TrueLife - The Wisdom of D. H. Lawrence

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

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Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Kodak Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. We are here with the one and only David Solomon. You may see in the chats, more David Solomon, more David Solomon. And it's people who are always saying this to me, you know, so. The people, people who listen to this podcast are then truly disturbed, George,

is there saying more David Solomon. Or truly informed. Well, I don't know. I've been married to my wife for almost 30 years. I don't think she's ever said more David Solomon. Oh, see, this is why I love this podcast. This is fun right here. For the few people that may not have listened.

some of the previous stuff. Would you be so kind just to reintroduce yourself to them? Sure. Sure. Glad to. So I am the director of undergraduate research and creative activity at Christopher Newport University in Newport, Newport, News, Virginia. I've been here for five years, as my sixth year here. I've been a professor of medieval literature, religion, and culture for almost 30 years, originally from New York City, and continue to teach here. at Christopher Newport, and my most recent book is on The Seven Deadly Sins. It's a look at the history of sin from the Middle Ages to the contemporary world with a focus on answering the question of whether or not the whole concept of sin is still

relevant today. And for those of you who haven't read the book, what are you doing? It's a beautiful book. I read it myself, and I find it not only informative, but it's rich. in footnotes. And sometimes when I see a book like that, it's awesome to go back and understand where you got that stuff from. I think you did a tremendous

job documenting all that. So if people are interested, they should definitely check it out. Yeah, it's a well done. Well, that's the truth. And I think you've hit a milestone at your recent adventure, right? Aren't you five years in now? Yeah, just celebrated five years at this position. So it's hard to believe it's been five years already.

But I came here to open up this office. They didn't have one. We've done some pretty good work here, so pretty pleased. Yeah, yeah. I can imagine the people around you would be pleased. It's a pioneering. And today we are going to get into the wisdom, the ideas, and the background of one D.H. Lawrence.

And I couldn't think of a better person, a better expert to talk to about it. And I'm not even sure where to begin this idea, except that he embodied, he came from this middle class family at this time where things are beginning to pop off. And maybe we could just begin at the beginning. Sure. Yeah. And I am not going to claim to be an expert on Lawrence by any stretch. I mean, my own exposure to Lawrence began as an undergraduate, we can talk about that as well. Because he becomes a fairly significant figure, I guess, in the book on Sin. I fall back on him quite often because I think he's just got some really brilliant insight.

So he is a British writer, born in 1885, as you say, to a fairly middle-class family, a working-class family, and involved mostly in coal mining in the coal world in England. He experienced illness pretty early in his life. He was fairly frail individual and had some serious, serious bout with pneumonia. when he was fairly young, which back in those days, of course, if you got pneumonia, it meant that you pretty much never shook it, and he never did. And he died in 1930, just shy of his 45th birthday. He had the pneumonia came back, and he had some struggles with tuberculosis. But along the way, just incredible, incredible literary output. I was looking at it this morning so that I could quantify it.

To be honest, the first time I've ever done this, in his less than 45 years on this planet, he wrote 12 novels, more than 800 poems, at least 12 short story collections, four travel books, 10 plays, and at least 14 nonfiction books, in addition to two tremendous volumes of letters. So that's pretty impressive.

And the quality throughout really does sustain. I was drawn to him because of his attitudes towards humanity and his concerns with our losing touch with each other and losing touch with the planet, which really just sort of are some of the basic themes that run through, I think, a lot of his work. Unfortunately, most people, if they hear Lawrence and they're not familiar with him, only think about

Lady Chatterley's lover and the obscenity case in the 1960s, but there's a heck of a lot more to Lawrence than just that one book, which, of course, ultimately was deemed as not obscene. So there's a landmark case

in the 60s. But really interesting, interesting figure. Yeah, I wanted to ask you this sense of the, when we talk about his love of the planet or his background there, it seems that there's a thread that runs through his work and it's about the body. I'm wondering if maybe the body might be correlated to the planet. Like I think, I mean, on some of the poems I read, I think you could make that correlation there. Sure. Yeah, I mean, he is definitely very interested in the national.

world and the connection that we have with the natural world physically. This is probably most evident in, oh my gosh, there are long stretches in his life when he traveled almost really by foot throughout areas of Europe and then eventually settled in Taos, New Mexico, in a town where he bought a 160,000. a 160 acre ranch, which is still there, named the D.H. Lawrence ranch, and was just always close to nature and concerned about our increasing disconnect from that. I mean, remember, I mean, having been born 1885, he's really just right on the tail on the Industrial Revolution and seeing the ways in which technology is really changing our relationship with each other and our relationship with the world.

