Lawrence
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The nature of sexuality, understood as an aspect
of the evolution of consciousness
in general and the descent of the potency
in particular, is a subject of some prominence in Unancestral Voice.
The work of the British novelist and poet D.
H. Lawrence, one of the most controversial commentators on sexuality
in this century, occasions several of Barfield's reflections.
Lawrence [Barfield has his mouthpiece
Burgeon say] had had the penetration to see below the symptom. Twentieth
century man was dimly, gropingly, feebly finding the potency where it actually
was--within; within the physical frame where a man was separate and alone.
But Lawrence had also divined the truth that, although it was within him,
it did not belong to him. It was his surviving real link with the cosmos,
out of which even his separateness had been born. It was his present being.
(31)
Contemporary sexuality is thus not universal or
timeless but a facet of our interiorization.
Though "desperately wrong" in most of their philosophy of sexuality (especially
the conviction that "enthusiastic copulation is pretty well all that is
required to set [things] right" [UV 33]), Lawrence and his followers,
Barfield firmly acknowledged,
were right, a thousand times, in their
insistence that the everlasting "sex" with which the twentieth century
is obsessed to the verge of demonic possession is infinitely more than
the surface thrill as which it was mostly accepted, infinitely more also
than a basis of intimate companionship between persons of opposite sex;
infinitely more than the means to the procreation of children. They were
right in divining through it a mightiness that had been shackled and should
now be set free. (32-33)
See in particular
Unancestral Voice,
Chaps. 3 & 4. |
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