The Black Dog

Even in the midst of his best music, it sat in the middle of him, this invisible black dog, and growled and waited, never to be cajoled. He knew of its presence—and was a little uneasy. For of course he wanted to let himself go, to feel rosy and loving and all that. But at the very thought, the black dog showed its teeth.

D. H. Lawrence - Aaron's Rod (1922)


The black dog is Lawrence’s metaphor for the way his principal character protects what he sees as his soul, the vastly important core of what he is. If anyone comes too close to that core, then the black dog shows his teeth and the approach is rejected.

Aaron Sisson, son of a mining family is that principal character, but it is easy to envisage Lawrence himself using much the same metaphor in his own case. As if he is equally determined to preserve the core of his being, equally determined to keep his soul to himself and keep something precious away from contamination by the outside world.

Lawrence was an artist, he could take us on a railway journey from Rome to Milan in a third class carriage crowded with Italian peasants, he could show us what it is to wake up alone on a bright, cold November morning in a cheap hotel in Florence. Yet when it came to people, Lawrence could paint a picture showing greater depth than the reality we see.   

We could go on to say that the fictitious Aaron Sisson was wary of what isn't within him becoming known, wary of being understood even though that may not have been Lawrence’s intention. Perhaps Lawrence himself was wary of being understood. As if a metaphorical black dog also guarded the core of what he was, guarded it against it being leaked to the wider world like stolen plans in a spy movie.

From the same novel we have Aaron Sisson in a country house party at the other end of the social spectrum. He becomes aware that the lives of country house people are in a sense already known to him and to everyone else via the cinema. Known more vividly in our day, as is much else which was previously known through the fogged lens of newspapers, books and gossip.


He had fallen into country house parties before, but never into quite such a plushy sense of riches. He felt he ought to have his breath taken away. But alas, the cinema has taken our breath away so often, investing us in all the splendours of the splendidest American millionaire, or all the heroics and marvels of the Somme or the North Pole, that life has now no magnate richer than we, no hero nobler than we have been, on the film. Connu! Connu! Everything life has to offer is known to us, couldn't be known better, from the film.


There is a curious sense of unease detectable here, unease about old mystiques ceasing to be mystiques. A suspicion that we could be more shallow than we suppose, easily known and understood. Most of us have some kind of social position to preserve, some kind of mystique about what we think we are. The unease leaking into Lawrence’s novel is where the black dog has nothing to protect apart from a flimsy mystique which others see through whenever they come close.

Perhaps rulers are wary of being understood too. Perhaps they are afraid that their mystique as rulers has gone, their abilities merely human, their failings too visible. The idea fits well with the strangely transparent incompetence of modern governments in our digital world. 

We have gone well beyond the cinema of Lawrence's day. If we pay attention to what can be known, then we are closer to our rulers than we ever were. We see what the governing classes are, their shallowness, motives, conceits, errors, facile ideologies and contorted justifications, their shallow mendacity.

There is nothing they can do about it, there is no black dog.

I didn’t know such people existed

“I didn’t believe my senses. I didn’t know such people existed. And her friends! Oh the dreadful friends she had — these Fabians!”  Oh, their eugenics. They wanted to examine my private morals, for eugenic reasons.  Oh, you can’t imagine such a state.  Worse than the Spanish Inquisition.  And I stood it for three years. How I stood it,  I don’t know — ”

D.H. Lawrence - The Lost Girl (1920)


Published over a century ago but could have been written today. There is still something of the ghastly, self-righteous, prodnose Fabian about our political class. That’s ‘class’ singular, there are enough similarities to leave it that way.

It isn’t easy to look back on earlier attitudes and impressions, but before the internet I’m fairly sure I didn’t know such people existed in such grasping, supercilious profusion.

An improbably honest Fabian might say –

We Fabians adopt authority and make it ours, so naturally we defer to authority and in so doing we defer to ourselves. We revere authority because we are authority. Admittedly that must make us seem somewhat narcissist in our general outlook, but this too is one of the burdens of authority.

Not quite sensible

From a shed issued a smallish, brigand-looking fellow carrying a lantern. He had his cloak over his nose and his hat over his eyes. His legs were bundled with white rag, crossed and crossed with hide straps, and he was shod in silent skin sandals. “This is my brother Giovanni,” said Pancrazio. “He is not quite sensible.”

