The End of the World

The Machine Will Never Triumph, part twenty-nine

Our day is over

Our day is over, night comes up
shadows steal out of the earth.
Shadows, shadows
wash over our knees and splash between our thighs,
our day is done;
we wade, we wade, we stagger, darkness rushes between our stones,
we shall drown.

Our day is over
night comes up.¹

Our civilization produced some great marvels of art, but also produced innumerable horrors. Modern civilization seemed endless for some time, but now the cracks are starting to show. The end is nigh; the only question is whether the end of this way of life will be the end of all life or the beginning of a resurgence of life. Lawrence describes our day, its godlessness, and its machine-ridden emptiness in biblical language as follows:

I see […] the seed of David rising up and covering the earth, […] then they wheel against the sun, and are dark like the locusts sweeping in heaven, like a pillar of locusts moving, yea, as tall, dark cloud upon the land. Till they drop in drops of blood, like thunder-rain, and the land is red. […] And they thicken and thicken, till the world’s air grates and clicks as with the wings of locusts. And man is his own devourer, and the Deep turns away, without wish to look on him further. So the earth is a desert, and manless, yet covered with houses and iron. […] And the world shall be godless, there shall be no god walk on the mountains, no whirlwind shall stir like a heart in the deeps of the blue firmament. And God shall be gone from the world. Only men shall there be, in myriads, like locusts, clicking and grating upon one another, and crawling over one another. The smell of them shall be as smoke, but it shall rise up into the air, without finding the nostrils of God. For God shall be gone! gone! gone! And men shall inherit the earth! Yea, like locusts, and whirring on wings like locusts. […] Godless the world! Godless the men in myriads even like locusts.—No God in the air! No God on the mountains! Even out of the deeps of the sky, they lured him, into their pit! So the world is empty of God, empty, empty, like a blown egg-shell bunged with wax and floating meaningless.²

And if the world is truly destined to end, including all life on the planet, one must not fret, nor fear, nor mourn. All one can do is live the best life he can here and now. The present is eternity, and all experience is already eternal, no matter how fleeting. To see the fluttering of a bird’s wings, to feel sea breeze on one’s face, or to look into the eyes of a mountain lion is already a transcendent experience. If the world ends, that does not mean that we end. Our souls are eternal. And so if we work and we strive for good, and beauty finally perishes from the world, still our souls will be with the Gods, and life will go on. Life always goes on, life will always triumph, and the Machine will perish from existence as a meaningless and transitory aberration. The Fire at the root of all that is has no beginning and has no end. Lawrence writes:

Well, if mankind is destroyed, if our race is destroyed like Sodom, and there is this beautiful evening with the luminous land and trees, I am satisfied. That which informs it all is there, and can never be lost. After all, what is mankind but just one expression of the incomprehensible. And if mankind passes away, it will only mean that this particular expression is completed and done. That which is expressed, and that which is to be expressed, cannot be diminished. There it is, in the shining evening. Let mankind pass away—time it did. The creative utterances will not cease, they will only be there. Humanity doesn’t embody the utterance of the incomprehensible any more. Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new way. Let humanity disappear as quick as possible.³

As for our present day, it is not such a stretch to envision its end, since modernity is not the pinnacle of civilization, but the most degenerate end period of a civilization. “Modernity, or modernness isn’t something we’ve just invented. It’s something that comes at the end of civilisations.”⁴ Modernity is a trap, and just as a caged animal fights to get free, but in doing so destroys itself, “we thresh destruction further and further, till our whole civilisation is like a great rind full of corruption, of breaking down, a mere shell threatened with collapse upon itself.”⁵ These are the end times: either a new beginning comes soon, or life on earth will end. Sadly, many people seem to consciously or unconsciously desire the hastening of the end. As Klages writes: “An unparalleled orgy of destruction has seized mankind, and it is ‘civilization’ that has unleashed this lust for murder, so that the Earth withers before its noxious breath. These are indeed the fruits of ‘progress’!”⁶ “Today we are witnessing an unprecedented ‘de-naturing’ of thought, and we should not deceive ourselves: it will ultimately end in the complete ignorance of a new dark age.”⁷

Dies Irae

Even the old emotions are finished,
we have worn them out.
And desire is dead.
And the end of all things is inside us.