Yeah, it's amazing to think about it. In some of his earlier books like the White Peacock and Middle Class, it seemed to me from what I read was that it had to do with relationships about his younger days. and perhaps that can like I said perhaps that can be a young man's relationship to himself

to a young lover or to the planet and I'm just curious like do you think that maybe some of the criticisms against him were because he was speaking so much truths

about relationships and these may have been taboo or people didn't talk about that kind of stuff I know it was a different time back then but I wonder if you can expand on that yeah I mean you know

sexuality is is a dominant theme throughout all of his work. And that discussing that is something which many people are not comfortable with, especially when we're talking about someone who died in 1930. After his first novel was published, the White Peacock in 1910, his mother died of cancer. And that, he had an incredibly close relationship to his mother, which Freudians claim to have been, you know,

Oedipal in nature. And as a result, the female characters in much of his work, especially the novels, are often read against his autobiography and against his, excuse me, against his biography and thinking about them as in the role of his mother.

and, you know, it's a mystery. I mean, you know, it makes me think of something like Citizen Kane, the film Citizen Kane, where, I mean, ultimately, Rosebud, you know, sorry to ruin it for anybody, is the sled. You know, this connection that we have with those very early experiences with, with people and with our family and how those really just become part of the fabric of who we are, oftentimes without even being aware of it.

And I think that was probably the case for him as well. I mean, when he finally met the woman that he was to share the rest of his life with Frida in 1912, she was married and had three young children and they were together for I think it was about six years before she finally divorced and then they married and they had a very interesting relationship she she tolerated a lot and and she too at points seems to have questioned his sexuality he would have probably been characterized as what we today would call bi-curious and so there's a lot there and I think that the you know you know one critic claims that that one of the dominant concerns that Lawrence has is physical touch um is and I and I think this is true he's worried that we're losing both the the literal and the metaphorical touch with each other And that can be, you know, for some people, disturbing because that touch can be sexual as it often work. Yeah, I could not agree more with that sentiment.

I think that we are losing our idea of touch. I mean, just look at the way in which we're conducting this interview, which is good in some ways because we can reach across the nation. However, I think we have spoken about the felt presence of the other in some previous podcast. But what a visionary to be able to see that happening. Or maybe it's just the callousness of the common person to not see it happening. Well, yeah, I think so. But I think he's also largely, I mean, I think ultimately reacting to these incredible shifts that were occurring in the world. while he was alive.

And what I'm referring to is, you know, World War I and the, the shadows of the Industrial Revolution and the growth in technology then, and then, you know, by the time he dies in 1930, I mean, you know, I always have to go back and look because I never remember that he died so early. Because so much of what he writes

is in reaction to the way that the world is changing. You know, in 1915, and I pulled this out from his letters, he wrote to a friend of his, so this is 1915. So this is right before World War I. He says, I want to gather together about 20 souls and sail away from this world of war and squalor and found a little colony where there should be no money but a sort of communism as far as necessaries, necessities, excuse me, of life, and some real decency, a place where one can live simply, apart from this civilization, with a few other people who are also at peace and happy and live and understand and be free. That's before World War I. So, you know, in many ways, he's reacting to this cultural shift that he sensed was coming

and did occur while he was alive. He, yeah, it's, if we take it back to the relationship with his mom, I think in another letter to a friend, he had written about the closeness of the relationship with his mom where, you know, they could communicate in a way where they didn't even need words. Like it's, you know exactly what this person wants because you're so similar to them. And then later, in some of his later works, it seems like the voice in his books may be a strong representation of Frida. And is that her, did I say that right? Yeah. And so it's, it's, in some ways it's amazing to me, even though the relationships with the women in his life may have been tumultuous, it was those relationships that may have inspired him to write some of the best and clearest perspectives possible from a man, you know, writing about a woman's perspective. And I think that it's that touch of feminine that may have.

Well, it's interesting that you say that because there are a lot of, a lot of, a lot of, fairly notable critics who would completely disagree with you and say that he was a misogynist. And they actually argue that he draws his women in a very misogynist light and is anything but a feminist. But there is also then a whole other school of thought that argues that he is actually a feminist and he writes strong women. And so I think it depends on probably your individual perspective, obviously, and your individual take. on this. I know when I first read him when I was an undergraduate, I was

captivated not necessarily by his writing of character, but by the language itself. His use of language, his sentences. I think the first thing I read by him may

have been the rainbow. And the rainbow is a novel which taken together, together with women in love is basically a kind of a trilogy would be three. It's two books that really go together. One continues the next. But I remember finishing the rainbow and just absolutely blown away just by his use of language. And then, you know, looking deeper than looking at the characters,

because these are family sagas, right? they're looking at at families over long periods of time and everything that goes along with that and that families go through the good and the bad and much of it very tragic yeah when you read the rainbow it seems like it's the dreams of the grandmother finally manifesting in the third generation or something along those lines did you did you did you in your opinion when you read that has your idea of him changed since you've read that the first time and then as you've grown older as a man has your ideas about him changed that's a that's a great question because that is one of the few books that over the course of my life i've gone back to and and if not reread in total then picked it up and reread sections at times and has my attitude about Lawrence changed over time?

