Work
All that we have is life—
All that we have, while we live, is life;
and if you don’t live during your life, you are a piece of dung.
And work is life, and life is lived in work
unless you’re a wage-slave.
While a wage-slave works, he leaves life aside
and stands there a piece of dung.
Men should refuse to be lifelessly at work.
Men should refuse to be heaps of wage-earning dung.
Men should refuse to work at all, as wage-slaves.
Men should demand to work for themselves, of themselves, and put their
life in it.
For if a man has no life in his work, he is mostly a heap of dung.1
Every person throughout history has had to work. Work is everything from going out to gather berries to the modern grind in a factory or office. But, there is a large gulf between classic and modern work. The ancient man or woman would work far less than his or her modern counterpart. Quantitatively, people throughout most of history had to work less than they do now. That all changed with the industrial revolution, which broke the backs of countless men. On the surface, things appeared to be getting better through government regulation, but now, with with inflation beginning to devalue wages and the rise of freelancing and the gig economy, people are having to work more than ever. Of course, if it was just a matter of hours, the fixes would be relatively simple, but the greater issue is the qualitative difference between ancient and classic work compared to modern work. Even an unwilling serf in bygone days would eat good food, breathe clean air, and have a healthy body. So much work in the modern world, in contrast, is utterly mind, body, and soul destroying. Some may claim to like their work today, but that is often because they are not fully awake—they have accepted the drudgery of work as unavoidable. Almost everyone who works today is more like a slave than the slaves of past eras. Of course, work must be done, but one should never have to work for one’s daily bread, save in the simple ways our ancient forebears did in gathering fruit or hunting. One should not have to continuously do what one hates, and one should aspire to be involved in activities that bring the heart joy. Additionally, activities undertaken should be healthy for body, mind, and soul. Far too much of modern work fulfils none of these criteria. Philip Sherrard writes of modern work as follows:
[N]ow is the age of the great betrayal of man,
now is the age when the great sleep has fallen over the
watchfulness of man,
when man has sold himself into captivity.
For once this land was a place to love with pride, We have
made it a show-piece of banality.
Once this land was a place where man might grow with the
rhythm of the tree and the grace of the river. We have
made it a vortex of hysteria.
Once this land was a place of forgiveness. We have made it
a quagmire of retribution.
When man eats bread prepared with his own hands, a poem
is born
When man embraces woman before a fire which they
themselves have lit, a poem is born.
But who tastes now the delight that springs from a heart
rich in the fruit of its own labour?
Our work is not the work of men but the work of puppets.
We scurry along like ridiculous microbes of fever to crouch
all day over jobs not worth a hair on our head. We slave as
never before, we create work as never before, we exhaust
ourselves as never before. And the sky is above us but we do
not notice; the wild rose blossoms in the hedgerow but we do
not notice; and time passes with no recall but we do not
notice. And when Death takes us it is as if one more entry
were made in the huge ledger where Waste keeps his
account.2
Life is for living, not for slaving. A shoemaker in medieval times would have been an artisan capable of creating beauty in his products, but a shoemaker today is a low-paid cog in a mechanized system of mass production. One could have worked growing plants in a garden or in a monastery illuminating manuscripts, and such work would be life-enhancing, but far too much of today’s work, whether in factories or at desks, saps life away from people, turning them into something akin to robots. To work without a sense of putting one’s soul into it, without vitality, is a form of living death. This is why modern work is so exhausting, and why such deadening entertainment is created to alleviate the tedium of the population in their non-working hours. If a man wants to be free, he should seek to escape the system and work for himself, not as a freelancer, but completely separated from our wage system. The Amish and certain monastic communities are as close as we have to such working conditions in modern times, but we must do better. We should seek to build Rananim. The question is how to show people the light. People today actually think they like their slavery. As Marguerite Yourcenar writes, using the emperor Hadrian as a mouthpiece:
I doubt if all the philosophy in the world can succeed in suppressing slavery; it will, at most, change the name. I can well imagine forms of servitude worse than our own, because more insidious, whether they transform men into stupid, complacent machines, who believe themselves free just when they are most subjugated, or whether to the exclusion of leisure and pleasures essential to man they develop a passion for work as violent as the passion for war among barbarous races. To such bondage for the human mind and imagination I prefer even our avowed slavery.3
Yes, even the avowed slavery of the days of yore is preferable to this base machine system that turns people into robots who revel in their slavery. Can these robots ever attain freedom? Theoretically, it is possible, and the sun-men should try to liberate them, but “[n]ot many souls are fit for freedom. Most get bored, or nervous, or foolish. Let them have jobs, let such have their time allotted to them. But for the free soul liberty is essential, and a job is a thing to be contemplated with horror and hatred.”4
Let us be men—
For God’s sake, let us be men
not monkeys minding machines
or sitting with our tails curled
while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.
Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces—5
Despite the narratives that tell us we are fluid identities and can be machine or animal, we are neither, we are humans, and, as such, we have a divine role to play. Working at a computer or vegetating in front of a television is a sin of the highest order, because it denies the very powerful divine spark within each and every one of us. All of our modern inventions are superfluous; they are an upside-down pyramid about to collapse. So many of our inventions are designed to solve problems that would not exist were it not for earlier problems also caused by earlier inventions. Why should a person work hard to buy machines that can save one time, when life without machines saves even more time. The argument of Ivan Illich that bicycles are a faster mode of transportation than cars, once all the additional work hours to afford the costs of a car are factored in, is well known, but the same argument holds for other devices as well. Hand washing is better than machine washing and hand writing is better than machine writing. Edward Abbey expresses his frustration with the whole modern system as follows:
My God! I’m thinking, what incredible shit we put up with most of our lives—the domestic routine…, the stupid and useless and degrading jobs, the insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the businessmen, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back home in the capital, the foul, diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of automatic washers and automobiles and TV machines and telephones—! ah Christ!,… what intolerable garbage and what utterly useless crap we bury ourselves in day by day, while patiently enduring at the same time the creeping strangulation of the clean white collar and the rich but modest four-in-hand garrote!6
It is time to stop putting up with this inhumane, degrading system. If we do, we may lose some conveniences, but we would gain life. As for how this subjugation of the human spirit took place, Lawrence gives a good fictionalized depiction as follows:
They had to work hard, much harder than before, the work was terrible and heart-breaking in its mechanicalness.
But they submitted to it all. The joy went out of their lives, the hope seemed to perish as they became more and more mechanised. And yet they accepted the new conditions. They even got a further satisfaction out of them. At first they hated Gerald Crich, they swore to do something to him, to murder him. But as time went on, they accepted everything with some fatal satisfaction. Gerald was their high priest, he represented the religion they really felt. His father was forgotten already. There was a new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman, but satisfying in its very destructiveness. The men were satisfied to belong to the great and wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed them. It was what they wanted. It was the highest that man had produced, the most wonderful and superhuman. They were exalted by belonging to this great and superhuman system which was beyond feeling or reason, something really godlike. Their hearts died within them, but their souls were satisfied. It was what they wanted. Otherwise Gerald could never have done what he did. He was just ahead of them in giving them what they wanted, this participation in a great and perfect system that subjected life to pure mathematical principles. This was a sort of freedom, the sort they really wanted. It was the first great step in undoing, the first great phase of chaos, the substitution of the mechanical principle for the organic, the destruction of the organic purpose, the organic unity, and the subordination of every organic unit to the great mechanical purpose. It was pure organic disintegration and pure mechanical organisation. This is the first and finest state of chaos.7
Our minds are decaying, our souls atrophying, and our bodies are unhealthy due to this insane system of modernity and the slave-work that makes the system run. Ironically, the more we descend into utter chaos and degeneracy, the more we claim that this is the best of all possible worlds. As Klages writes:
Listen to him chattering about how far “we” have come, how wonderful is the time in which “we” live, and how delightful are the gadgets that are available to “us”…Everything that he says sounds like the babbling of a carnival conjuror; everything that he says reveals the utter impotence of his Spirit!8
Work
There is no point in work
unless it absorbs you
like an absorbing game.
If it doesn’t absorb you
if it’s never any fun,
don’t do it.
When a man goes out into his work
he is alive like a tree in spring,
he is living, not merely working.
When the Hindus weave thin wool into long, long lengths of stuff
with their thin dark hands and their wide dark eyes and their still souls
absorbed
they are like slender trees putting forth leaves, a long white web of living
leaf,
the tissue they weave,
and they clothe themselves in white as a tree clothes itself
in its own foliage.