D.H. Lawrence - The Lost Girl (1920)

I like the comment in this quote. “He not quite sensible.” There’s a lot of it about.

Under a therapeutic disguise

Ken McLaughlin has an interesting CAPX post on the dangers of viewing the world through a psychological lens. Obvious dangers, but they don't go away.


Over-diagnosed Britain has forgotten about freedom

• Being sick, once seen as unusual and temporary, has become a badge of identity
• Today's mental health debate promotes the notion that we are all perpetually vulnerable
• Being forced to view the world through a psychological lens is a threat to our freedom

In 2004, I was asked to contribute to the Academy of Ideas Letters on Liberty series on the subject of mental health. Somewhat paradoxically, my argument was that while we must always err on the side of liberty, there are times when, due to mental disorder or incapacity, restricting someone’s freedom can be justified even if they have not committed a crime.

However, we must always be aware that the interplay between psychiatry and society often reveals the social and political prejudices of the time. For example, in 1851, Samuel Cartwright detailed a ‘mental disorder’ he named drapetomania, which was said to afflict black slaves who fled captivity. Cartwright’s theory was widely mocked by some but embraced by others as an explanation as to why slaves wanted their freedom. They couldn’t consider that they wanted to be free, so it must have been a disease causing them to abscond.

In the former Soviet Union, political dissidents were often labelled mentally ill – with one dissident being told ‘your disease is dissent’. It was not until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association voted to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder. It was 1992 before the WHO followed suit and removed it from the tenth edition of its International Classification of Diseases.

These examples, and there are many more, illustrate the societal prejudices of their time around race, political ideology and sexuality. For example, the dropping of homosexuality was less due to advances within psychiatry and more to do with the changing social and cultural climate and the work of gay activists.


The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder that failure to err on the side of liberty is not a new problem. Here's what D.H. Lawrence wrote about a fashion of his time - psychoanalysis.

First and foremost the issue is a moral issue. It is not here a matter of reform, new moral values. It is the life or death of all morality. The leaders among the psychoanalysts know what they have in hand. Probably most of their followers are ignorant, and therefore pseudo-innocent. But it all amounts to the same thing. Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man. Let us fling the challenge, and then we can take sides in all fairness.

D.H. Lawrence - Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921)

Now it is all tame

What kind of person voted Labour in the last UK general election? It’s a question we could answer in many ways, but perhaps we should begin by saying that only a person who been politically tamed would vote for someone like Keir Starmer.


Now, it is all tame. It was bad enough, thirty years ago, when it was still on the upward grade, economically. But then the old race of miners were not immensely respectable. They filled the pubs with smoke and bad language, and they went with dogs at their heels. There was a sense of latent wildness and unbrokenness, a weird sense of thrill and adventure in the pitch-dark Midland nights, and roaring footballing Saturday afternoons. The country in between the colliery regions had a lonely sort of fierceness and beauty, half-abandoned, and threaded with poaching colliers and whippet dogs. Only thirty years ago!

Now it seems so different. The colliers of today are the men of my generation, lads I went to school with. I find it hard to believe. They were rough, wild lads. They are not rough, wild men. The board-school, the Sunday-school, the Band of Hope, and, above all, their mothers got them under. Got them under, made them tame. Made them sober, conscientious, and decent. Made them good husbands. When I was a boy, a collier who was a good husband was an exception to the rule, and while the women with bad husbands pointed him out as a shining example, they also despised him a little, as a petticoat

D.H. Lawrence - Autobiographical Fragment (1936)


Today life is even tamer. Consider again those we elect as our representatives, those narrow, chair-bound creatures with damp handshakes who would manage our lives down to every little finicking detail. Only tame, domesticated voters would vote for them - and they did.

Birkin was right

“Knowledge is, of course, liberty,” said Mattheson.

“In compressed tabloids,” said Birkin, looking at the dry, stiff little body of the Baronet. Immediately Gudrun saw the famous sociologist as a flat bottle, containing tabloids of compressed liberty. That pleased her. Sir Joshua was labelled and placed forever in her mind.

“What does that mean, Rupert?” sang Hermione, in a calm snub.