Our epoch is over,
a cycle of evolution is finished,
our activity has lost its meaning,
we are ghosts, we are seed;
for our Word is dead
and we know not how to live wordless.

We live in a vast house
full of inordinate activities,
and the noise, and the stench, and the dreariness and lack of meaning
madden us, but we don’t know what to do.

All we can know at this moment
is the fulfilment of nothingness.
Lo, I am nothing!

It is a consummation devoutly to be wished
in this world of mechanical self-assertion.⁸

The world we live in is frightening and maddening. There is incessant noise, constant light, and hardly ever a moment of peace. Religions have largely failed to hold their ground, and the religions we have, along with those who believe in them, are mostly hollow shells of historic spirituality. All is empty and meaningless, but with a constant sensual bombardment redolent of a war zone. In such chaos, one can only hope for silence, peace, and tranquillity. We can also wish for the Nothingness that is really fullness, which is the stillness at the core of the soul. As for a nothingness that is an ultimate end and void, we can only hope that it is the end and consummation of the Machine. As the Machine is evil, none of it should be saved. “Heaven bless us, we who want to save civilisation. We had better make up our minds what of it we want to save. The kernel may be all well and good. But there is precious little kernel, to a lot of woolly stuffing and poisonous rind.”⁹ Ultimately, the Machine is not and never has been a force for progress, but only a source of degeneracy. For true change to happen, it needs to happen organically, and in harmony with the natural world, not in the sense of evolution, but in the sense of spiritual resurrection and renewal. As Lawrence writes: “I do not believe in evolution, but in the strangeness and rainbow-change of ever-renewed creative civilisations.”¹⁰

Dies Illa

Dies irae, dies illa
solvet saeclum in favilla—

Day of wrath, O day of warning!
Flame devours the world.

It does, even if we don’t see it.
For there are all sorts of flames:
slow, creeping cold ones
that burn inwardly
like flickering cancers.

And the slow cold flames
may burn for long years
before they’ve eaten through the joists and the girders
and the house comes down, with a subsiding crash.¹¹

Even if you don’t believe it, even if your eyes are not now open to the devastation all around you, be certain that the world is burning, and that the end of the world as we know it is nigh. Not all ends happen with a big explosive force; sometimes they creep up slowly. This is not something to regret or to fear. The end of modernity should be a joyful thing: when the house comes down, life can thrive once again. Even if not just our civilization, but the human species comes to an end, it is not an event to mourn, since Life can never be diminished, and the Fire at the root of all being always will send forth more shoots. As Lawrence writes:

Well, if mankind is destroyed, if our race is destroyed like Sodom, there is this beautiful evening with the luminous land and trees. That which informs it all is there, and can never be lost. After all, what is mankind but just one expression of the incomprehensible. And if mankind passes away, it will only mean that this particular expression is completed and done. That which is expressed, and that which is to be expressed, cannot be diminished. There it is, in the shining evening. Let mankind pass away—what does it matter? The creative utterances will not cease, they will only be different. If it is not the great word of humanity uttered by the incomprehensible, it will be other words. What does humanity matter, to the undiminished, whole spirit?¹²

The death of our era

Our era is dying
yet who has killed it?
Have we, who are it?

In the middle of voluted space
its knell has struck.
And in the middle of every atom, which is the same thing,
a tiny bell of conclusion has sounded.

The curfew of our great day
the passing-bell of our way of knowing
the knell of our bald-headed consciousness
the tocsin of this our civilisation.

Who has struck the bell?
Who rang the knell?
Not I, not you
yet all of us.