As with cloth, so with houses, ships, shoes, wagons or cups or loaves
men might put them forth as a snail its shell, as a bird that leans
its breast against its nest, to make it round,
as the turnip models his round root, as the bush makes flowers and
gooseberries,
putting them forth, not manufacturing them,
and cities might be as once they were, bowers grown out from the busy
bodies of people.
And so it will be again, men will smash the machines.
At last, for the sake of clothing himself in his own leaf-like cloth
tissued from his life,
and dwelling in his own bowery house, like a beaver’s nibbled mansion
and drinking from cups that came off his fingers like flowers off their
five-fold stem,
he will cancel the machines we have got.9
Lawrence’s advice above is epoch shattering and epoch making as well. If everyone, or even most people just simply escaped the system, stopped working, stopped buying and selling the entire edifice would crumble; the house would come down. So, what advice do we have to young people who want to make a difference in the world? Buy nothing, sell nothing, and don’t work for anyone. Escape into the forest, join a monastic community, do only enough “work” to survive, and with all the time left, work at something fun. One’s working hours should be spent doing what he or she loves, and in one’s free time, basic chores can be taken care of. But, don’t do anything that helps the Machine, and don’t do anything unless it is truly and greatly fulfilling. Nothing, and I repeat nothing, should be done that contributes to the harm of non-human species or our Mother Earth. Ecocide is a great sin, which so many modern jobs contribute to. Hildegard of Bingen writes of how all the elements of the earth shudder at the results of human ecocide:
[T]he elements utter their complaints as with the loudest shouts to their Creator, not so that they might speak like humans do, but so that they might demonstrate what their oppression means. For because they are caught up by human sins, they transgress the proper mode that they received from their Creator, with movements and courses that are foreign to them. They demonstrate that they cannot keep to the paths and purposes to which they were enjoined by God, because they are subverted by human wickedness. So too they stink with the pestilence of depraved reputations and the hunger of miscarried justice, for humans do not tend them rightly. For they sometimes are contaminated by the fog of stinking human filth brought on as punishment, because the elements and humans share a common bond—humans exist with the elements and the elements exist with humans. (Liber Vitae Meritorum 3.23)
Instead of work that harms the planet, do something simple, something organic, such as gathering fruit, planting trees, or turning downed wood into beautiful bowls. It can be done; As Lawrence states above, with prophetic fervor, “men will smash the machines,” “he will cancel the machines we have got.” As for the position of the unenlightened modern worker, he is debased by the machines he uses, which in turn use him. Schuon writes the following on this phenomenon:
[H]ow is the position or quality of the modern industrial worker to be defined? In the first place the answer is that “the worker’s world” is a wholly artificial creation due to machines and the popular diffusion of scientific information connected with their use; in other words machines infallibly create the artificial human type called “proletarian,” or rather they create a proletariat, for here it is essentially a question of a quantitative collectivity and not of a natural caste, namely one that is based on a particular individual nature. If machines could be suppressed and the ancient crafts restored with all their aspects of art and dignity, the “problem of the workers” would cease to exist; this is true even as regards purely servile functions or more or less quantitative occupations, for the simple reason that machines are in themselves inhuman and anti-spiritual. The machine kills not only the soul of the worker, but the soul as such and so also the soul of the exploiter: the pair exploiter-worker is inseparable from mechanization, whereas the crafts by their human and spiritual quality prevent this gross alternative. The universe of the machine means, in short, the triumph of ponderous and treacherous iron-mongery; it is the victory of metal over wood, of matter over man, of cunning over intelligence; expressions such as “mass,” “block” and “shock” that occur so commonly in the vocabulary of industrialized man, are very significant in a world more proper to insects than to humans. There is nothing surprising in the fact that the “workers’ world,” with its mechanico-scientific and materialistic psychology, is particularly impermeable to spiritual realities, for it presupposes a “surrounding reality” which is quite artificial: it requires machinery and therefore metal, din, hidden and treacherous forces, a nightmare environment, incomprehensible comings and goings, in a word an insect-like existence carried on in the midst of ugliness and triviality. In such a world, or rather in such a “stage set,” spiritual reality comes to be regarded as an all too obvious illusion or a luxury to be despised. In no matter what traditional environment, on the contrary, it is the “problem of the workers,” and so also of mechanization, which is devoid of persuasive force: in order to make it convincing, a world of stage sets corresponding to it had