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.