At the core of space the final knell
of our era has struck, and it chimes
in terrible rippling circles between the stars
till it reaches us, and its vibrations shatter us
each time they touch us.

And they keep on coming, with greater force
striking us, the vibrations of our finish.

And all that we can do
is to die the amazing death
with every stroke, and go on
till we are blank.

And yet, as we die, why should not our vast mechanised day die
    with us,
so that when we are re-born, we can be born into a fresh world.

For the new word is Resurrection.¹³

All that exists in the realm of manifestation is destined to die. Whether it is the short-lived fly or the long-lived granite escarpment, all is destined to change, and finally end. And yet, the end is not always the end. When a machine breaks down it is kaput, and when the Machine finally crumbles to the ground, it will be gone forever, but for all that lives, there is never a final end, but only a series of rebirths and resurrections. As such, we should not hate the idea of things coming to an end, but rejoice, since an ending is just another name for a new beginning. We must prepare ourselves for all our various endings by dying before we die, so that we may live. The writings of the Tibetan and ancient Egyptian sages are replete with advice for one’s posthumous journey, but sometimes their wisdom doesn’t translate easily into modern tongues. Thank the Gods that Lawrence gave us his wisdom and has shown us the way. As we prepare for our deaths and the death of our era, we can keep up good cheer as we read the good news of Lawrence that resurrection is the next step on a long and beautiful journey. As for the world we live in, we should do our best to create a beautiful future, whilst living here and now, since:

No one can foresee the radical changes to come. But technological advance will move faster and faster and can never be stopped. In all areas of his existence, man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technology. These forces, which everywhere and every minute claim, enchain, drag along, press, and impose upon man under the form of some technical contrivance or other—these forces, since man has not made them, have moved long since beyond his will and have outgrown his capacity for decision.¹⁴

There is a form of escape from the dissolution happening all around us. We can come together in communities of brotherhood and sisterhood founded according to Lawrencian principles. Even now, a visitor to a secluded place in the countryside or a person on a retreat in a monastery may have their eyes opened to the truth of things. Lawrence described this awakening as follows:

To see trains come steaming, with white smoke flying. To see the station like a little harbour where trucks like shipping stood anchored in rows in the black bay of railway. To see trains stop in the station and tiny people swarming like flies! To see all this from the monastery, where the Middle Ages live on in a sort of agony, like Tithonus,¹⁵ and cannot die, this was almost a violation to my soul, made almost a wound.¹⁶

It is no contradiction for lovers of life to wish for the end of our civilization, since our civilization is consummately anti-life. Klages writes:

The hour of reaction has been missed; there are those among us whose passionate love of life has made them see just how wretched the world has become: we are the “last of the Mohicans.” Whoever still has it in him to express a wish, must wish for one thing above all: that the consummately vile mankind of today may drown, die, disappear as soon as possible, along with his wretched arsenal of murder, so that once again the forests may resound with the roar of purifying and self-renewing winds.¹⁷

Nothing to save.

There is nothing to save, now all is lost,
but a tiny core of stillness in the heart
like the eye of a violet.¹⁸

We have destroyed much, so very much of the natural world, and have even destroyed the opportunity for peace. Where in the world may one go where there is true stillness and jets don’t fly overhead? But, as Lawrence stated, there is and will remain a core of peace in every heart. We need that core of peace now more than ever, because things will get worse before they get better. The technological onslaught is increasing at an exponential pace, and every day forests are destroyed, species become extinct, and the human heart shrivels a little more. This is an all-out war on life perpetuated by the Machine. As Heidegger writes:

We do not stop to consider that an attack with technological means is being prepared upon the life and nature of man compared with which the explosion of the hydrogen bomb means little.¹⁹

As horrendous as nuclear weapons are, the ravages of technology on a global scale far outweigh the devastation wreaked by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which themselves were products of the Machine. Every day things change for the worse for those who see it. Global warming seems like a relatively recent theory, but the groundwork had been laid by the Industrial Revolution of the 1700s, and Lawrence could clearly see what was happening by 1921, when he published the following:

