because what have you got when you’ve got it?
The young aren’t vitally interested in it any more.
Only third-rate swabs are pushing to get on, nowadays.
Getting the better of other people! Who cares? —
Getting the better of them! - Which better, what better, anyhow?
Our poor old daddies got on,
and then could never get off again.
If only we could make life a bit more just
so that we could all get along gaily
instead of getting on and not being able to get off again.
Triumph
It seems to me that for five thousand years at least
men have been wanting to triumph, triumph, triumph
triumph over their fellow men, triumph over obstacles, triumph
over evil,
till now the very word is nauseating, we can’t hear it any more.
If we looked in our hearts, we should see
we loathe the thought of any sort of triumph,
we are sick of it.
The Combative Spirit
As a matter of fact, we are better than we know.
We trail behind us an endless tradition of combat, triumph, conquest
and we feel we’ve got to keep it up, keep on combating, triumphing,
conquering.
When as a matter of fact, the thought of this endless imbecile struggle
of combat
kills us, we are sick of it, to die.
We are fed up with combat,
we feel that if the whole combative, competitive system doesn’t soon
go bust,
we shall.
We want a new world of wild peace, where living is free.
Not this hyena tame peace where no man dare tell another he’s a thief
and yet every man is driven into robbing every other man;
this pretty peace where every man has to fight, and fight foul
to get a living, in the dastardly mean combat
we call free competition and individual enterprise and equal
opportunity.
Why should we have to fight for a living?
Living should be as free to a man as to a bird,
though most birds have to pay, with their lives, where men are.
Why should we brace ourselves up with mean emulation?
If we brace ourselves up, it should be for something we want to do
and we feel is worth doing.
The efforts of men, like the efforts of birds in spring,
would be lovely if they rose from the man himself, spontaneous
pure impulse to make something, to put something forth.
Even if it was only a tin pan.
I see the tin-man, the tinker, sitting day after day on the beach
mending and tinning the pans of all the village
and happy as a wagtail by a pool,
the same with the fishermen sitting darning their nets,
happy as perhaps kings used to be, but certainly aren’t.
Work is the clue to a man’s life.
But it must be free work, not done just for money, but for fun.
Why should we compete with one another?
As a matter of fact, when the tinker looks so happy tinkering
I immediately want to go and do something jolly too.
One free, cheerful activity stimulates another.
Men are not really mean.
Men are made mean, by fear, and a system of grab.
The young know these things quite well.
Why don’t they prepare to act on them?
Then they’d be happy. For we are all so much better than the
system allows us to be.
Wages
The wages of work is cash.
The wages of cash is want more cash.
The wages of want more cash is vicious competition.
The wages of vicious competition is - the world we live in.
The work-cash-want circle is the viciousest circle
that ever turned men into fiends.
Earning a wage is a prison occupation
and a wage-earner is a sort of gaol-bird.
Earning a salary is a prison overseer’s job
a gaoler instead of a gaol-bird.
Living on our income is strolling grandly outside the prison
in terror lest you have to go in. And since the work-prison covers
almost every scrap of the living earth, you stroll up and down
on a narrow beat, about the same as a prisoner taking exercise.
This is called universal freedom.
Young Fathers
Young men, having no real joy in life and no hope in the future,
how can they commit the indecency of begetting children
without first begetting a new hope for the children to grow up to?
But then, you need only look at the modem perambulator
to see that a child, as soon as it is bom,
is put by its parents into its coffin.
A Tale Told by an Idiot
Modem life is a tale told by an idiot;
flat-chested, crop-headed, chemicalised women, of indeterminate sex,
and wimbly-wambly young men, of sex still more indeterminate,
and hygienic babies in huge hulks of coffin-like perambulators —
The great social idiot, it must be confessed,
tells dull, meaningless, disgusting tales
and repeats himself like the flushing of a WC.
Being Alive
The only reason for living is being fully alive;
and you can’t be fully alive if you are crashed by secret fear,
and bullied with the threat: Get money or eat dirt! —
and forced to do a thousand mean things meaner than your nature,
and forced to clutch on to possessions in the hope they’ll make you
feel safe,
and forced to watch everyone that comes near you, lest they’ve come
to do you down.
Without a bit of common trust in one another, we can’t live.
In the end we go insane.
It is the penalty of fear and meanness, being meaner than our
natures are.
To be alive, you’ve got to feel a generous flow,
and under a competitive system, that is impossible, really.
The world is waiting for a new great movement of generosity,
or for a great wave of death.
We must change the system, and make living free to all men,
or we must see men die, and then die ourselves.
Self-Protection
When science starts to be interpretive
it is more unscientific even than mysticism.
To make self-preservation and self-protection the first law of
existence
is about as scientific as making suicide the first law of
existence,
and amounts to very much the same thing.
A nightingale singing at the top of his voice
is neither hiding himself nor preserving himself nor propagating
his species;
he is giving himself away in every sense of the word
and obviously, it is the culminating point of his existence.
A tiger is striped and golden for his own glory.
He would certainly be much more invisible if he were grey-green.
And I don’t suppose the ichthyosaurus sparkled like the
humming-bird,
no doubt he was khaki-coloured with muddy protective coloration,
so why didn’t he survive?
As a matter of fact, the only creatures that seem to survive
are those that give themselves away in flash and sparkle
and gay flicker of joyful life;
those that go glittering abroad
with a bit of splendour.
Even mice p
lay quite beautifully at shadows,
and some of them are brilliantly piebald.
I expect the dodo looked like a clod,
a drab and dingy bird.
A Man
All I care about in a man
is that unbroken spark in him
where he is himself
undauntedly.
And all I want is to see the spark flicker
vivid and clean.
But our civilisation, alas,
with lust crushes out the spark
and leaves men living clay.
