The slow death produced science and machinery, but both are death products.”Īnd there you have it. They substituted the non-vital universe of forces and mechanistic order, everything else became abstraction, and the long slow death of the human being set in. “Then again the cosmos became anathema to the Protestants after the Reformation. “The cosmos became anathema to the Christians, though the early Catholic Church restored it somewhat after the crash of the Dark Ages,” he wrote. The indigenous presence made a huge impression on Lawrence when he was in Taos. Lawrence could have learned as much from the Aboriginals in Australia but his journeys and his book “Kangaroo” (1923) never plumbed the enormous depths of a 60,000-year old consciousness.

His eyes and his soul opened up in New Mexico more than anywhere else. He considered himself a pagan, a pantheist and it is from that perspective that we could garner the best understanding of a ‘pariah’ whose self imposed exile from the depredations of “Christian civilization” would serve us well today. His was a prophetic voice perhaps more relevant to where we stand as a species than almost any other writer. His birthday was September 11th which if he had experienced it in 2001 would have substantiated his concerns for a humanity terribly out of sorts with itself. Never has his message been more relevant and revelatory of humanity’s immense shortcomings than today. His father Arthur worked in the coal mines, the operative word being coal, because the rest of his very short life, David excoriated those parts of his culture that demeaned, reduced and undermined humans to mere pawns in the industrial juggernaut. It feels not so much a commentary on Revelations as an inside look at a writer’s deep concerns with his civilization like nothing the Western civilization has ever produced. He called his small, exquisite esoteric tract “APOCALYPSE.” In 1931. David Herbert Lawrence would have understood the international cabal holding the world for ransom about a century ago. The captains of the corporate elite are meeting in Glasgow. “We are unnaturally resisting our connection with the cosmos.”

“Confraternity of the living sun, make the embers of financial and industrial internationalism pale upon the hearth of the earth.

Long dark how to save