It seems the climate of North Europe was colder then than now. In those days great armies of Romans marched across the frozen Rhine, rolling their ponderous baggage-wagons on the ice. This could never happen now, the river does not freeze to this extent. The reindeer, also, which roamed the northern swamps and the Hercynian forests, now cannot live even round the southern Baltic. He must go much farther north, or he dies of warmth. Again, we are told that the wine of the Romans froze into lumps in the German camps. Now, in these very regions, the vine grows.—Perhaps the clearing of swamps and forests has made the difference, perhaps there is a change in the world.²⁰

Lawrence may not have known the precise scientific mechanics for global warming, but his eyes were open, and he got the answer right, namely that deforestation and mechanization have led to a warming of the earth, which if left unchecked will cause massive suffering and death on a scale not seen for tens of thousands of years. Things are bad, but we still have to live. As Lawrence writes:

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.²¹

Walk Warily

Walk warily, walk warily, be careful what you say:
because now the Sunderers are hovering round,
the Dividers are close upon us, dogging our every breath
and watching our every step.
and beating their great wings in our panting faces.

The angels are standing back, the angels of the Kiss—
they wait, they give way now
to the Sunderers, to the swift ones
the ones with the sharp black wings
and the shudder of electric anger
and the drumming of pinions of thunder
and hands like salt
and the sudden dripping down of the knife-edge cleavage of the lightning
cleaving, cleaving.

Lo, we are in the midst of the sunderers
the cleavers, that cleave us forever apart from one another,
and separate heart from heart, and cut away all caresses
with the white triumphance of lightning and electric delight,
the Dividers, the Thunderers, the Swift Ones, blind with speed
who put salt in our mouths
and currents of excitement in our limbs
and hotness, and then more crusted brine in our hearts.

It is the day of the Sunderers
and the angels are standing back.²²

The sunderers, namely the minions of the Machine, are running the world, and all hell is breaking loose. As such, the angels and the Gods have absconded, but they have not really left, for they still reside in the heart of every believing man, woman, and child. Our day is a day of great evils. Lawrence describes this apocalyptic vision as follows:

And she had a vision, a vision of evil. Or not strictly a vision. She became aware of evil, evil, evil, rolling in great waves over the earth. Always she had thought there was no such thing—only a mere negation of good. Now, like an ocean to whose surface she had risen, she saw the dark-grey waves of evil rearing in a great tide.

And it had swept mankind away without mankind’s knowing. It had caught up the nations as the rising ocean might lift the fishes, and was sweeping them on in a great tide of evil. They did not know. The people did not know. They did not even wish it. They wanted to be good and to have everything joyful and enjoyable. Everything joyful and enjoyable: for everybody. This was what they wanted, if you asked them.

But at the same time, they had fallen under the spell of evil. It was a soft, subtle thing, soft as water, and its motion was soft and imperceptible, as the running of a tide is invisible to one who is out on the ocean. And they were all out on the ocean, being borne along in the current of the mysterious evil, creatures of the evil principle, as fishes are creatures of the sea.

There was no relief. The whole world was enveloped in one great flood. All the nations, the white, the brown, the black, the yellow, all were immersed, in the strange tide of evil that was subtly, irresistibly rising. No one, perhaps, deliberately wished it. Nearly every individual wanted peace and a good time all round: everybody to have a good time.

But some strange thing had happened, and the vast mysterious force of positive evil was let loose. She felt that from the core of Asia the evil welled up, as from some strange pole, and slowly was drowning earth.

It was something horrifying, something you could not escape from. It had come to her as in a vision, when she saw the pale gold belly of the stallion upturned, the hoofs working wildly, the wicked curved hams of the horse, and then the evil straining of that arched, fish-like neck, with the dilated eyes of the head. Thrown backwards, and working its hoofs in the air. Reversed, and purely evil.