first to be created, in which the very forms suggest the absence of God; Heaven has to be implausible and talk of God has to sound false. When the industrial worker says he has no time to pray he is not so wrong, for in this way he is merely expressing what is inhuman or, one might say, subhuman in his condition. The ancient crafts were eminently intelligible and did not deprive man of his human quality, which by definition implies the faculty to think of God. Some will doubtless object that industrialism is a fact and must be accepted as such, as though the character of being a fact took precedence over truth. People easily mistake for courage and realism what is their exact opposite: that is to say, because some calamity cannot be prevented, people call it a “good” and make a virtue of their own inability to escape from it. Error is deemed truth simply because it exists and this fits in well with the dynamism and existentialism of the mentality of a machine age; everything that exists, thanks to the blindness of men, is called “our time,” just as if this fact by itself constituted a categorical imperative. It is all too clear that the impossibility of escaping from an ill does not prevent that ill from being what it is; in order to find a remedy it is necessary to consider the ill quite apart from our chance of escape or our desire not to perceive it, for no good can arise in opposition to truth.10
Schuon stated things so clearly and irrefutably that there is little need for additional comment. It is clear that for all their obvious differences, Lawrence and Schuon could have been allies on many issues, such as the necessity of destroying the Machine, and the importance of reviving traditional crafts. Both desired a fuller form of life for humanity, one in which the divine spark had not been blown out. The Protestant view of work’s importance may have had some meaning centuries ago, but not today when most forms of work have been despiritualized. As Lawrence writes, “It may be argued that work has a fuller meaning, that man lives most intensely when he works. That may be, for some few men, for some few artists whose lives are otherwise empty. But for the mass, for the 99.9 per cent of mankind, work is a form of non-living, of non-existence, of submergence.”11 As such, we must look upon 99.9 percent of humanity with pity. The modern humiliation a person is subject to is poetically described by R. S. Thomas:
I would have spared you this, Prytherch;
You were like a child to me.
I would have seen you poor and in rags,
Rather than wealthy and not free.
The rain and wind are hard masters;
I have known you wince under their lash.
But there was comfort for you at the day’s end
Dreaming over the warm ash
Of a turf fire on a hill farm.
Contented with your accustomed ration
Of bread and bacon, and drawing your strength
From membership of an old nation
Not given to beg. But look at yourself
Now, a servant hired to flog
The life out of the slow soil,
Or come obediently as a dog
To the pound’s whistle. Can’t you see
Behind the smile on the times’ face
The cold brain of the machine
That will destroy you and your race?12
What is he?
What is he?
—A man of course.
Yes, but what does he do?
—He lives and is a man.
Oh quite! But he must work. He must have a job of some sort.
—Why?
Because obviously he’s not one of the leisured classes.
—I don’t know. He has lots of leisure. And he makes quite beautiful
chairs.—
There you are then! He’s a cabinet maker.
—No no!
Anyhow a carpenter and joiner.
—Not at all.
But you said so.
—What did I say?
That he made chairs, and was a joiner and carpenter.
—I said he made chairs, but I did not say he was a carpenter.
All right then, he’s just an amateur.
—Perhaps! Would you say a thrush was a professional flautist, or just an
amateur?—
I’d say it was just a bird.
—And I say he is just a man.
All right! You always did quibble.13
A real, authentic person, who has a deep knowledge of his inner self, is simply who he is, a being unique in all of creation. That person can never be defined by the work he does, but only by who he is. We, today, judge people by what they do, rather than who they are. Many people small in their sense of being do a lot, but if a person full of being does nothing, it matters not, since he is what he is, just like all the rest of creation. Only man judges other men based on their actions, but it lowers him from his proper role in the chain of being. This insistence on action makes a virtue out of work, even slave work, so we tell people they are free, but without work they will starve. They are only free to choose their slavery over starvation. Instead, we should free ourselves from work, free ourselves from this system of paying for our necessities by selling our freedom to be fully human. Lawrence writes:
We do all like to get things inside a barb-wire corral. Especially our fellow-men. We love to round them up inside the barb-wire enclosure of FREEDOM, and make ’em work. Work, you free jewel, WORK! shouts the liberator, cracking his whip[…] I will not work. I do not choose to be a free democrat. I am absolutely a servant of my own Holy Ghost.14
The ignoble procession—
When I see the ignoble procession
streaming forth from little doorways
citywards, in little rivers that swell to a great stream,
of men in bowler hats, hurrying
and a mingling of wallet-carrying women
hurrying, hurrying, legs going quick quick quick
in ignoble haste, for fear of being late—
I am filled with humiliation.