“You can only have knowledge, strictly,” he replied, “of things concluded, in the past. It’s like bottling the liberty of last summer in the bottled gooseberries.”

“Can one have knowledge only of the past?” asked the Baronet, pointedly. “Could we call our knowledge of the laws of gravitation for instance, knowledge of the past?”

“Yes,” said Birkin.

D.H. Lawrence - Women in Love (1920)

The tragedy of Hardy

My mother-in-law used to work in Eastwood, the birthplace of D.H. Lawrence. During the early part of her working life, she encountered a few elderly Eastwood residents who had known Lawrence and the Lawrence family and didn’t think much of the man behind the novels. Apparently he wasn't highly regarded locally.

In this D.H. Lawrence quote, he writes about Thomas Hardy and what he calls the tragedy of Hardy. Yet this is also the tragedy of Lawrence, his inability to inhabit the security of established convention and perhaps his failure to find beyond it what he hoped to find. 

This is the tragedy of Hardy, always the same: the tragedy of those who, more or less pioneers, have died in the wilderness, whither they had escaped for free action, after having left the walled security, and the comparative imprisonment, of the established convention. This is the theme of novel after novel: remain quite within the convention, and you are good, safe, and happy in the long run, though you never have the vivid pang of sympathy on your side: or, on the other hand, be passionate, individual, wilful, you will find the security of the convention a walled prison, you will escape, and you will die, either of your own lack of strength to bear the isolation and the exposure, or by direct revenge from the community, or from both.

D.H. Lawrence - Study of Thomas Hardy (1914)

Lost Connection

Man’s life consists in a connection with all things in the universe. Whoever can establish, or initiate a new connection between mankind and the circumambient universe is, in his own degree, a saviour. Because mankind is always exhausting its human possibilities, always degenerating into repetition, torpor, ennui, lifelessness. When ennui sets in, it is a sign that human vitality is waning, and the human connection with the universe is gone stale. Then he who comes to make a new revelation, a new connection, whether he be soldier, statesman, poet, philosopher, artist, he is a saviour.

D.H. Lawrence - Reflections on the death of a porcupine and other essays (1925)

As Lawrence said, we are always exhausting human possibilities, always degenerating into repetition, torpor, ennui, lifelessness. In the modern era we see it most clearly in certain visual areas such as the arts, architecture and city centres.

We also see it in the degenerate nature of softer sciences where both science and scientists are being bent to the needs of political projects and posturing. Scientific funding is directed towards the pursuit of policy goals as opposed to deeper insights. Bent towards careers as opposed to vocations.

What are we to make of a situation where our human connection with the universe is gone stale? It is a sombre assertion because it is not obvious what can be done about it. We do need to connect and reconnect and connect again. As Lawrence saw, it is not a static need.

How about that new revelation, a new connection? To my mind, this would require some kind of cultural revival in education, politics and the media. In the arts too perhaps. It sounds unlikely but maybe that's the torpor speaking. Covid suggests there is a lot of it about.

The will for chaos

There was a new situation created, a new idea reigned. Even in the machine, there should be equality. No part should be subordinate to any other part: all should be equal. The instinct for chaos had entered. Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being. But the desire for chaos had risen, and the idea of mechanical equality was the weapon of disruption which should execute the will of man, the will for chaos.

D.H. Lawrence – Women in Love (1920)

A strange idea - the will for chaos, yet very much what we observe today. There are numerous influential people who by their words and their actions seem to have it in abundance – the will for chaos. If so, then chaos is probably where we are headed.

Weird as it seems, there is a major political divide between those who try to contain chaos plus the potential for further chaos and those who do not even recognise it for what it is. The divide seems to have evolved far beyond the old distinction between conservatives and radicals.

As if prosperity has eaten away genuine opportunities to be radical and left us with only two options. Boring maintenance plus incremental improvements or the exciting, progressive worlds of social justice and equality - the weapon of disruption which should execute the will of man, the will for chaos.

Lexit

Having occasion to go to London, he marvelled, as he returned, thinking of naked, lurking savages on an island, how these had built up and created the great mass of Oxford Street or Piccadilly. How had helpless savages, running with their spears on the riverside, after fish, how had they come to rear up this great London, the ponderous, massive, ugly superstructure of a world of man upon a world of nature! It frightened and awed him. Man was terrible, awful in his works. The works of man were more terrible than man himself, almost monstrous.