Because when the spark is crushed in a man
he can’t help being a slave, a wage-slave,
a money-slave.
Lizard
A lizard ran out on a rock and looked up, listening
no doubt to the sounding of the spheres.
And what a dandy fellow! the right toss of a chin for you
and swirl of a tail!
If men were as much men as lizards are lizards
they’d be worth looking at.
Relativity
I like relativity and quantum theories
because I don’t understand them
and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that
can’t settle,
refusing to sit still and be measured;
and as if the atom were an impulsive thing
always changing its mind.
Space
Space, of course, is alive
that’s why it moves about;
and that’s what makes it eternally spacious and unstuffy.
And somewhere it has a wild heart
that sends pulses even through me;
and I call it the sun;
and I feel aristocratic, noble, when I feel a pulse go through me
from the wild heart of space, that I call the sun of suns.
Sun-Men
Men should group themselves into a new order
of sun-men.
Each one turning his breast straight to the sun of suns
in the centre of all things,
and from his own little inward sun
nodding to the great one.
And receiving from the great one
his strength and his promptings,
and refusing the pettifogging promptings of human
weakness.
And walking each in his own sun-glory
with bright legs and uncringing buttocks.
Sun-Women
How strange it would be if some women came forward and said:
We are sun-women!
We belong neither to men nor our children nor even ourselves
but to the sun.
And how delicious it is to feel sunshine upon one!
And how delicious to open like a marigold
when a man comes looking down upon one
with sun in his face, so that a woman cannot but open
like a marigold to the sun,
and thrill with glittering rays.
Democracy
I am a democrat in so far as I love the free sun in men
and an aristocrat in so far as I detest narrow-gutted, possessive
persons.
I love the sun in any man
when I see it between his brows
clear, and fearless, even if tiny.
But when I see these great successful men
so hideous and corpse-like, utterly sunless
like gross successful slaves grossly waddling,
then I am more than radical, I want to work a guillotine.
And when I see working men
pale and mean and insect-like, scuttling along
and living like lice on poor money
and never looking up,
then I wish, like Tiberius, the multitude had only one head
so that I could lop it off.
I feel that when people have gone utterly sunless
they shouldn’t exist.
Aristocracy of the Sun
To be an aristocrat of the sun
you don’t need one single social inferior to exalt you;
You draw your nobility direct from the sun
let other people be what they like.
I am that I am
from the sun,
and people are not my measure.
Perhaps, if we started right, all the children could grow up sunny
and sun-aristocrats.
We need have no dead people, money-slaves, and social worms.
Conscience
Conscience
is sun-awareness
and our deep instinct
not to go against the sun.
The Middle Classes
The middle classes
are sunless.
They have only two measures:
mankind and money,
they have utterly no reference to the sun.
As soon as you let people be your measure
you are middle-class and essentially non-existent.
Because, if the middle classes had no poorer people to be superior to
they would themselves at once collapse into lower classness.
And if they had no upper classes either to be inferior to,
they’d become nothing.
For their middleness is only an unreality separating two realities.
No sun, no earth,
nothing that transcends the bourgeois middlingness,
the middle classes are more meaningless
than paper money when the bank is broke.
Immorality
It is only immoral
to be dead-alive
sun-extinct
and busy putting out the sun
in other people.
Censors
Censors are dead people
set up to judge between life and death.
For no live, sunny man would be a censor,
he’d just laugh.
But censors, being dead men,
have a stem eye on life.
— That thing’s alive! It’s dangerous. Make away with it! —
And when the execution is performed
you hear the stertorous, self-righteous heavy breathing of the
dead men,
the censors, breathing with relief.
Man’s Image
What a pity, when a man looks at himself in a glass
he doesn’t bark at himself like a dog does,
or fluff up in indignant fury, like a cat!
What a pity he sees himself so wonderful,
a little lower than the angels!
and so interesting!
Immoral Man
Man is immoral because he has got a mind
and can’t get used to the fact.
The deep instincts, when left alone, are quite moral,
and clear intuition is more than moral,
it really makes us men.
Why don’t we learn to tame the mind
instead of the passions and the instincts and feelings?
It is the mind which is uncouth and overweening
and ruins our complex harmony.
Cowards
In all creation, only man cowers and is afraid of life.
Only man is terrified of his own possible splendour and delight.
Only is man agonised in front of the necessity to be something
better than he is,
poor mental worm.
Though maybe the mammoth got too big in tusk and teeth,
and the extinct giant elk too big in antlers,
out of fear of the unknown enemy;
so perhaps they too died out from fear,
as man is likely to do.
Think -!
Imagine what it must have been to have existence
in the wild days when life was sliding whirlwinds, blue-hot weights,
in the days called chaos, which left us rocks, and gems!
Think that the sapphire is
only alumina, like kitchen pans
crushed utterly, and breathed through and through
with fiery weight and wild life, and coming out
clear and eternally blue!
Peacock
Think how a peacock in a forest of high trees
shimmers in a stream of blueness and long-tressed magnificence!
And women even cut their shimmery hair!
Paltry-Looking People
And think how the nightingale, who is so shy,
makes of himself a belfry of throbbing sound!
While people mince mean words through their teeth.
And think how wild animals trot with splendour
till man destroys them!
how vividly they make their assertion of life!
But how paltry, mingy and dingy and squalid people look
in their rag garments scuttling through the streets,
or sitting stuck like automata in automobiles!
Tarts
I suppose tarts are called tarts because they’re tart,
meaning sour, make you pull a face after.
And I suppose most girls are a bit tarty today,
so that’s why so many young men have long faces.
The father eats the pear, and the son’s teeth are set on edge.
Latter-Day Sinners
The worst of the younger generation, those Latter-Day sinners,
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 857