She saw the same in people. They were thrown backwards, and writhing with evil. And the rider, crushed, was still reining them down.

What did it mean? Evil, evil, and a rapid return to the sordid chaos. Which was wrong, the horse or the rider? Or both?

She thought with horror of St. Mawr, and of the look on his face. But she thought with horror, a colder horror, of Rico’s face as he snarled Fool! His fear, his impotence as a master, as a rider, his presumption. And she thought with horror of those other people, so glib, so glibly evil.

What did they want to do, those Manby girls? Undermine, undermine, undermine. They wanted to undermine Rico, just as that fair young man would have liked to undermine her. Believe in nothing, care about nothing: but keep the surface easy, and have a good time. Let us undermine one another. There is nothing to believe in, so let us undermine everything. But look out! No scenes, no spoiling the game. Stick to the rules of the game. Be sporting, and don’t do anything that would make a commotion. Keep the game going smooth and jolly, and bear your bit like a sport. Never, by any chance, injure your fellow-man openly. But always injure him secretly. Make a fool of him, and undermine his nature. Break him up by undermining him, if you can. It’s good sport.

The evil! The mysterious potency of evil. She could see it all the time, in individuals, in society, in the press. There it was in socialism and bolshevism: the same evil. But bolshevism made a mess of the outside of life, so turn it down. Try fascism. Fascism would keep the surface of life intact, and carry on the undermining business all the better. All the better sport. Never draw blood. Keep the hemorrhage internal, invisible.

And as soon as fascism makes a break—which it is bound to, because all evil works up to a break—then turn it down. With gusto, turn it down.

Mankind, like a horse, ridden by a stranger, smooth-faced, evil rider. Evil himself, smooth-faced and pseudo-handsome, riding mankind past the dead snake, to the last break.

Mankind no longer its own master. Ridden by this pseudo-handsome ghoul of outward loyalty, inward treachery, in a game of betrayal, betrayal, betrayal. The last of the gods of our era, Judas supreme!

People performing outward acts of loyalty, piety, self-sacrifice. But inwardly bent on undermining, betraying. Directing all their subtle evil will against any positive living thing. Masquerading as the ideal, in order to poison the real.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror. But go on saving life, the ghastly salvation army of ideal mankind. At the same time secretly, viciously, potently undermine the natural creation, betray it with kiss after kiss, destroy it from the inside, till you have the swollen rottenness of our teeming existences.—But keep the game going. Nobody’s going to make another bad break, such as Germany and Russia made.

Two bad breaks the secret evil has made: in Germany and in Russia. Watch it! Let evil keep a policeman’s eye on evil! The surface of life must remain unruptured. Production must be heaped upon production. And the natural creation must be betrayed by many more kisses, yet. Judas is the last God, and, by heaven, the most potent.

But even Judas made a break: hanged himself, and his bowels gushed out. Not long after his triumph.

Man must destroy as he goes, as trees fall for trees to rise. The accumulation of life and things means rottenness. Life must destroy life, in the unfolding of creation. We save up life at the expense of the unfolding, till all is full of rottenness. Then at last we make a break.

What’s to be done? Generally speaking, nothing. The dead will have to bury their dead, while the earth stinks of corpses. The individual can but depart from the mass, and try to cleanse himself. Try to hold fast to the living thing, which destroys as it goes, but remains sweet. And in his soul fight, fight, fight to preserve that which is life in him from the ghastly kisses and poison-bites of the myriad evil ones. Retreat to the desert, and fight. But in his soul adhere to that which is life itself, creatively destroying as it goes: destroying the stiff old thing to let the new bud come through. The one passionate principle of creative being, which recognises the natural good, and has a sword for the swarms of evil. Fights, fights, fights to protect itself. But with itself, is strong and at peace.²³

