The swaying
expression, line-dancing, shifty footies, whether hairy or lissom, are
something else. I’m talking about Coconut, natch.
The body is moral and musical in its natural movements.
Nilsson’s Caribbean-come-harmonic tendencies could almost be taken as a
rebuke to the over-intellectualisation of (mainly British) prog rock. He and
The Beatles got on well which, in view of Lennon’s devil-may-care personality,
isn’t surprising (Pussy Cats, Nilsson’s
tenth album, is their collaborative drollery).
That was when music meant something outside of profits and investing in the “rock market”. Like Elvis, it meant the gyrating body as an expressive instrument.
Like “the devil’s music”, DH Lawrence (Pictorial 68/69) came
under sustained fire from the establishment for his dirty ways with the body.
The fact that he married Freda, a German, gave them more ammunition for
slanderous claims during the Great War.
The Introduction to Apocalypse is written as
a letter to Frieda Lawrence by a guy called Aldington, who must have known them,
and it’s worth quoting a few extracts.
The rejection of the sovereignty of the
intellect is the cause of much of the misunderstanding and hostility Lawrence
endured. It made him look like a crank, and thereby estranged the intellectuals..
Thus while Lawrence informed mankind they were scarcely living at all, they
retorted by calling him a cretin, a sewer, and a pornographist. A sad
imbroglio. (cf Alan Moore Lost
Girls). Page XVI
His ideas on sexual liberation strike me as no different to Paul Kantner’s
in the 60sw and, as previously stated, the liberation of the body was found in
rustic pursuits such as Fulling (Hyborian Bridge 60). What leapt out was
this quote.
Before Lawrence, the primacy of the
intellect had been doubted by Bergson, the psychology of the unconscious had
been formulated by Freud (ps and Jung), and the whole system of
values of European civilization had been rejected in their different ways by
Tolstoy and Nietzsche, and even Dostoievsky. Lawrence differs from them, partly
because he was English, but chiefly because he was essentially a poet – a poet
who for various reasons found his more effective medium was prose. Page XV
This paints the impression that not only is there an anti-intellectual
trend in Western thought (to the mainstream), but the poetic stream of
consciousness is a close connection to the American anti-intellectual Howard
(ps Nietzsche also is a poet).
Both Lawrence and Howard were convinced that Western civilization was
following a wrong path, a falsity that had death at its conclusion (Weird 8).
As Aldington says, these things are difficult to pin down in words, and
Lawrence’s poetic Mexican jaunt, The Plumed Serpent, is full of
esoteric symbolism and blushing colours.
Yes, but it still begs the question, is a universe which is very
convincing to the intellect actually a mirage? Which comes first, poetry or
intellect?
Poetry is strong, passionate, fiery. Lawrence’s Apocalypse
is about his rejection of the fiery rhetoric
of Revelations. So another
question is: what is the truth of poetry?
As previously noted, if we live in an illusory reality, the fact that
it’s very convincing is meaningless. The world it describes is not the reality
that is poetic revelation.
So, what is that reality? It’s a physical reality that describes the
cosmos we see with our eyes. It contains the general and the particular;
therefore it also has to contain different viewpoints – such as Lawrence’s
intensity of personal sexual experience in the cosmos.
Do you follow the point? The cosmos has no one single viewpoint or perspective
vision (sun). That is death. Our experience can reach to the cosmos, but
without the experience we are nothing.
Lawrence wanted (liked) that experience and, in his American way, so
did Howard. One thing about the State, it’s not the pivotal obstacle to
experience. That is the intellect that tells us our bodies are just adjuncts to
a world of brain and machine-brains.
This is the death-force of Western civilization; the solar serpent of
the head, tongue clacking insistently, eyes drilling into our consciousness.
Whether Howard, Lawrence, Nietzsche or any of the others (Jean-Luc
Godard is another, as is Jean-Jacque Rousseau), there are claims that the Western
civilization we live in takes away our intensity of sensation, our experience
of the cosmos. As human beings, they’re our lives and natural justice says we
should be able to live them.
(The road to Mexico and The Plumed Serpent)