I think if anything, I've grown more sympathetic with him, the more that I get to know him. I've spent the last couple of years reading through his letters. I was able to pick up at some crazy book sale to two volumes of his letters that were, for some reason, they had been discarded, I think was a library sale. And I grabbed them, and I've been going through them ever since, and just underlining things that he said and phrases and language.

And I think I just have grown more sympathetic with the way that he felt, which was in many ways incredibly sorrowful. about what was happening to us as a species and what was happening to the world around us. I mean, I think one of his most brilliant nonfiction works is his last work, a little book called Apocalypse, which is essentially a quote-unquote interpretation of the book of Revelation, although he would scoff at that because he didn't actually agree that you could interpret a text in that way. But in that little book, which he wrote in his last months alive, he talks at one point, and I grabbed it off the shelf this morning because the passage is so telling to me.

And it's funny because the first time I read it, I didn't understand it until later. He writes, he's writing about the sun, S-U-N. and he's talking about, well, can you indulge me and let me read part of this paragraph? Please, please. So he talks about, let me see if I go back to the beginning of this. He says, some of the great images of the apocalypse move us to strange depths and to a strange wild fluttering of freedom, of true freedom, really an escape to somewhere, not an escape to nowhere, an escape from the tight little cage of our,

universe, tight in spite of all the astronomers' vast and unthinkable stretches of space. Tight, because it is only a continuous extension, a dreary on and on without any meaning. An escape from this into the vital cosmos to a sun who has a great wild life and who looks back at us for strength or withering, marvelous as he goes his way. Who says the sun cannot speak to me? The sun has a great blazing consciousness, and I have a little blazing consciousness. When I can strip myself of the trash of personal feelings and ideas and get down to my naked sun self, then the sun and I can commune by the hour, the blazing interchange, and he gives me life, sun life, and I send him a little new brightness from the world of the bright blood.

But the great sun, like an angry dragon, hater of the nervous and personal consciousness in us, as all these modern sunbaters must realize, for they become. disintegrated by the very sun that bronzes them. But the sun, like a lion, loves the bright red blood of life and can give it an infinite enrichment if we know how to receive it. But we don't. We have lost the sun. And he only falls on us and destroys us, decomposing something in us, the dragon of destruction instead of the life bringer. In that line, we have lost the sun. I have an underlined an asterisk to my text from when I first read this, oh my gosh, 40 years ago, that phrase always stuck with me. We've lost our son.

And I remember when I first read it, I thought it was a significant line. I underlined it and put an asterisk next to it, but I didn't understand what it was until years later when I realized that what he means by that is we've lost our center. The sun is the center of the universe. We've lost our center, right? In addition to its other meanings in this text, but we've lost our center. We've lost, I mean, it reminds me of the Yates poem, you know, the center cannot hold, right? And I think that that's the sense that he had as he was dying, as he was writing this, that we've lost our hold on things. And as I say, I mean, he's dying in 1930, so writing this.

right before the rise of Nazism and then World War II. So it's just an incredible little book Apocalypse, which I highly recommend really a great book. Yeah, that's a beautiful passage right there. And you can see a lot of the emotion and a lot of thinking. In fact, those may be some of the insights that come to one only when you're on your deathbed. It possibly is.

you're right you're right but he but you know these are things that he was concerned with his whole life I mean you know yes his fiction is great his poetry is is is great in fact he he seemed to consider himself a poet more than a novelist but it's his nonfiction the essays which to me just are so incredibly insightful um 1928 two years before he dies he writes an essay called we need one another. And it's a great piece. It's a short little four or five page essay. And he argues here that men need women and women need men.

Now, let's put aside the gender issues that we deal with today. But just this sense that we are in a constant kind of battle of the sexes, sexes. but as he says here, I mean, ultimately, we need one another. We just, we do. And he argues against here the, what he calls the religions of overweening individualism, right? This sense that we are all individuals and we can all make it on our own and be independent. And he says, you know what, that's really a lot of crap. We need one another.

Yeah, that speaks volumes of, if you just play, play that out, this world of individual projects that we think we may be in an entrepreneurial world, it's just the center can't hold. I mean, it goes right back to the, to the apocalypse. Yeah, yeah. It's just, it's incredible how to me, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he's almost warning us about it. And of course, you know, it was a warning that in many ways went unheeded.

I mean, he was close friends with Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. Huxley visited him in New Mexico once he settled there at the end of his life. And their connection itself is, is kind of interesting. I don't know enough about it to say anything,

but of course, Brave New World, not written until some years later. but it would be interesting to know if there was any kind of discussion about that. You know, I mentioned in the book on Sin things like the opening of the movie Metropolis, with the robots walking. And just this sense that we are becoming more robotic as human beings, as technology strips away our humanity.