There is not much to add to this. All we can say is that time, rather than making Lawrence seem irrelevant, has proven every one of his prophetic utterances. We must “[r]etreat to the desert, and fight.” Our desert is any place relatively peaceful and free from the modern stain, and our fight is to make a new life-affirming world free from technology. We call these communities Rananim, but the name matters little. What we want is a return to sacrament, a return to tradition, a return to nature, and a renewed communion with the Gods. In a time of sundering, we must turn back to religion—which means to bind together. David Jones describes our dilemma:

How are we to reconcile man the artist, man the sign-maker or sacrament²⁴ maker with the world in which we live today? It would appear that there is a dichotomy which puts asunder that which our nature demands should be joined together. We hear a great deal from persons of all sorts, about incompatibilities, separations, divorces and nullities. But there is also another sort of divorce that characterizes the phase of civilization in which we live and which thus affects the thoughts and lives of all of us, whether we are aware of it or not. The divorce of which I speak is far more difficult of analysis than those divorces affecting the nature of the marriage bond between man and woman and, if I may say so without being altogether misunderstood, is anterior in importance. For the very notion of “Sacrament” binding two persons is devoid of meaning unless the nature of man is sacramental, and, as we have argued, without ars there is no possibility of sacramentum. […] But this divorce with which we are here concerned is a dichotomy to be observed in the actual civilization of which we are a part. It is a situational problem. However one tries to express it one leaves much unsaid or one puts it in such a way as to invite valid objections. But something may perhaps be indicated by saying that there have always been frictions, estrangements and contradictions within man himself of the “utile” and the sacramental and that the fruit of this wedding was, to a less or greater degree, observable throughout the whole gamut of man’s making, but that now these estrangements take on the nature of actual and agreed separations. […] Because the Church is committed to “Sacraments” with a capital S, she cannot escape a committal to sacrament with a small s, unless the sacramentalism of the Church is to be regarded as a peculiar and isolated phenomenon. We know that such a view is not to be entertained and that the sacramentalism of the Church is a thing normal to man and that a sacramental quality is evidenced in the past works of man over the whole period of his existence so far known to us. It is argued in these pages that this is the very quality by which “man” is distinguished from “animal” and from “angel” and I have tried to state why I think this to be so. I have said further that many of us find ourselves asking of ourselves: To what extent is the civilizational trend depriving us of this normality? It must be left to the reader to ask whether or not, in his or her view, it is the trend of our technocracy to increasingly put asunder what is joined together in man-the-artist. Should the answer be at all in the affirmative, then to that exact extent, and no more, there is ground for dilemma and for further scrutiny because it means that more and more human beings, through no fault of their own at all, are alienated from the mere notion of sacrament with a small “s”. Were this alienation to become more complete, then the persons affected would have to regard the postulate of the Church with respect to the Sacraments as something to be accepted on authority only, something which the rules happened to say must be done. Something which, though foreign to all their ways and habits of thought, was, for mysterious and inexplicable reasons demanded of them in the name of religion. Or, alternatively, they would have to reject those postulates as being not only incompatible with their lives, works and habit of thought but as belonging to an out-moded conception of man’s nature and requirements, and as no longer even comprehensible except as a survival of by-gone practices.²⁵

We must return to rites, to sacraments, and strive to be pure in our religious practice. Simone Weil belonged to no specific faith—though she held a deep love for the Catholic doctrine—but she developed a method of meditation whereby she would recite the pater noster over and over until she felt she reached perfection, which led her to experience mystical visions. Essentially, we need to delve deep into our souls, get to know the Gods, and get out of the glass jars of our egos. That is the only way to liberation. As Lawrence writes:

[T]he supreme little ego in man hates an unconquered universe. We shall never rest till we have heaped tin cans on the North Pole and the South Pole, and put up barb-wire fences on the moon. Barb-wire fences are our sign of conquest. We have wreathed the world with them. The back of creation is broken. We have killed the mysteries and devoured the secrets. It all lies now within our skin, within the ego of humanity.

