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Archive for April 2021

  1. Pan: the unformed Pan in DH Lawrence’s animist vision – II

    “The collective problem, then, is to institute, find, or recover a maximum of connections. For connections (and disjunctions) are nothing other than the physics of relations, the cosmos. Even disjunction is physical, like two banks that permit the passage of flows, or their alternation. But we, we live at the very most in a “logic” of relations. We turn disjunction into an “either/or. ” We turn connection into a relation of cause and effect or a principle of consequence. We abstract a reflection from the physical world of flows, a bloodless double made up of subjects, objects, predicates, and logical relations.

    Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Medical (1997)

    Continuing from the previous post in this series, here are some further explorations of D.H. Lawrence’s animist vision of Pan. Again, the main texts I’ll be drawing from are the novella St. Mawr and the essay Pan in America. Both the essay and St. Mawr were conceived in 1924, when Lawrence was living in New Mexico.

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    April 24th 2021

    Posted by in Occult, Pagan

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  2. Pan: the unformed Pan in DH Lawrence’s animist vision – I

    “What were you talking about?” asked Mrs. Renshaw, simply curious. She was not afraid of her husband’s running loose.
    “We were just saying ‘Pan is dead’,” said the girl.
    “Isn’t that rather trite?” asked the hostess.
    “Some of us miss him fearfully,” said the girl.
    “For what reason?” asked Mrs. Renshaw.
    “Those of us who are nymphs–just lost nymphs among farm-lands and suburbs. I wish Pan were alive.”
    D.H. Lawrence, The Overtone (1913)

    I came to the works of D.H. Lawrence late in life, having been more or less put off his writing by Kate Millet’s fierce and funny taking to pieces of his infamous novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover in her 1970 book Sexual Politics. Millet charged Lawrence with both misogyny and phallocentrism, so I admit, I didn’t look any further than that, and it’s only in the last decade or so, that have I begun to read Lawrence attentively. This post is the first of a two-parter examining Lawrence’s animist vision of Pan with reference to his novella St. Mawr and his essay Pan in America.

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    April 16th 2021

    Posted by in Occult, Pagan

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