D. H. Lawrence - The Rainbow (1915)

I sometimes wonder if we’re barking up the wrong tree with the EU referendum. Whatever happens on June 23rd, those of us living outside London are stuck with it as a vast vortex sucking in too much money and with far too much influence on the rest of the country, culturally, economically and politically.

Not that we are in a position to do anything about it, but it is conceivable that the EU could reduce the distorting effects London has on the rest of us. On the other hand, even if we break free from the EU we are still stuck with London.

So I lie to myself and to him

Where can I find an image of myself? Ah, in the poor, in my poor neighbour labouring in the grip of an unjust system of capitalism. Let me look at him, let my heart be wrung, let me give myself to his service.

Poor fellow, poor image, he is so badly off. Alas and alas, I do love my neighbour as myself: I am as anxious about his pecuniary welfare as I am about myself. I am so sorry for him, the poor X. He is a man like me. So I lie to myself and to him. For I do not care about him and his poverty: I care about my own unsatisfied soul. But I sidetrack to him, my poor neighbour, to vent on him my self-pity.

D H Lawrence – Study Of Thomas Hardy (1914)

Cut off like a doll

No chemise

In or out her chemise, however, doesn’ t make much difference to the modern woman. She’s a finished-off ego, an assertive conscious entity, cut off like a doll from any mystery. And her nudity is about as interesting as a doll’ s. If you can be interested in the nudity of a doll, then jazz on, jazz on!

The same with the men. No matter how they pull their shirts off they never arrive at their own nakedness. They have none. They can only be undressed. Naked they cannot be. Without their clothes on, they are like a dismantled street-car without its advertisements: sort of public article that doesn’t refer to anything.

The ego! Anthropomorphism! Love! What it works out to in the end is that even anthropos disappears, and leaves a sawdust manikin wondrously jazzing.

D.H. Lawrence  ...Love Was Once A Little Boy (1925)

M6 doglocked

Source

And we must always beware of romance: of people who love nature, or flowers, or dogs, or babies, or pure adventure. It means they are getting into a love- swing where everything is easy and nothing opposes their own egoism. Nature, babies, dogs are so lovable, because they can’t answer back.

D.H. Lawrence  ...Love Was Once A Little Boy (1925)

A sense of community

From Wikipedia

Here's an interesting quote many folk will have come across at one time or another.

He could not see, it was not born in him to see, that the highest good of the community as it stands is no longer the highest good of even the average individual. He thought that, because the community represents millions of people, therefore it must be millions of times more important than any individual, forgetting that the community is an abstraction from the many, and is not the many themselves. 

Now when the statement of the abstract good for the community has become a formula lacking in all inspiration or value to the average intelligence, then the “common good” becomes a general nuisance, representing the vulgar, conservative materialism at a low level.

D.H. Lawrence - The Rainbow (1915)

Such a common word isn't it? Community. What could be nicer than to be part of a community? Yet a community binds us together in a way which may be benign or oppressive, but is too often merely political. 

Community. A community facility. A community resource. A community organiser. Wasn't Obama a community organiser? Or maybe a community organizer. Sounds grim to me. Not a job I'd relish. 

Unfortunately Lawrence was right. The idea of community has become a formula lacking in all inspiration or value to the average intelligence.

We've forgotten that bit haven't we - the inspiration? We've sucked the human juice out of a useful notion and made it dull, mechanical and more than a little unhealthy.

A horror of being wrong

From Wikipedia

Some people, and I think I’m one of them, have a problem with being wrong. It manifests itself as a certain lack of robustness when it comes to attacking almost any social malaise or political stupidity. Almost always there are caveats. Almost always arguments are less robust than they could be. Note the almost.

I’ve been reading reams of G K Chesterton lately, mainly because I think he illustrates the problem very well. He understood the art of argument, the need to ignore the inevitable weakness of any standpoint and play to its strengths. The need to have a robust standpoint in the first place. Take these three quotes as an example.

Surely, when all is said, the ultimate objection to the English public school is its utterly blatant and indecent disregard of the duty of telling the truth.