And without explicitly saying that, I think that's what Lawrence is telling us. He's warning us about that. Yeah. I think I read somewhere that on his deathbed, it was Aldous's wife Maria that was cradling his head and he said something to the effect of Maria, Maria, don't let me die. Interesting to think about the closeness of such literary giants towards the end of their career. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm always surprised when you find out about these intersections and these intersections and

these, oh, I had no idea that they, you know, were that close and knew each other that well. In fact, it was I think it was Ian Forster, the novelist author of Room with a View, who wrote an obituary of Lawrence when he died, one of the only obituaries that was really kind of praising Lawrence. He was much disparaged at that point in his life. And I think Forrester claimed that he was one of the greatest novelists of the period. Right. If I remember correctly. Yeah, it's, it blows my mind to think about the work ethic that he could have if he's played with tuberculosis or if he's always been, you know, in a situation where he wasn't in the best health.

But to put out that much. And then even some paintings, too. I think I read somewhere that. towards the end of his life, he had thought about becoming more of a painter, even having some painting sneezed. He did. He did paint, and some of his paintings were shown and had become important pieces. But, you know, just to give you an indication of that, you say, you know, the work ethic, but also just the fact that having spent so much of his life being physically ill, the symbol that he adopted at the end of his life was the phoenix

and in fact the phoenix is on his tombstone and and the phoenix the bird which is consumed but then is reborn and it's almost that that sense that that's what he was doing over and over in his life is he would constantly he would get so sick that it seemed like he was going to just die that was going to be the end of it and then all of a sudden he would just be reborn and continue working. And continue, you know, we say continue working.

He, I'm not sure he looked at it as work. I'm sure that he looked at it as being creative and he needed to do that, right? He had to do that. And I think it's interesting that a lot of that comes through in the travel literature that he wrote as he traveled, where he would write about these places. And then, you know, something that we've lost today, which is letter writing. I mean, his letters.

The letters are just amazing to all kinds of people and from all kinds of people. In fact, Huxley, I think, edited the first volume of his letters after he died. It's just, you know, the letter writing, you know, I, I mean, I try to do it, but it's hard these days, isn't it? I mean, especially with email. But there is something about writing letters that is quite different. There was an article in the New York Times on Sunday that I was just reading about this big cache of stuff that's been discovered of Hemingways that they're going to, I guess, is going to be eventually on display. And they include things like letters and personal effects.

and that kind of stuff is just, it tells us about who people are in ways that we, otherwise I don't think we would know. You know, we get more of an inner life and letters. Yeah, there's sort of an intimacy there that you would never see unless that came out. And there are, you look at the, like, Boswell or even Christopher Hitchens,

These people published all their letters towards the end. And in a way, I think it's obtuse that we don't have more of it because you only get to see this commercialization. You only get to see this one little slice and way too often. And I think even with DeH Lawrence, people may have mistaken the people he wrote about as him. I think that happens a lot to authors. Oh, sure. So we get to read their letters, right? Yeah, yeah.

I think that's often the mistake, right? I mean, it's the mistake that I have had with students over the years where, you know, they'll read and think that, oh, the main character is the author. You know, that, I mean, in some cases, that's true, but in most it is not. You know, we tend to believe that every author's first novel is autobiographical. And whether that's true or not, I mean, it seems to ring through in a lot of cases. But as you go through Lawrence's fiction, there are characters that certainly show up who resemble real people. You know, people that either are famous or famous authors or famous figures in the art world with whom he had had contact and then seems to clearly base a character on. But I think, you know, it's interesting because for a guy who was so concerned about losing touch with other people, his dream was to, as I read in that letter from 1915, to leave this world and go and found this little colony where, you know, people would live.

but it would be simple and it would be apart from civilization with only a few people, this kind of escape that he had yearned for, which I think he looked for first in walking through Europe with Frida, and then when they moved to New Mexico to Taos. You know, now that you say that, as I begin thinking about him wanting to start a call, And then I begin thinking about Aldous Huxley. I think of the book, The Island, you know, where Aldous talks about this incredible island where people are raised in a way that is simple but is meaningful. And the whole time there's this underlying problem of oil where, like, you know, part of the island is thinking about becoming a consumer-based place.

That seems like that book may have been influenced by D.H. Lawrence, if you think about it. It may have. You know, I mean, the whole concept, of course, of living in a utopia is nothing new. You know, of creating this kind of utopian community. I think people still yearn for that today. I mean, that's what's behind so many of the kinds of religious cults that we talked about last time, right? It is creating this utopian community that is apart from the rest of the horrible world. But, you know, the nature of utopia is that it can't be real.

I mean, that's just inherent in what a utopia is. It's not real. And oftentimes, if you try to create that kind of a society, the flaws will just kill you. You know, once they pop up, as you say, I mean, you know, on the island, you've got the oil, right? And ultimately that drives people's greed and, you know, I want to make money. And that trumps, no pun intended, everything else.