Their haste
is so
humiliating.15
Modern life is so humiliating. What could be more noble than the way any animal acts, naturally, proud of itself, and secure in its being? And yet humans run away from this organic naturalness into an absurd artificiality. All the great cities, the huge factories, and the creations of modern man only serve to demean the species and make those who are awake cry out in pity and rage. The way a sane person should react to the idea of modern employment is described by Lawrence:
Work!—a job! […] She rebelled with all her backbone against the word job. Even the substitutes, employment or work, were detestable, unbearable. Emphatically, she did not want to work for a wage. It was too humiliating. Could anything be more infra dig than the performing of a set of special actions day in day out, for a life-time, in order to receive some shillings every seventh day. Shameful! A condition of shame. The most vulgar, sordid, and humiliating of all forms of slavery: so mechanical. Far better be a slave outright, in contact with all the whims and impulses of a human being, than serve some mechanical routine of modern work.16
And as for the vast bulk of humanity who know nothing better than their work, their slavery: they are to be pitied. All employees today are degenerates, whether directors of companies, or assembly-line workers at Ford, and as Lawrence says, “Ford’s employees are not spontaneous, nonchalant human beings[…] They are good, well-tested, well-oiled motor-car sections.”17
Men are not bad—
Men are not bad, when they are free.
Prison makes men bad, and the money compulsion makes
men bad.
If men were free from the terror of earning a living
there would be abundance in the world
and men would work gaily.18
The modern system forces people to work, but work makes people subservient to the modern system. It is a horrific, vicious, circle and it must be stopped. Just as a petty criminal goes into prison with a soul, and leaves a hardened killing machine, modern children are born with the same wonder that all generations have been born with, but school kills half of their vitality, and work kills the other half. If we were all free to do as we like without fear of starvation, and without an insane attachment to things, we would have far less crime and insanity, and far more happiness. To become free, we must both rely on the wisdom gleaned from the sun-men, and also develop an organic connection to other people, animals, the planet, and the cosmos. Lawrence writes:
We must have a new bond between men, the bond of real brotherhood. And why don’t we find that bond sufficiently among us? Because we have been brought up from childhood to mistrust ourselves and to mistrust each other. We have been brought up in a kind of fetish worship. We are like tribes of savages with their witch-doctors. And who are our witch-doctors, our medicine men? Why, they are professors of science and professors of medicine and professors of law and professors of religion, all of whom thump on their tom-tom drums and overawe us and take us in. And they take us in with the clever cry, “Listen to us, and you will get on, get on, get on, you will rise up into the middle classes and become one of the great washed.”
The trick of this only educated men like yourself see through. The working man can’t see through it. He can’t see that, for every one that gets on, you must have five hundred fresh slavers and toilers to produce the graft. Tempt all men to get on, and it’s like holding a carrot in front of five thousand asses all harnessed to your machine. One ass gets the carrot, and all the others have done your pulling for you.
Now what we want is a new bond between fellow-men. We’ve got to knock down the middle-class fetish and the middle-class medicine-men. But you’ve got to build up as you knock down. You’ve got to build up the real fellow-feeling between fellow-men. You’ve got to teach us working men to trust one another, absolutely trust one another, and to take all our trust away from the Great Washed and their medicine men who bleed us like leeches. Let us mistrust them—but let us trust one another. First and foremost, let us trust one another, we working men.19
Wages
The wages of work is cash.
The wages of cash is want more cash.
The wages of want more cash is vicious competition.
The wages of vicious competition is—the world we live in.
The work-cash-want circle is the viciousest circle
that ever turned men into fiends.
Earning a wage is a prison occupation
and a wage-earner is a sort of gaol-bird.
Earning a salary is a prison overseer’s job,
a gaoler instead of a gaol-bird.
Living on your income is strolling grandly outside the prison
in terror lest you have to go in. And since the work-prison covers
almost every scrap of the living earth, you stroll up and down
on a narrow beat, about the same as a prisoner taking his exercise.
