Flowers and Flesh: Color, Place, and Animism in St Mawr and "Flowery Tuscany"

Lawrence was deeply interested in dynamics of germination that link all organic species. In Spirit of Place (1918), he affirmed that soil and climate bring forth their own intrinsic flora and fauna, human beings and cultures: some subtle magnetic or vital influence [inheres] in every specific locality and some attach[es] to every distinct region of earth's surface, over and above indisputable facts of climate and geological condition (20). (1) peculiar potentiality of consists in exchange of energies between perceiver and perceived, spirit of place itself a metaphoric fusion of subject and object. M. M. Mahood, in D. H. Lawrence: Botanist, emphasizes that this sense of interrelatedness is continuous strand by which [Lawrence] joins together radii of me-to-person, me-to-plant and rest, into web of being (184). (2) His last testament in Apocalypse is a manifesto of vital awareness and relationship: For man, as for flower and beast and bird, supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in flesh, and part of living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of sea. ... [R]e-establish living organic connections, with cosmos, sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with sun, and rest will slowly, slowly happen. (A 149) Subjectively and psychologically, Lawrence's animism was a participation mystique designed to overcome mental illusion of separateness, of on outside looking on instead of interacting with people, places, and life-forms. Objectively and scientifically, was grounded in his studies of botany and biology (3) and his experience of industrial/agricultural carving-up of Nottinghamshire countryside. His primitivist quest for a lost sense of oneness with earth, after leaving England in 1919, is remarkably in tune with contemporary environmental concerns. Keith Sagar remarks that Lawrence was a prophet of the deeper ecology of a different consciousness, a wholeness, atonement, a in touch (307). He adds that [d]eep ecology seeks to respiritualize Nature, to heal split in human psyche, replacing anthropocentric with biocentric consciousness (371). In Etruscan Places, Lawrence imagines a fully animistic culture: The natural flowering of life! ... [A]ll was alive: whole lived: and business of man was himself to live amid all. ... cosmos was alive, like a vast creature ... and had a great soul or anima (SEP 56-57). He believed that [w]e need to live again, so that we can live with it (Pan 162). Donald Gutierrez defines Eco-monism in Lawrence's sense of as an ecological sense of human unity with nature and earth, one in which recognition of a crucial interdependence ... could help preserve nature and thus humanity (39). While monism tallies with mythic concept of Pan as all-pervading life-force, according to Gary Snyder, the science of ecology ... [demonstrates] coevolution, symbiosis, mutual aid and support, interrelationship, and interdependence throughout natural systems (71). As for philosophical monism, Sagar argues that Lawrence worked through a fundamentally dualistic concept of mind and senses towards at-onement with natural cosmos. Certainly he was a prophet of being-in-touch and of subtle contact with other life-forms. In Morality and Novel, Lawrence examines Van Gogh's vital response to a sunflower and asserts that the business of art is to reveal relation between man and his circumambient universe (MN 171; my italics). David Abram in Spell of Sensuous (1997) explores cultural and philosophical implications of animism. …