It's an interesting relationship they have to sex in there. Like if you look at all those Huxley's book, The Island, there seems to be people that treat love and see love in a similar way that maybe D.H. Lawrence was trying to talk about in some of his books. Yeah, possibly. I mean, it's, it's, I think that the relationship between men and women is something which has an interesting history in the literature like Huxley, like Orwell, you know, those modern novelists who are writing about the effects of technology and government on our lives. And it, it often, creates interesting relationships. You know, the kinds of relationships that you often see in Lawrence's novels are, and I'm trying to think about the right way to describe them, they seem to me to be more pure. They're pure and they're more authentic. And they're of, because of the people that he's writing about who are largely working class,

it's just, it's a different mindset. and it tends to be more primal and more primitive. And I don't mean that in a pejorative way. And I think that's much of what Lawrence is looking at. I mean, in that essay, we need one another. He even talks about that primal kind of connection that we have with each other. I read one of the critics that was talking about his book on sons and lovers. He talks about how he has multiple relationships.

And in one of them, he can have sex without love. And then another he can have love without sex. And the critic had said something that it appears the character he's writing about is psychologically damaged. The character Paul Morrell. Yeah. Paul, thank you.

And he says that he can have. have a spiritual relationship without sex and a sexual relationship without spirit and he struggles to integrate him. I thought that was a pretty interesting point to bring up. Yeah, no, and I think that that's largely true. I mean,

in Paul Morrill, that's the fact throughout the novel. But the image at the end of the end of the rainbow, and it follows a lot of the same characters show up in some of the different novels,

The image that shows up, and I wish I'd brought my copy of the rainbow in today, the closing passage is just incredible. I mean, there's essentially destruction. The world of these characters is destroyed, but the last image that he gives you in the novel is the image of the rainbow. And he says, and the rainbow stood on the earth. It's out of the Genesis text after the flood, that even though everything's been destroyed, Here's the promise that something else is coming and it's good. Man, it's so deep to think about, like we're back to symbols. Like we often get back to, you know, but you think of the symbol of the Phoenix and then this idea of love and sex and then destruction.

And it's just such like a rebirth, you know, it's maybe it's me always seeing these. Maybe that says something about me, but, you know, it just seems like I keep seeing these symbols everywhere. And when I think about it, I can almost see the. plight of every man or maybe even every woman where can you have these relationship passionate relationships without you know without spirituality and can you have this other one without sex it's it's just such a great concept that maybe more people should be thinking about these things and there would be a lot more personal growth yeah well it follows with what we were talking about with mystics right and mysticism and the divide between the spiritual and the physical right it is as you

beings, we are physical in nature. We have a spiritual side to us. And of course, there's a distinction between physical lust and spiritual love. I don't know if you can have spiritual lust, I wonder. And, you know, but it's the fact of the matter is that, again, to quote Lauren, we need one another. I mean, if we don't have that, then the species ends. So we have to have that to some degree. Now, can you have physical love without spiritual love, to be sure? Can you have lust and not have love, of course? And that's the problem of the sin of lust, right, is that it is purely driven by the carnal nature,

and there's nothing of the spirit that's involved there. but by the same token can you have spiritual love without the physical now many of course in the in the religious history would argue that you could the problem with that is you run into you know as we mentioned once before you run into the problem of the essines the guys who wrote the dead sea scrolls who took vows of chastity that was the end of the essence you know so we're constantly experienced this experiencing this kind of conflict.

We want to be spirit. We want to get back to being spirit. And we're stuck in these physical beings. And for some of us, I think, it's a frustrating kind of existence to try to strive to be pure spirit, pure intellect, but have the dirtiness

of physical living getting in the way. Yeah, that call, that emotional call, that lustful feeling and potential excitement of breaking a covenant that calls to you. And maybe that's why some, like, sometimes I think that that is why the heat of passion burns so hot is that you know what you're doing is wrong. And you can't, it's this animalistic drive

to this other person that just calls to your soul. spirit that just, wha, you know, like you're just burning hot with fire. But you know you're ruining something beautiful. But that's the animalistic side to us. And there's so many different, so much different literature that talks about, I think even Marcus Aurelius talks about how he dams himself for having this animalistic passion. And he wishes he didn't have it, but he does. And it's just, it's just this foundation.

And I think that that is something that D.H. Lawrence calls to in his books, be it, you know, Lady Chatterley or Sons and Lovers or even going deep into his family history, like in the rainbow that you talk about. Like I, it's such a passionate thing that no matter where we are on the spectrum of human evolution, it still burns inside us and each individual seems to be called to it. Yeah. Well, that that animalistic tendency, as you mentioned, I mean, reflects a lack of control, right, a lack of self-control.

