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Oh, good point. Do you think then he said so as a 'man thing' opposing the controlling female, who he was greatly at odds with by now? So he aligned himself with Gerald. I can't picture Birkin taking the same action towards an animal but then again there is much animal abuse in many of Lawrence's novels and man does seem to be held supreme always in relationship to animals. When you read the chapter "Rabbit" you will again encounter this. In 'The White Peacock", Lawrence's first novel, begun when he was only 22, I was amazed at all the blantant animal cruelity, not instigated by the Lawrence/Cyril character, but by the boy on the neighboring farm and others.
It could be a male thing. That crossed my mind too. Quite interesting about the animal cruelty thing. I seem to remember a fox is hunted in his short novel The Fox.
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`I do enjoy things -- don't you?' she asked.
`Oh yes! But it infuriates me that I can't get right, at the really growing part of me. I feel all tangled and messed up, and I can't get straight anyhow. I don't know what really to do. One must do something somewhere.'
`Why should you always be doing?' she retorted. `It is so plebeian. I think it is much better to be really patrician, and to do nothing but just be oneself, like a walking flower.'
`I quite agree,' he said, `if one has burst into blossom. But I can't get my flower to blossom anyhow. Either it is blighted in the bud, or has got the smother-fly, or it isn't nourished. Curse it, it isn't even a bud. It is a contravened knot.'
A walking flower, burst into blossom. And then in chapter 12 they talk about love and Birkin says his notable statement that love is not the final conclusion:
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`Yes, it does. At the very last, one is alone, beyond the influence of love. There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional relationship. So it is with you. But we want to delude ourselves that love is the root. It isn't. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does not meet and mingle, and never can.'
Notice the flower metaphor in there. And then a little furthere down;
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`There is,' he said, in a voice of pure abstraction; `a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you -- not in the emotional, loving plane -- but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me. And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman, -- so there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever -- because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. One can only follow the impulse, taking that which lies in front, and responsible for nothing, asked for nothing, giving nothing, only each taking according to the primal desire.'
And then in chapter 14:
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`Do you smell this little marsh?' he said, sniffing the air. He was very sensitive to scents, and quick in understanding them.
`It's rather nice,' she said.
`No,' he replied, `alarming.'
`Why alarming?' she laughed.
`It seethes and seethes, a river of darkness,' he said, `putting forth lilies and snakes, and the ignis fatuus, and rolling all the time onward. That's what we never take into count -- that it rolls onwards.'
`What does?'
`The other river, the black river. We always consider the silver river of life, rolling on and quickening all the world to a brightness, on and on to heaven, flowing into a bright eternal sea, a heaven of angels thronging. But the other is our real reality --'
`But what other? I don't see any other,' said Ursula.
`It is your reality, nevertheless,' he said; `that dark river of dissolution. You see it rolls in us just as the other rolls -- the black river of corruption. And our flowers are of this -- our sea-born Aphrodite, all our white phosphorescent flowers of sensuous perfection, all our reality, nowadays.'
`You mean that Aphrodite is really deathly?' asked Ursula.
`I mean she is the flowering mystery of the death-process, yes,' he replied. `When the stream of synthetic creation lapses, we find ourselves part of the inverse process, the blood of destructive creation. Aphrodite is born in the first spasm of universal dissolution -- then the snakes and swans and lotus -- marsh-flowers -- and Gudrun and Gerald -- born in the process of destructive creation.'
`And you and me --?' she asked.
`Probably,' he replied. `In part, certainly. Whether we are that, in toto, I don't yet know.'
`You mean we are flowers of dissolution -- fleurs du mal? I don't feel as if I were,' she protested.
He was silent for a time.
`I don't feel as if we were, altogether,' he replied. `Some people are pure flowers of dark corruption -- lilies. But there ought to be some roses, warm and flamy. You know Herakleitos says "a dry soul is best." I know so well what that means. Do you?'
`I'm not sure,' Ursula replied. `But what if people are all flowers of dissolution -- when they're flowers at all -- what difference does it make?'
`No difference -- and all the difference. Dissolution rolls on, just as production does,' he said. `It is a progressive process -- and it ends in universal nothing -- the end of the world, if you like. But why isn't the end of the world as good as the beginning?'
`I suppose it isn't,' said Ursula, rather angry.
`Oh yes, ultimately,' he said. `It means a new cycle of creation after -- but not for us. If it is the end, then we are of the end -- fleurs du mal if you like. If we are fleurs du mal, we are not roses of happiness, and there you are.'
`But I think I am,' said Ursula. `I think I am a rose of happiness.'
`Ready-made?' he asked ironically.
`No -- real,' she said, hurt.
`If we are the end, we are not the beginning,' he said.
`Yes we are,' she said. `The beginning comes out of the end.'
`After it, not out of it. After us, not out of us.'
`You are a devil, you know, really,' she said. `You want to destroy our hope. You want us to be deathly.'
`No,' he said, `I only want us to know what we are.'
If you can piece those scenes together, I think you will see that Lawrence's understanding of completeness and finale is to be as a flower, without a will, blossomed in the sunshine of nature. That is the ultimate goal of life, the culmination in a heaven as a spiritual being. Flowers do not have wills; horses and humans have wills and they are incomplete. The goal then is to lose that will, to cast it off.
