#lady chatterleys lover

“From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world. She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees. They seemed a very power of silence, and yet a vital presence.”

Lady Chatterley’s Lover — D.H. Lawrence

“The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There’s lots of good fish in the sea…maybe…but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you’re not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.”

Lady Chatterley’s Lover — D.H. Lawrence

“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.”

Lady Chatterley’s Lover — D.H. Lawrence

I remember reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover in High School.

Some parts of it I thought were dumb, like the way the lovers wove flowers into their pubic hair. 

But what did I know, and who was I to judge, and who am I to remember this now.

I would never have described D.H. Lawrence as a writer who was important to me, I have only read one of his books, I remember that sometimes French people would go into ecstasies about “the perfection of his style” and I think I found the style the most annoying thing of all, and I’ve forgotten almost everything about Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and yet there is one thing about it I always remember, or think I remember, and therefore I think this book has been incredibly influential to me, and even though I’ve forgotten almost everything except for what I thought was wonderful and perhaps I have exaggerated or distorted what has become for me a signal part, well I think it is incredibly important to me, and maybe D.H. Lawrence is as great as they say, even if I’ve totally failed to see the greatness in him that other people see, and have mistook for his greatness something that I made up, and maybe what I’ve made up by mistaking it for something I saw in D. H. Lawrence is as valueless as anything else other people can’t see, or as priceless, or maybe this is only it, the very same thing that other people do see, and now we can all be friends!

I was working at an antiquarian bookstore, I think it was the summer before sophomore year.  My work in this bookstore and the owners of this bookstore and just the existence of this bookstore, all of these together were the most powerful, the most influential, and the strongest medicine the good lord saw to send to me in those dreamy, shitty adolescent days.

How’s it going with Lady Chatterley’s Cate would ask me in a voice both mocking and affectionate.  She was one of the two owners and I feared and adored them both, because not only did they know everything, but they were so sweet to me, and I had decided that greatness and totality should be both cruel and largely unintelligible, like the tomes of modernism say, or like my father’s dead face, so it took me some time not to tremble even from their good humor and kindness.

Anyway the part of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that I always think about is the part when the lover, I forget his name, he’s from the working classes, and he and Lady Chatterley have just fucked, and he says that he wishes that the men would all wear tight pants with red stripes and loose open shirts that would show their beautiful bodies, and I forget if he said how he envisioned the women should dress, but the men shouldn’t be hidden in black and their bodies and the joy of their bodies should not be hidden, and that the men and women should work just enough to give pleasure to their bodies and food to their bellies and rooves for them to sleep under and should otherwise have plenty of idle time to make music and swim and play and fuck and share their love.

I am always surprised and not surprised to think again of this part of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I read in high school because I had read somewhere else that it was scandalous, I think I read in some old copy of the Evergreen Review or something that D.H. Lawrence was a visionary of sex and class and that his ideas were not merely pornographic but revolutionary, and I always think about the difference between revolution and pornography, and how the latter has had a way of stealing the former.

I think about it whenever I’ve fallen in love, and I thought about it yesterday fucking in the vestibule of the building I live in, that I always love to see people who love each other sporting all over the place.  There are varieties of lilies here that I have never seen.  A month ago I saw varieties of irises that I have never seen.  I think about people and their work hours and the real meaning of slavery and how I hate to see anybody under the yoke of any man, and how surprised I am again and again that what people consider pleasure is something they are willing to pay somebody else to take the lion’s share of, while they, the horde, watch. 

Energy crisis and financial crisis, these crises of dearth that have nothing to do with scarcity and everything to do with the serving of dead masters, the worship of dead ideas, the terror of an order that might be other than the order of a master whose star’s only mystery is how much we are willing to pay him to keep on being, keep on seeming, what he is for us, what we need for him to seem.

For example, it is not a sexual revolution for all of the sex to be on the internet, and it is not a sexual revolution for a genius of sex to become a film star of sex.  We geniuses of sex are supposed to fuck the world, not steal the sex of the people and take their money.  I think this is what is supposed to have been revolutionary about D.H. Lawrence?  I can’t remember.  Maybe this is what is revolutionary about me.

I can’t fall in love without wanting to see everyone in love and fucking.  When it’s spring and summer, I don’t want to see the sticky depakote eyes of the boys who spooge more with their laptops than they ever have their whole lives any other way.  And it hurts me to see women who fuck themselves through their own mirrors so hard, and hate themselves so hard through their own mirrors, and try so hard with their fashions to please god look fuckable today that they never, ever, ever learn how to make love.

If you are in love, do not memorialize your good sport only for porntube, I pray ye.  Bless the land of your terrible fathers, your mean mothers, your charming and indifferent neighbors, bless them with the ointments of your loins.