And the living is easy

Of late, it's been difficult writing regularly here. There's simply too little going on. The content of my days has slowed to a summer trickle, consisting of little more than the gym and my reading chair. Philadelphia's cast of characters is similarly diminished. Especially on weekends, Center City itself feels empty. Unfortunately for me, without the frisson of another person, my mind - or is it my soul? - tends to slow and settle, matching its mood to the summer weather. Sometimes a book or a film (or a romantic email) will jolt it into the kinesis of desire, but these prompts always come from too far a distance to prolong the movement into some sort of departure or transcendence.

I'm reading Larwrence at the moment, which likely has something to do with the language I'm crafting lately, if not the actual feelings themselves. The two of us don't see eye-to-eye very often, but some of the sensuousness of his desire is clearly infectious. And his peculiar rendering of time - both its slowness and its suddenness - is perhaps too accurate for me to approve. Though literature is not (or is not foremost) a question of realism, I do not yet know how comfortable I am with the implications of Lawrence's literary psychology. They soothe me and seem to open before me a raw and spiritual materialism - yet the author in me wants (or claims to want) no part of that in my fiction.

Yet it may be that there are two authors at work in me: myself and what the Greeks would name my Genius. And my Genius - who, as Socrates claims in the Phaedo, came before me and will live past me - has a better sense of what I must write than I do. I'm thinking just now of Sarah - Sarah the character in The Grain and all that she's meant to do there. Though she has numerous real-life predecessors of the same name (the first of which is written of all the way back in The Library's Grain #10), her fictional self as it first appears fully-formed (in, as far as I can tell, #87 and #92) owes the majority of its contours to Lawrence. And it must not be taken for granted that Day 3 (October 27, 2004), what I call in my notes "The Day of Love," proceeds thus under Lawrence's aegis.

Of course, of all the 7 days - save perhaps the last - I've had the most difficulty figuring out exactly what happens on Day 3. The middle or perhaps the end of the chapter takes place at a cafe named Chapterhouse, where the novel's two artists - Blake and Sarah - are celebrating a dual opening (you can catch a glimpse at #117). The unease between Blake and Adrian (who first appears in #90) has been much easier for my mind to plot, though it's meant only to be the day's backstory. So what of Sarah then? Perhaps she will become clearer to me with time, or perhaps who she is precisely the author's blindspot. In a 1914 letter to Edward Garnett that might be instructive here, Lawrence says of the men and women that people The Rainbow:

I don't think the psychology is wrong: it is only that I have a different attitude to my characters, and that necessitates a different attitude in you, which you are not as yet prepared to give . . . somehow - that which is physic - non-human, in humanity, is more interesting to me than the old-fashioned human element - which causes one to conceive a character in a certain moral scheme and make him consistent. The certain moral scheme is what I object to . . . You mustn't look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we've been used to exercise, [in order] to discover [that they] are states of the same single radically-unchanged element. . . . You must not say my novel is shaky - It is not perfect, because I am not expert in what I want to do. But it is the real thing, say what you like.

What might happen with Sarah and how might others appear to me outside of my fiction if we call this attitude of Lawrence's love?