D.H. Lawrence and Spirituality

WINDING UP THE CLOCK


You said a few words to a neighbour or an acquaintance, but it was merely for the sake of making a sound of some sort. Just a sound. There was nothing really to be said. The vast continent was really void of speech....Richard found he never wanted to talk to anybody, never wanted to be with anybody....And the rest of the people either were the same, or they herded together in a promiscuous fashion. But this speechless, aimless solitariness was in the air. It was natural to the country. The people left you alone. ...The profound Australian indifference...The disintegration of the social...Rudimentary individuals with no desire of communication....it felt like a clock that was running down. -D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, Angus and Robertson, 1982(1923), pp.386-387.

So much of the land was unapproachable;
even the cities had an unreality about them,
as if they were sprinkled onto a darkness into
which it never penetrated. In places the endless
grey-green iron foliage; in other places the empty
bush and all of it waiting, always waiting with a
presence, a wonderful presence, a spirituality.

Now, D.H. Lawrence, the car takes me around
when I want to go, which is not often any more,
except to the beach: sand, wind, sea and sun, or
to a meeting or anywhere that necessity or desire
requires. I can feel that spirituality here, a presence,
while lots of people have no desire to communicate,
just to make sounds with nothing really said.

Now, D.H., there is an endless chatter, on and on
and , if I let it, I could drown in words, words, words.
It’s much more complex now with half the population
migrated here or descended from migrants. Rarely, do
I want to talk to somebody, but others want to talk to me
and in this there is more than an adequate sufficiency.

Now, D.H., the great mass leave you alone, but there is
a determined core who get through to my solitariness
with their needs, their gregariousness, their love, their
kindness and their endless ability to talk, it seems, forever.
I could not be a hermit here; getting the balance right
has become an art that I take a certain pride in maintaining.

Now D.H., that profound indifference, that lack of caring
is still here, but lots of good people have lots of convictions,
too many of them; many of the worst are full of passionate
intensity; a tiresome and exhausting anarchy is loosed upon
the land, but much of which is subtle, complex and utterly confusing.
We seem to accept the absense of a centre not knowing what it means.

Now D.H., the inner life is awakening and the sense
of the tragic is finally finding a voice beneath a brain
full of laughs, for this is a country of laughs,
and that holding back is starting to move up
and tell of an inner life that no one knew, gentle,
soft, tentative, searching, often inarticulate and scared,
but started on the journey that is winding up that clock.

Ron Price
29 January 1996