This is called universal freedom.20
If this is freedom, we should want none of it. It would be vastly preferable to be a simple Russian serf from a few hundred years ago. At least the serf would have clean air, clean water, good black bread, and a healthy lifestyle with a strong body. Now we have blackened air, poisoned water, artificial food, and depraved sedentary lifestyles that destroy the body and mind. As the Buddha made clear, attachments are a great evil. Attachments to money, power, and things are destroying this planet. Let’s put an end to this vicious circle, smash the machines, and restore beauty to our planet, along with dignity and joy in living on it.
It is clear from the literature that there was often an organic connection between masters and servants in the past, but now there is no connection even between people of the same class, and the overwhelming focus on equality simply places everyone in service of a false doctrine. It would be vastly preferable to have a true, organic hierarchy, as in the past. Let the sun-men rule, and let everyone else serve, but serve in a life-affirming and organic manner. Lawrence writes:
Master and servant—or master and man relationship is, essentially, a polarised flow, like love. It is a circuit of vitalism which flows between master and man and forms a very precious nourishment to each, and keeps both in a state of subtle, quivering, vital equilibrium. Deny it as you like, it is so. But once you abstract both master and man, and make them both serve an idea: production, wage, efficiency, and so on: so that each looks on himself as an instrument performing a certain repeated evolution, then you have changed the vital, quivering circuit of master and man into a mechanical machine unison. Just another way of life: or anti-life.21
Work, in the modern sense is always anti-life. Work is the opposite of prayer, and, hence, goes against the will of the Gods. Lawrence makes this clear:
Never was a more grovelling motto than this, that work is prayer. Work is not prayer at all: not in the same category. Work is a practical business, prayer is the soul’s yearning and desire. Work is not an ideal, save for slaves.22
What have they done to you—
What have they done to you, men of the masses
creeping back and forth to work?
What have they done to you, the saviours of the people?
Oh what have they saved you from?
Alas, they have saved you from yourself,
from your own body, saved you from living your own life.
And given you this jig-jig-jig
tick-tick-ticking of machines,
this life which is no-man’s-life.
Oh a no-man’s-life, in a no-man’s-land
this is what they’ve given you
in place of your own life.23
All of the “conveniences” brought by modern technology rob man of his vitality, destroy his mind, and rape his body. Why work for this? Is this the plan of the Gods? No! This is the work of pure evil, namely the Machine. All who work in the system, work for the system, and so are nothing more than slaves. As Lawrence writes:
I’ll tell you what’ll happen to you chaps. I’ll give you a little picture of what you’ll be like, in the future.—[They will] make a number of compounds […] and there you’ll be kept. And every one of you’ll have a little brass collar round his neck, with a number on it. You won’t have names any more. […] You won’t be allowed to go outside the gates, except at week-ends. […] They’ll give you plenty to eat, and a can of beer a day, and a bit of bacca—and they’ll provide dominoes and skittles for you to play with. And you’ll be the most contented set of men alive.—But you won’t be men. You won’t even be animals. You’ll go from number one to number three thousand, a lot of numbered slaves—a new sort of slaves.24
We might not have physical brass collars, but we have spiritual collars, and all the rest is true. They legalize marijuana, prostitution, gambling; they come up with ever new and more depraved forms of entertainment, but all with the goal of enslaving us ever more.
The People.
Ah the people, the people!
surely they are flesh of my flesh!