And as human beings, we don't. like that. We like to be in control. And we see animals when we talk about them as being, is not having control, right? I mean, an animal doesn't necessarily have rational control over what it's doing. But we, of course, are animals. We're human animals. And we forget that part of it. We forget that we have that part of us that is an animal. You know, when I used to teach philosophy and we would look at work of Peter Singer, the great animal ethicist, who was the one who talked about, you know, we need to talk about animals and human animals. We are animals.

We're human animals. And the fact that there is still an animal part of us that does things and seems to lack that kind of control, which makes us, as you say, nervous and maybe feeling guilty because we know we shouldn't be doing something. But, you know, I mean, and we experience this with anything, right? I mean, it's not just sexual passion, but it's, you know, eating, drinking, whatever, and any of these things that we do to excess. We oftentimes will know that what we're doing is, is quote-unquote, wrong and yet we don't seem to be able to be able to control not doing it because that's the animal part of us that's driving that. If it were all about the rational human part of us,

we would be living different existences. And that's why I think it's such a struggle for so many of the religious writers. And again, going back to the mystics, struggling with that. They want to live that spiritual existence. But the physical is always there nagging at them saying, you know, you got to eat dinner.

It's like, I don't want to eat dinner. I want to spend my time in, you know, contemplation and prayer. How much you got to eat? Because you're a physical being and physical being needs that kind of nourishment. And so we see folks who oh, I mean, and it's still, we still have cases of it today where devout, devout Catholics will attempt to go through extreme fasts in which the only thing that they consume is the communion wafer and the wine.

And they, you know, with the understanding that because of transubstantiation, that's going to be able to sustain you. Of course, in almost all cases, it can't. You're just not getting enough nourishment from a biological perspective. Your spiritual nourishment may be there, but your physical biological nourishment is lacking. It's, it's, I'm not sure the right words to use. It's somehow coming to grips with the human animal, I guess, is one way to do it. Here is something for you, David, from Benjamin George, he says, I don't think it has to be an act of losing control, but it is something we must figure out how to balance. Well, yeah, to be sure, to be sure.

I mean, and that's how the mystics come up with the middle way, right? I mean, you've got to find that balance. You've got to find the middle way. But, you know, as the Upanishad say, you know, about the razor's edge, right? I mean, you know, the line between love and hate, it's difficult to walk. It's not a clear-cut division. There's no clear-cut line to walk. And the act of losing control, I think, you know, that balance is tough.

I mean, there's a reason why when people look at the balance beam that gymnasts walk on, they say, oh, my gosh, how do you do that? because it's it's very narrow and I think that that balance is narrow for us do you think if you were going to like teach a class like you could you could give an idea of that balance beam by putting up two opposing views of books like maybe you could put up um d h lawrence lady chatterley and then have some sort of Thomas Aquinas or something like that but would you do you think it's possible to maybe begin an education of balance at a younger age by getting kids to read literature?

And if so, what books would you put against each other? That's a really interesting question. Certainly, I think it's possible. It's increasingly difficult in our culture because we're removing literature for most of the curriculum, never mind for young kids, but even in the high school. I mean, you know, the easy place to start, obviously, is to have them reach Shakespeare. because, you know, in some sense, it's all in Shakespeare. I mean, he covers, he seems to cover at all.

But, I mean, you know, if you want to want to go to one specific text, I mean, you know, I would look at Hamlet. Everything is in that play. But, I mean, let's just look at the character of Hamlet himself, who is really struggling with finding that balance. He's enraged that his father is dead. and then he ultimately finds out was murdered by his uncle. And he's at the same time enraged that his mother has remarried, said uncle. And he is driven to revenge by the ghost of his father, who comes back and asks him to take that revenge.

But constantly nagging at Hamlet throughout the entire play is he knows in his heart that murder is wrong. And so he's all, I mean, that's the reason for, you know, what T.S. Eliot called Hamless Delay, right? Numerous times in the play, he has the chance to kill Claudius and he doesn't. Now, some people look at that as a failure of character. I don't necessarily look at it that way. I look at that as that's a real human being who is really struggling between a commitment that he's made to his dead father to avenge his death and the fact that he knows murder is wrong. So finding that balance, I mean, there's a great illustration of how you do that. Now, maybe it's not the greatest illustration, of course, because it doesn't end up too well. You know, I think learning lessons that way and learning lessons through literature as a young person can be very helpful. Now, I say that fully aware that growing up as a kid, I barely read any literature. And through high school, I didn't like reading literature, although I do recall that the first text that really affected me in a strong way was when in, I believe it was the eighth grade, we read Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, which is about some pretty serious heavy issues about adultery and punishment and sin.