So, circumscribed within the outer nullity, we give ourselves up to the flux of death, to analysis, to introspection, to mechanical war and destruction, to humanitarian absorption in the body politic, the poor, the birth-rate, the mortality of infants, like a man absorbed in his own flesh and members, looking forever at himself. It is the continued activity of disintegration, disintegration, separating, setting apart, investigation, research, the resolution back to the original void.

All this goes on within the glassy, insentient, insensible envelope of nullity. And within this envelope, like the glassy insects within their rind, we imagine we fill the whole cosmos, that we contain within ourselves the whole of time, which shall tick forth from us as from a clock, now everlastingly.

We are capable of nothing but reduction within the envelope. Our every activity is the activity of disintegration, of corruption, of dissolution, whether it be our scientific research, our social activity[, …] our art, or our anti-social activity, sensuality, sensationalism, crime, war. Everything alike contributes to the flux of death, to corruption, and liberates the static data of the consciousness.

Whatever single act is performed by any man now, in this condition, it is an act of reduction, disintegration. The scientist in his laboratory, the artist in his study, the statesman, the artizan, the sensualist obtaining keen gratification, every one of these is reducing down that which is himself to its simpler elements, reducing the compound back to its parts. It is the pure process of corruption in all of us. The activity of death is the only activity. It is like the decay of our flesh, and every new step in decay liberates a sensation, keen, momentarily gratifying, or a conscious knowledge of the parts that made a whole, knowledge equally gratifying.²⁶

All of this destruction, disintegration, and death is due to over-inflated egos. We must subdue the ego and nurture the soul to make ourselves and the world whole again.

Bibliography

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

Jones, David. Epoch and Artist: Selected Writings. Edited by Harman Grisewood. London: Faber; Faber, 2008.

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

———. The Biocentric Worldview. Translated by Joseph D. Pryce. London: Arktos, 2013.

Lawrence, D. H. Aaron’s Rod. Edited by Mara Kalnins. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.

———. Introductions and Reviews. Edited by N. H. Reeve and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

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

———. Late Essays and Articles. Edited by James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

———. Movements in European History. Edited by Philip Crumpton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

———. 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.

———. “St. Mawr.” In Collected Stories, 791–925. London: Everyman’s Library, 1994.

———. The First Women in Love. Edited by John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

———. The Plays. Edited by Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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

———. Women in Love. London: Everyman’s Library, 1992.

1. D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 369.

2. D. H. Lawrence, The Plays, ed. Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 488–89.

3. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London: Everyman’s Library, 1992), 53.

4. D. H. Lawrence, Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 152.

5. D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 277.

6. Ludwig Klages, The Biocentric Worldview, trans. Joseph D. Pryce (London: Arktos, 2013), 31.

7. Ludwig Klages, Cosmogonic Reflections, trans. Joseph D. Pryce (London: Arktos, 2015), 129.

8. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:443.

9. D. H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 150.

10. D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 64.

11. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:444.

12. D. H. Lawrence, The First Women in Love, ed. John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 49.

13. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:444–45.

14. Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit, trans. John M. Anderson and Hans E. Freund (New York: Harper Perennial, 1966), 51.

15. In Greek mythology, Tithonus was the lover of the goddess Eros, who granted him immortality, but not eternal youth, and thus suffered the vicissitudes of old age with no hope for relief by death.

16. D. H. Lawrence, Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 27.

17. Klages, Cosmogonic Reflections, 68.

18. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:568.

19. Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit, 52.

20. D. H. Lawrence, Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 46.

21. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 5.

22. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:621.

23. D. H. Lawrence, “St. Mawr,” in Collected Stories (London: Everyman’s Library, 1994), 848–50.

24. “Sacrament” as a generic term, not referring to specific Christian rites, means a symbolic act or sign, often accompanied by specific words, that mysteriously conveys a grace or blessing upon those for whom, or by whom, it is performed.

25. David Jones, Epoch and Artist: Selected Writings, ed. Harman Grisewood (London: Faber; Faber, 2008), 176–78.

26. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, 281–82.