But no English school-boy is ever taught to tell the truth, for the very simple reason that he is never taught to desire the truth. From the very first he is taught to be totally careless about whether a fact is a fact; he is taught to care only whether the fact can be used on his “side” when he is engaged in “playing the game.”

England is the country of the Party System, and it has always been chiefly run by public-school men. Is there anyone out of Hanwell who will maintain that the Party System, whatever its conveniences or inconveniences, could have been created by people particularly fond of truth?

G K Chesterton - What's Wrong with the World (1910)

I don't find it easy to write in this robust manner because what Chesterton says isn’t true - there are glaring holes. To begin with, Chesterton himself attended a public school - St Paul's School. So where does that leave his own attitude to truth?

On the other hand, a disproportionate number of our political elite slither out of public schools and adapt to a culture of routine lying like ducks to water. In other words there is at least some connection between habitual lying, carelessness with facts and public schools.

The trouble is, I would not find it easy to ignore the caveats as Chesterton so blithely and persuasively does. The cynic in me says that is because Chesterton is doing exactly that of which he accuses the political classes. Yet it works. The point is made and it lingers - as it is supposed to linger.

But all sorts of things go through our heads, and some seem to linger, and some don’t.

D.H. Lawrence - St Mawr (1925)

Raise a glass to the prophets

To my mind, one of the greatest blights on the intellectual landscape is the wannabe prophet. The guy with a pocketful of adjectives who claims intimacy with the future. The prophesy bit may well be buried under a few layers of technical froth, but it’s usually visible to those who take the trouble to look.

Frustratingly you can’t check everything emitted by pseudo prophets because links are absent or not quite relevant or there are just too many to check. These latter prophets seem to hypnotise their acolytes into a kind of stunned acquiescence. The prophet squirts out a morass of comfy cant which moulds itself tightly around acolyte prejudices. It’s like watching a snake snacking on a kid’s hamster.

When tackling the prophet issue I find it’s a good idea to stick to two key mantras as a protective armour against becoming hopelessly lost in their rhetoric.

Mantra 1 – the future is unknown and unknowable. There are a few clues and regularities but these are mostly common knowledge available to all. Such as night following day.

Mantra 2 – prophets have been with us forever. They are a feature of the landscape like rocks, trees and babbling brooks. Some of their guesses are bound to come good through sheer breadth of coverage, but in those rare cases I just pause for a moment and remember those monkeys typing out Shakespeare’s plays.

There are exceptions of course. Some writers such as G K Chesterton have been remarkably prescient about social and political change simply because he was an adept people-watcher and a profound sceptic when it came to novel social enthusiasms.

So who are the prophets these days? Well they swarm through the environment, economics and politics like locusts. Too many to count. Their numbers are so vast because it’s a popular pastime for the inflated ego, but there are prophets who manipulate the future too. Their prophesies come true because in a sense they make them come true. These are the guys who know how to spin desirable illusions.

If it had existed it did exist. And if it did exist, it was worth having. You could call it an illusion if you liked. But an illusion which is a real experience is worth having.

D.H. Lawrence - The Captain's Doll (1923)

The new prophets have money, lots and lots of money. Their illusions have depth, subtlety and richly persuasive narratives. They also have professionals – employees whose job it is to promote illusions, weave them into the complexities of daily life, hide their origins and their purpose from the vulgar gaze.

Prophesy has a major weakness though, its tendency toward the scare story or doom mongering. Illusion weavers seem to have an ineradicable fixation with a notion that people must be manipulated by pessimism – only rarely by optimism. Hence the scare story as the narrative vehicle of choice.

D H Lawrence, G K Chesterton and Thomas Hardy all wrote about it – how individuals, families and especially societies so often conspire against the flowering of the human spirit. How inevitable it is that free spirits be brought back to earth – sooner or later.

The guy with the placard saying Prepare To Meet Thy Doom, he’s the handy figure of fun, the butt of a thousand cartoon jokes, but he’s not the problem. Never was.

So those who sit in offices, those with digital placards destined to be woven into our lives by professionals – maybe we should treat them as figures of fun too. Maybe we should despise them and raise a sardonic glass to their antics, because in the end their manipulations are perhaps susceptible to a genial determination to get on with life and enjoy it.