And I was very struck by that. now eighth grade i was what 13 so um you know i think if we expose uh children to to some of these great literary tales i mean that they really do teach us that lesson about finding that middle way finding that balance as benjamin says there yeah yeah i agree i think that kids can understand a lot more than we give them credit for And if we show them, think, like, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I was, before we came on the air, I'm not a bash to be, to tell you. It's been a kind of a rough day, and I was watching Looney Tunes, old Looney Tunes cartoons.

And it just makes me think of that because when they renewed the license for the Looney Tune Cartoons in the 1990s, they removed a lot of the so-called violent scenes because, oh, my God, we can't show this at children. Now, I grew up watching Looney Tunes. I never was under the impression that if you hit somebody over the head with an anvil, he got up like an accordion and walked away. I wasn't stupid. And, you know, I think we do not give kids enough credit these days to be smart and to understand the way things work.

And we're too worried about insulating them from the big, bad world, which, of course, only seems to get bigger and bad. by the day. In my neighborhood, that was my sole exposure to classical music.

Me too. Of me too. Of course. Yeah. And it's kind of a tragedy. Like you see, you hear this beautiful score and then all of a sudden

someone runs into a wall or, you know, it's, in some ways it's, it's poetry in motion. It is. I mean, I think,

you know, I think you and I probably learned a hell of a lot from watching Looney Tons. Yeah. Not just our first, plus enough classical music, but probably other things as well. Opera.

Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting. If you just take a look back into some of the cartoons back in the day, like, how about Popeye? He's like, here's this immigrant guy that comes over that doesn't speak English very well, you know, he's kind of a small guy. Yep, yep. Yeah, I mean, a lot of those early, I mean, the early, the Looney Tunes cartoons in particular,

I mean, I'm just really struck by, especially if you watch the ones that were produced you know, during World War II and then into the 50s, some of them are making some pretty significant social comments that I think are kind of interesting. I used to teach a course on the Holocaust, and we would look at some of the now banned cartoons that were made during World War II, and they're really quite interesting.

I mean, it's, you know, I think some people dismiss them a little bit too readily. The same way they dismiss now graphic novels and think that they're just, you know, it's just comic books, but more than that. Yeah, it was in, I was having a conversation with some people a week ago, and we thought it was pretty interesting how,

you know, this world of comic books seems to be that which is taken over the entirety of the movie industry. And, you know, I'm not sure what that says about our society. On one level, we want this hero, but on another one, It's not kind of Pinocchio. Yeah. Yeah.

It's our desperate need for superheroes. And I think you're right. I mean, you know, the way that that has taken over, it seems, the entire movie industry these days is just incredible. But I think it is in many ways our incredible need for heroes and superheroes. And if you look at the way that that tracks along with, the track of history after 9-11, it definitely makes sense. You know, this feeling that we are helpless and the only the superhero could save us.

Guys, dangerous to think about what that can bring forth, you know? It just seems like a march towards authoritarianism. Well, and that seems like where we're going, doesn't it? Yeah, I agree. it's really disturbing and it has potential just calamitous results hopefully it will

hopefully it will turn around but we don't seem to be going in the right direction at the moment that's for sure yeah I wonder if there are some new D.H. Lawrence is out there that are beginning in times like this where it seems like the night is dark I think there's times when

a new son, you know, we were just talking about the sun. Like maybe there's a new class of authors. Maybe there's a new class of experimental people coming up and writing in a way that is going to influence people or spark a new generation to think in a way that is different. And I could see how the younger people today could be looking at the older people like, you guys are so afraid of everything. Like, what's your problem? Like I can see new authors being born. Do you see some hope for that in, in? I mean, there's a lot of great stuff. written and being published. I think the potential problem at the moment is because of the internet,

there's almost too much. And it's difficult to sort through and to look at what might be considered the new D.H. Lawrence and then, you know, the great new novelist. I mean, there are a few people contemporaries who I read regularly, but, you know, most often I'm going back to the older ones. and looking for inspiration there. But, I mean, recently I've been reading a lot of Matt Haig and his book The Midnight Library is his most recent novel.

He's a good novelist. You know, is he writing about, you know, incredible relationships the way that somebody like a D.H. Lawrence did? Not really. You know, I'm not sure that young writers, I'm not sure that young writers can do that yet. I mean, I know that's a nasty thing to say and a controversial thing to say

because Lawrence, of course, when he was writing, he started out, he was young. I mean, he died at 44, so look what he accomplished by then. But of course, I think 44 in 1930 is different than 44 in 2022. And just the breath of experience that he had by that age, I don't know anybody who's gone through that today. I just don't see it in the same way.

Yeah, it seems like a lot of the great literature was, you know, inspired by very difficult times. And there's the saying that says difficult times make hard men and easy times make weak men. Well, and to some degree, we are seeing some of that. I mean, look at Margaret Atwood's work. I mean, you know, she has done, you know, has an incredible canon. And it's not just the Handmaid's Tale, which gets all the press.

