As I tweeted, in exasperation, either something other than research happens tonight or I'm out of NaPoWriMo. My muse is unruly and apparently will not write on command.

And I guess I'm out. Though I would like to continue to post bits from the book I am currently into.

From Women in Love, Birkin, who probably closest resembles Lawrence himself, talking to Gerald:


These few lines [in Chapter 16] sparked something. I am immersed in thinking about the 'gift economy' (as an parallel system to Capitalism, or what Capitalism is founded on rather), about the artist's life, the struggle to live, what has to be sacrificed for art, and why art continues when society seems in nearly every way to wish to abolish it by ignoring most of their artists' need for decent livelihood.

And in this economic predicament, yes, "every true artist is the salvation of every other." And they do get on "badly"? Surely!

But it is the last line, "only artists produce for each other the world that is fit to live in," that had the wow factor. I feel Lawrence himself is doing this for me, even as I walk up and down the streets and across the parks with my dog listening to Women in Love on audiobook.

And, you see, Venus, Botticelli's Venus, does create a vision of beauty that makes the world fit to live in.


from the VirtualUffizi


Sorry to be so sketchy. But I shall have to give up the NaPoWriMo effort as my muse is veiled, absent.

Because Women in Love is a 25 hour recording, and I listen to it every night on my dog walk, the influence of Lawrence's novel will affect my writing. I've never read Lawrence, though I do have The Plumed Serpent on my shelves, so must have tried. An audio recording, and Sennheiser earbuds, and I enter deep listening mode. The brilliance and beauty of his language marvels me as I walk the dark streets with my dog.

My writing has been compared to Lawrence's, which is far-fetched, surely, and yet I find I am enthralled with his mastery, as a writer, and feel a deep resonance with his work, at least as it is expressed in this novel.

Tonight, listening to Chapter 14 (of 42, I have a ways to go), a passage spoke again of concerns relevant to my Venus Poems. Birkin and Ursuala are speaking:


From my Venus manuscript, this piece:










And now I understand from Lawrence that her birth from the sea-foam, the sea-sperm of her castrated father, is not just the miraculous birth of love in the world, of poetry, but of death in the world, of dissolution, loss.

Venus' creation out of destruction marks her. For there is also Venus Pandemos, who, in mythology, is born of Zeus and Dione. She is associated, not with celestial love, like Venus Urania, but with the body; Venus Pandemos is the common goddess of the people. A goddess of sensuality, of lust. And hence of death, dissolution.

Once again, I find I am laying the groundwork for writing, for continuing with the suite of poems I began a few years ago, without actually writing. Yet this research is of enormous help to me, never-the-less.

And besides, you get to read a few quotes from Lawrence's Women in Love, which may inspire you to download the audiobook and listen, or the pdf and read it.

An extraordinary passage in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, between the characters, Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin, who fall in love (though I am only on chapter 15 so don't know the outcome). When Ursula visits him alone, he explains his position.

Birkin says, "If we are going to make a relationship, even of friendship, there must be something final and infallible about it." He continues:


Yes, I understand this. In meditation, I, too, have discovered what Lawrence writes about. But can I write about the void that is beyond love? Even a few lines will do - only a draft and a re-entry into my Venus Manuscript.


We can love only when we are emptied of ourselves. When we have given ourselves to the other.

In the depths of this giving, profound, scary, unsettling, is a union beyond self, ego, personhood, the particular state of time and space in the here and now that we are.

If we enter this spiritual state of being, dependent as it is on the erotic, on the sexual forces of attraction, desire and excitement, melt into the beyondness of the orgasmic moment, and allow it to be a portal where we can spin, tilt, go deeper into the mystery, letting ourselves dissolve, even to the point of extinction, giving ourselves over to the enigma, then, yes.

There remains something alone in each of us even in the union of love, and there is a "beyond, in you, in me, which is further than love."


And I apologize, this is as far as I can go tonight. Tomorrow images may emerge to give flesh to these thoughts; who knows.