils, and through doing so, we have murdered the earth. To resurrect the earth, and heal our souls, we need new veils, new mysteries, urgently. Klages writes:

Mysteries…neither desire to be, nor can they be, “unriddled.” A mystery from which the veil that obscures it has been torn is, indeed, no longer a mystery at all. Those who respect the integrity of the concealing veil are those natures who prefer metaphysics to any form of “redemption.” The actualization of a primordial mystery transforms it into “cognition.” One should never inquire into the primal origins; but one can ask all sorts of questions about essences, such as the essence of light, the essence of science, or even, if you wish, the essence of the copula “and!”⁴⁰

Bibliography

Abbey, Edward. The Best of Edward Abbey. Edited by Edward Abbey. Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2005.

Chazal, Malcolm de. Sens-Plastique. Translated by Irving Weiss. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Wakefield Press, 2021.

Govinda, Lama Anagarika. The Way of the White Clouds. London: Rider, 2006.

Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit. Translated by John M. Anderson and Hans E. Freund. New York: Harper Perennial, 1966.

Jeffers, Robinson. The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Edited by Tim Hunt. Vol. Three. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1988.

Klages, Ludwig. Cosmogonic Reflections. Translated by Joseph D. Pryce. London: Arktos, 2015.

Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Edited by Michael Squires. London: Penguin Books, 2009.

———. Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays. Edited by Virginia Crosswhite Hyde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

———. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. Edited by Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

———. Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. Edited by Michael Herbert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

———. “Sea and Sardinia.” In D. H. Lawrence and Italy, 137–326. London: Penguin Books, 2007.

———. Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays. Edited by Simonetta De Filippis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

———. Studies in Classic American Literature. Edited by Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

———. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Edited by Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton. Vol. VII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

———. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Edited by James T. Boulton, Margaret H. Boulton, and Gerald M. Lacy. Vol. VI. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

———. The Plumed Serpent. Edited by L. D. Clark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

———. The Poems. Edited by Christopher Pollnitz. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

———. The Poems. Edited by Christopher Pollnitz. Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

———. The Rainbow. London: Everyman’s Library, 1993.

———. “Twilight in Italy.” In D. H. Lawrence and Italy, 2–136. London: Penguin Books, 2007.

Thomas, R. S. Collected Later Poems. Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2004.

1. D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 394.

2. D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, vol. VII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 510.

3. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 123.

4. Ludwig Klages, Cosmogonic Reflections, trans. Joseph D. Pryce (London: Arktos, 2015), 29.

5. Robinson Jeffers, The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt, vol. Three (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1988), 476.

6. R. S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2004), 158.

7. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:439.

8. Malcolm de Chazal, Sens-Plastique, trans. Irving Weiss (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Wakefield Press, 2021), 232.

9. D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 196–97.

10. D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 1616.

11. D. H. Lawrence, “Twilight in Italy,” in D. H. Lawrence and Italy (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 31.

12. D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 172.

13. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:447.

14. Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit, trans. John M. Anderson and Hans E. Freund (New York: Harper Perennial, 1966), 56.

15. Thomas, Collected Later Poems, 117.

16. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, 41.

17. D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 316–17.

18. Lama Anagarika Govinda, The Way of the White Clouds (London: Rider, 2006), 60–61.

19. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:460.

20. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 159–60.

21. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:543.

22. de Chazal, Sens-Plastique, 235.

23. D. H. Lawrence, “Sea and Sardinia,” in D. H. Lawrence and Italy (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 164–65.

24. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:558.

25. D. H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 82–83.

26. ibid., 180–81.

27. Edward Abbey, The Best of Edward Abbey, ed. Edward Abbey (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2005), 229.

28. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 284.

29. Klages, Cosmogonic Reflections, 82–83.

30. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:605.

31. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (London: Everyman’s Library, 1993), 460.

32. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:607.

33. Lawrence, “Sea and Sardinia,” 182.

34. Thomas, Collected Later Poems, 238.

35. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:620.

36. D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. James T. Boulton, Margaret H. Boulton, and Gerald M. Lacy, vol. VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 377–78.

37. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 117.

38. D. H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta De Filippis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 203.

39. Klages, Cosmogonic Reflections, 38.

40. ibid., 129.