The Lotus Mystery

In response to our discussion in class today about perspective fluidity, I'd like to structure this post around a close(ish)-reading of the passage on pg 89 that specifically foregrounds a similar kind of decentralization.

As Birkin copies out a Chinese drawing of some geese, Hermione comes into the room and asks him to explain why he doesn't produce something original. Birkin answers that he wants “to know what centers they [the geese, presumably, not the Chinese] live from.” In a certain sense, Birkin replicates the work of his novelist, draining the self, as it were, and projecting into “the hot, stinging centrality of a goose”--just as Lawrence projects into the centralities of his fictional characters. Here “centrality” feels synonymous with perspective, a point at which one frames and interprets reality. (The reader will recall this specifically “stinging” centrality when Birkin, naked and unconscious, “saturates himself” in “soft-sharp needles” on pg 107). “Hot” seems about as connotatively ambiguous as every moiety in Lawrence's binary network, but here we get a sense of intensity and vigor, of pumping blood and beating wings. This heat contrasts sharply and immediately with the “flux of cold water and mud,” a distinction later collapsed into “cold-burning mud,” where the hyphen ropes together two opposite sensations of swanliness into one; a reconciliation of seeming contradictions. Thus Birkin, in is his characteristically chameleonic way (detailed on pg 91), lives through a multiplicity of perspectives, searching perhaps for a more consummate experience of decentralization in unconscious being, which arguably occurs on pg 107. Would this be manifest in a similar collapse? Soft-sharp perhaps?

Fittingly, Lawrence gives Hermione's perspective relatively (pun intended) equal footing. Though "almost unconscious" when she enters the room, she finds herself “unable to attend to his [Birkin's] words.” Her "almost" finds fulfillment in total “dissolution,” as Lawrence repeatedly calls it, as if “destroyed with some insidious occult potency.” So Birkin and Hermione ultimately experience the same decentralization, but their interpretations of the radical other to knowledge yield differing shades of connotation. Hermione, desperate always to remain in control, encounters her ego-death with fear, “like one attacked by tomb-influences,” while Birkin actively seeks the animal sensuality of that same unconsciousness. Enter the final duality: life/death.