When, in the streets of the working quarters
they stream past, stream past, going to work
then, when I see the iron hooked in their faces,
their poor, their fearful faces
then I scream in my soul, for I know I cannot
cut the iron hook out of their faces, that makes them so drawn,
nor cut the invisible wires of steel that pull them
back and forth to work,
back and forth, to work
like fearful and corpse-like fishes hooked and being played
by some malignant fisherman on an unseen, safe shore
where he does not choose to land them yet, hooked fishes of the factory
world.25
Some people have mistakenly labeled Lawrence as a misanthropist. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Lawrence loved all of creation, including mankind, but he also understood the need for balance and proportion. When humans overpopulate the planet, destroying much beauty in the process, that form of humanity must be railed against. Additionally, modern man is qualitatively different from his forebears. Lawrence could see the vitality in people that still retained some, but he was also aware that most people today are turning into robotic automatons. Lawrence didn’t hate man as such, but hated the robot he is turning into. The poem above shows how much Lawrence cared for his fellow men. He wished to save them, but he felt that perhaps even Jesus couldn’t save all of mankind. He did, however, revel in every opportunity of basking in the life-flow of men who still retained even a modicum of vitality, as evinced in the following passage:
Detached men, some in the black and white, stood at the street corners, as if obstinately avoiding the current of work. Having had a day off, the salt taste of liberty still lingering on their lips, they were not going to be dragged so easily back into harness. I always sympathise with these rather sulky, forlorn males who insist on making another day of it. It shows a spark of spirit, still holding out against our over-harnessed world.26
The three principle ways people are defeated and their life-forces dwindled within the modern world are drugs, including those prescribed so often by psychiatrists, entertainment, and work. All three should be avoided as nefarious methods of control. A free man can and should work, since laziness is never a virtue, but he shouldn’t work at a job. As Lawrence writes:
[Y]ou’d never get me to work at a job, or do a day’s regular work, no, not if I starved by inches. I am a man first, and a man I will remain. I’ll work with men who are just busy about the place. But work for money, never. Earn a living, never. Earn! Foul, filthy word. I will earn nothing. Earn? Think of it. I, who am a man, earning. Foul and despicable. I’ll dig, or I’ll write, or I’ll chop wood or mend boots. But not for money. No no. I’d rather die. […] I’ll live like the dingoes or crows, I’ll be an outlaw or a thief. But work for a wage I will not: nor a salary either. Neither will I live on an income derived from other people’s work. The world of work is to me an ignominy and shame. I hope it will go bust in my day, so that I can see the ruin. […] Fat-arsed humanity[…] I’d rather kick its beastly humble behind than do anything else in the world. […] [No,] I wouldn’t want to debase even my boot. They can kick one another. They won’t be able to keep off it much longer.27
The modern world we inhabit reeks of corruption, and one of the sources of depravity is modern work. A man hunched over a computer is no longer a man, and is destined to fill the world with more depravity and the stench of human filth. What may we do to stem the tide of the onslaught of the Machine? We may pray, as Angelos Sikelianos declares in the following poem:
Once at sunset Jesus and his disciples
were on their way outside the walls of Zion
when suddenly they came to where the town
for years had dumped its garbage: burnt mattresses
from sickbeds, broken pots, rags, filth.
And there, crowning the highest pile, bloated,
its legs pointing at the sky, lay a dog’s carcass;
and as the crows that covered it flew off
when they heard the approaching footsteps, such a stench
rose up from it that all the disciples, hands
cupped over their nostrils, drew back as one man.
But Jesus calmly walked on by Himself
toward the pile, stood there, and then gazed
so closely at the carcass that one disciple,
not able to stop himself, called out from a distance,
“Rabbi, don’t you smell that terrible stench?
How can you go on standing there?”
Jesus, His eyes fixed on the carcass,
answered: “If your breath is pure, you’ll smell
the same stench inside the town behind us.
But now my soul marvels at something else,
marvels at what comes out of this corruption.
Look how that dog’s teeth glitter in the sun:
like hailstones, like a lily, beyond decay,
a great pledge, mirror of the Eternal One, but also
the Just One’s harsh lightning-flash and hope.”
So He spoke; and whether or not the disciples
understood His words, they followed Him
as He moved on, silent.
And now I,
certainly the last of them, ponder Your words, O Lord,
and, filled with one thought, I stand before You:
grant me, as now I walk outside my Zion,
and the world from end to end is all ruins, garbage,
all unburied corpses choking the sacred
springs of breath, inside and outside the city:
grant me, Lord, as I walk through this terrible stench,
one single moment of Your holy calm,
so that I, dispassionate, may also pause
among this carrion and with my own eyes
somewhere see a token, white as hailstones,
as the lily—something glittering suddenly
deep inside me, above the putrefaction,
beyond the world’s decay, like the dog’s teeth
at which You gazed that sunset, Lord, in wonder:
a great pledge, mirror of the Eternal One, but also
the Just One’s harsh lightning-flash and hope.28
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One of your best yet, and on an extremely important topic for the modern world. Work - or "work" - is it seems to me one of the most important topics in freeing us from our imprisonment to modernity.
Thank you, and please keep it up.