Certainly, we would sacrifice all our wires, wheels, systems, specialties, physical science and frenzied finance for one half-hour of happiness such as has often come to us with comrades in a common tavern. I do not say the sacrifice will be necessary; I only say it will be easy.

G K Chesterton - What's Wrong with the World (1910)

The corncrake cried too

A few years ago, a cold and foggy December morning found me walking back from an early medical appointment. The streets were quiet. A low winter sun rose behind a huge old beech tree towering over a scrubby piece of land. Shafts of brilliant hazy sunlight gleamed through icy fog and leafless black branches to create a scene of the most extraordinary beauty.

I stopped for a moment, wished I had a camera but walked on because there is no capturing these moments, no way to possess them.

Does the beauty of the fields delight you? Surely, yes; it is a beautiful part of a right beautiful whole. Fitly indeed do we at times enjoy the serene calm of the sea, admire the sky, the stars, the moon, the sun. Yet is any of these thy concern? Dost thou venture to boast thyself of the beauty of any one of them? Art thou decked with spring's flowers? is it thy fertility that swelleth in the fruits of autumn? Why art thou moved with empty transports? why embracest thou an alien excellence as thine own? Never will fortune make thine that which the nature of things has excluded from thy ownership.

Boethius - The Consolation of Philosophy (around 524 AD)

More recently.
The street outside falls strangely silent under a brilliant summer sun. Nothing moves, no sounds, not even birds. Breathless and timeless - even the clock seems to have slowed its relentless tick. A curiously beautiful stillness but only for a moment.  A car approaches. The spell is broken.

Natural beauty is like that – impossible to grasp beyond momentary impressions. Impossible to own or take away its alien excellence. 

Then a corncrake began to call in the meadow across the river, a strange, dispassionate sound, that made him feel not quite satisfied, not quite sure. It was not all achieved. The moon, in her white and naked candour, was beyond him. He felt a little numbness, as one who has gloves on. He could not feel that clear, clean moon. There was something betwixt him and her, as if he had gloves on. Yet he ached for the clear touch, skin to skin — even of the moonlight. He wanted a further purity, a newer cleanness and nakedness. The corncrake cried too.

D.H. Lawrence – The Overtone (1933)

The Ripley Rattlers

From nottinghampost.com
A Ripley Rattler in Upper Parliament Street
waiting to begin the 15-mile trip to Ripley

D H Lawrence knew all about the tram service from Nottingham to Ripley in Derbyshire. Largely because of the gradients it had to negotiate, it was reputed to be the most dangerous tram route in England. The trams were known as the Ripley Rattlers.

There is in the Midlands a single-line tramway system which boldly leaves the county town and plunges off into the black, industrial countryside, up hill and down dale, through the long ugly villages of workmen's houses, over canals and railways, past churches perched high and nobly over the smoke and shadows, through stark, grimy cold little market-places, tilting away in a rush past cinemas and shops down to the hollow where the collieries are, then up again, past a little rural church, under the ash trees, on in a rush to the terminus, the last little ugly place of industry, the cold little town that shivers on the edge of the wild, gloomy country beyond.

This, the most dangerous tram-service in England, as the authorities themselves declare, with pride, is entirely conducted by girls, and driven by rash young men, or else by invalids who creep forward in terror. The girls are fearless young hussies. In their ugly blue uniforms, skirts up to their knees, shapeless old peaked caps on their heads, they have all the sang-froid of an old non-commissioned officer. With a tram packed with howling colliers, roaring hymns downstairs and a sort of antiphony of obscenities upstairs, the lasses are perfectly at their ease. They pounce on the youths who try to evade their ticket-machine. They push off the men at the end of their distance. They are not going to be done in the eye—not they. They fear nobody—and everybody fears them.

D H Lawrence - Tickets Please (1919).

Or more prosaically from Wikipedia:-

The original Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Tramways Company Bill of 1902 was an ambitious application which proposed the building of 79 miles (127 km) of track to link together the tramway systems of Nottingham, Derby and Ilkeston. 

However, when passed the following year the Act only authorized the construction of 39 miles (63 km) of route, of which only 11 miles (18 km) were laid, the section from Ripley to Cinderhill. This was the beginning of the service known locally as the Ripley Rattlers.