You know, read her other work. It's really quite brilliant. And a lot of that comes out of what we're, the kind of hardships that we're talking about, the kind of struggle, a lot of it on a level of just our, the survival of our culture. And I think that the best writers will be writing about that in the coming decades. You know, I'm thinking about the kinds of work that came out of the turn of the 20th century from folks like, I mean, Lawrence, Sinclair Lewis, you know, just writing about the ways in which the world was significantly changing just right under their feet. and the fear that they had about that and the warnings that they were throwing out about that.

And I think we're maybe back to that now. I'm not sure how that switch has happened. It's troubling. And in some of the classes that maybe you have taught or people in your circle may have taught, do they teach about the power in which literature or writing can influence, influence the world? Explicitly, no. I think that as social justice movements have moved forward,

and that is now becoming more and more part of literary criticism, we're starting to see it, but it's relatively new. I would say that probably the early, incarnation of it, for me at least, would have been eco-criticism and seeing it there. But I do think now we're starting to become more aware of it because, as I say, of social justice and that becoming part of the curriculum. In today's world, it almost seems like if you want to write a book that's different, then you would write a book that doesn't have social justice in it.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, certainly there, they're, There do seem to be too many cookie cutters, right? There kind of is. It's an eloquent romance way of writing fiction, where you just write by a paradigm and just use this template. Yeah, and that's, you know, I mean, I've always felt, and I mean, and I'm not unusual in saying this.

I mean, you know, the greatest books that I've read are the ones where you turn the page and you're stunned. You're like, oh my God, I didn't see that coming. I remember taking a class decades ago with the writer Lawrence Block. Lawrence Block was a mystery writer. And he wrote, oh, my God, I don't know how many mysteries. And they were pretty formulaic. But he used to say that I know that I've got the plot right when my main character opens up a door. And even I don't know what's on the other side.

And that's kind of when you know you're there as a writer. Man, that speaks volumes of your ability to write. If you can make that a reality. Yeah, I mean, your characters become so real that you just don't even know what's happening until it happens. Yeah. That's that fine line between when you're breaking reality. Like you're probably kind of a, you're probably kind of a difficult. to be around if you're stuck between

those two realities. I imagine so. Yeah, and that's why people, I mean, usually fiction writers will go into that place and it has to be also a physical place where you're just away from everybody else because you're living with those characters. You know, I've attempted

it and I've never been successful, so I've yet to finish a novel that I've written, although I certainly have tried. Yeah, I always remember Philip K. Dick and how he thought that like, all were reality. It was pasted on to Rome and like, you know, it's just so, those are almost as good as all the novels is that their way that they looked at the world. Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely.

Well, I, um, I wanted, I wrote down this one last piece that, uh, I thought was a good way for it to, to leave on, excuse my, stuttering. In one of his poems, shadows, G.H. Lawrence says, in the finishing sentences, oh, build your ship of death. Oh, build it. for you will need it. For the voyage of oblivion awaits you. Like, just so beautiful to think about that. And I think that was one of the last poems he read before he wrote before he died. Amazing, the insight that one can have, the clarity one can have when it seems that everything is dark around you.

Yeah, no, to be sure. And to try to find light there. Yeah. I mean, that the Phoenix, right? Yes. Yes. The symbolism, the Phoenix. Thanks. Dr. David Solomon, I love talking to you. And I feel like the time goes way too fast.

We just start getting into these awesome things. But I'm hopeful that people find it as enjoyable as we do. I hope. Yeah. Before we leave, would you be so kind as to remind people what you have coming up, where people can find you and what you're excited about? So my website is David A. Solomon, S-A-L-M-O-M-O-N.com. And you can find my books there and links to my blog and all my media appearances and my consulting and all the stuff that I that takes up too much time working on a new book working on a new book with my wife on angels and demons and pop culture which we hope will be out next year and working on a new blog post which I hope will be out next week so perhaps by the time we chat again George still working on it so I'm not I'm not going to reveal what it is yet.

And excited about fall, starting here in Virginia, and the fact that I am organizing a new study abroad trip with my students for next summer to go to London and begun signing up students who seem really interested. We're going to be going to museums and historic sites in London for 19 days. They seem really charged about that as well as I am as well. Well, I'm excited to hear it. And for everybody that's listening to this, I think you should definitely go to David's site. If you want to reach out to him, his information is there, if your kids are becoming of an age where they want to learn from someone who I think is a master,

you should be looking at this man right here, Mr. David Solomon. And I hope more people reach out to you. And I know that we'll be talking more on Tuesdays. And I really look forward to our conversations. I really enjoy him. So thank you for spending some time with me. I think this is one of the few podcasts that probably exists in which in one hour we talked about D.H. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Looney Tunes, all in the same day of hours. So there you go.

Well, where else would you want to go? It's all here. It's all here. It's all here. Well, that's what we got for today, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your time. Aloha.