*I am now writing/copying posts on both Facebook and on this blog. While writing on Facebook earlier today, that which I will copy here now, the hackers were blocking functions which I tried to copy from a text--I had to click on functions 4 times in a row and delete as many times in order to get a simply copy and paste function accomplished. I would write a commentary and that was deleted while I was writing it. This post below I am not going to re-read for hacker inserts or deletions or rewrites. The hacker terrorists also changed the order of the pasted text to jumble all in the wrong order of the book after I published. Often entire passages I pasted would be deleted after I copied them and stopped pressing the function keys/mouse to copy and paste. Parts that I added as commentary were deleted and the text appeared as a black block when I tried to copy as well. Entirely much time spent simply trying to correct the pages I was copying--which on Facebook now are completely out of alignment with the text due to hacker terrorist intervention and censorship and discrediting of me.
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Chapter One, page One, first paragraph.
"Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father's house in Beldover, working and talking. Ursula was stitching a piece of brightly-coloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a board which she held on her knee. They were mostly silent, talking as their thoughts strayed through their minds.
*' Ursula," said Gudrun, " don't you really want to get married? " Ursula laid her embroidery in her lap and looked up. Her face was calm and considerate.
" I don't know," she replied. " It depends how you mean."
Gudrun was slightly taken aback. She watched her sister for some moments.
" Well," she said, ironically, " it usually means one thing ! But don't you think anyhow, you'd be — " she darkened slightly — *'in a better position than you are in now. ' '
A shadow came over Ursula's face.
" I might," she said. " But I'm not sure."
Again Gudrun paused, slightly irritated. She wanted to be quite definite.
" You don't think one needs the experience of having been married ? " she asked.
*' Do you think it need he an experience ? " replied Ursula.
" Bound to be, in some way or other," said Gudrun, coolly. " Possibly undesirable, but bound to be an ex- perience of some sort."
" Not really," said Ursula. *' More likely to be the end of experience."
Gudrun sat very still, to attend to this.
" Of course," she said, " there's that to consider." This brought the conversation to a close. Gudrun, almost angrily, took up her rubber and began to rub out part of her drawing. Ursula stitched absorbedly.
*' You wouldn't consider a good offer? " asked Gudrun.
" I think I've rejected several," said Ursula.
" Really ! " Gudrun flushed dark — " But anything really worth while ? Have you really? "
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(my commentary) ..random page quotation from same source above: (very symbolic, hint hint)
"So again she drifted into the green-houses, looking at the lovely roses in their pots, and at the virginal cyclamens, and at the mystic white clusters of a creeper. The beauty, oh the beauty of them, and oh the paradisal bliss, if she should have a perfect bouquet..."
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...near the end of the book, another randomly-selected passage:
"Suddenly Ursula said to the company at large, in a bright voice, " Rupert and I are going to be married to-morrow."
Her father turned round, stiffly.
"You what?" he said.
" To-morrow ! " echoed Gudrun.
" Indeed ! " said the mother.
But Ursula only smiled wonderfully, and did not reply.
" Married to-morrow ! " cried her father harshly. " What are you talking about."
*' Yes," said Ursula. *' Why not }" Those two words, from her, always drove him mad. " Everything is all right — we shall go to the registrar's office — "
There was a second's hush in the room, after Ursula's blithe vagueness.
" Really, Ursula ! " said Gudrun.
"Might we ask why there has been all this secrecy?" demanded the mother, rather superbly.
" But there hasn't," said Ursula. " You knew."
"Who knew?" now cried the father. "Who knew? What do you mean by your ' you knew ' ? "
He was in one of his stupid rages, she instantly closed against him.
" Of course you knew," she said coolly. " You knew we were going to get married."
There was a dangerous pause.
" We knew you were going to get married, did we ? Knew ! Why, does anybody know anything about youy you shifty bitch ! "
" Father ! " cried Gudrun, flushing deep in violent re- monstrance. Then, in a cold, but gentle voice, as if to re- mind her sister to be tractable : " But isn't it a fearfully sudden decision, Ursula ?" she asked.
" No, not really," replied Ursula, with the same maddening cheerfulness. " He's been wanting me to agree for weeks — he's had the licence ready. Only I — I wasn't ready in myself. Now I am ready — is there anything to be dis- agreeable about?"
" Certainly not," said Gudrun, but in a tone of cold re- proof. " You are perfectly free to do as you like."
" ' Ready in yourself ' — yourself, that's all that matters, isn't it ! 'I wasn't ready in myself,' " he mimicked her phrase offensively. " You and yourself, you're of some im- portance, aren't you ?"
She drew herself up and set back her throat, her eyes shining yellow and dangerous.
" I am to myself," she said, wounded and mortified. '' I know I am not to anybody else. You only wanted to bully me-^you never cared for my happiness."
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...continued passage from above: He was leaning forward watching her, his face intense like a spark.
" Ursula, what are you saying ? Keep your tongue still," cried her mother.
Ursula swung round, and the lights in her eyes flashed.
" No, I won't," she cried. " I won't hold my tongue and be bullied. What does it matter which day I get mar- ried — what does it matter! It doesn't affect anybody but myself."
Her father was tense and gathered together like a cat about to spring.
" Doesn't it ?" he cried, coming nearer to her. She shrank away.
" No, how can it ?" she replied, shrinking but stubborn.
" It doesn't matter to me then, what you do — what be- comes of you ?" he cried, in a strange voice like a cry.
The mother and Gudrun stood back as if hypnotised.
" No," stammered Ursula. Her father was very near to her. '* You only want to "
She knew it was dangerous, and she stopped. He was gathered together, every muscle ready.
" What?" he challenged.
" Bully me," she muttered, and even as her lips were moving, his hand had caught her smack at the side of the face and she was sent up against the door.
" Father ! " cried Gudrun in a high voice, "it is im- possible I "
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a page down in the text (she leaves her home and flies to her lover soon-to-be husband Birkin)
" What is it, then ?" he asked.
Suddenly she broke away, wiped her eyes, regained her composure, and went and sat in a chair.
" Father hit me," she announced, sitting bunched up, rather like a ruffled bird, her eyes very bright.
"What for?" he said.
She looked away, and would not answer. There was a pitiful redness about her sensitive nostrils, and her quivering lips.
"Why?" he repeated, in his strange, soft, penetrating voice.
She looked round at him, rather defiantly.
" Because I said I was going to be married to-morrow, and he bullied me."
" Why did he bully you ?"
Her mouth dropped again, she remembered the scene once more, the tears came up.
" Because I said he didn't care — and he doesn't, it's only his domineeringness that's hurt — " she said, her mouth pulled awry by her weeping, all the time she spoke, so that he almost smiled, it seemed so childish. Yet it was not childish, it was a mortal conflict, a deep wound.
" It isn't quite true," he said. " And even so, you shouldn't say it."
" It is true — it is true," she wept, " and I won't be bul- lied by his pretending it's love — when it isnH — he doesn't care, how can he — no, he can't — "
He sat in silence.
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(My commentary): In a Freudian transference of love for the father figure, now abandoned after a bout of violence and despair, the woman runs illicitly to her unmarried lover--soon to be married and thus commensurate with acceptable state of martial norms.
First she must, tho, kill the father figure in order to love another father/son/husband triangle figure. He sees her as his redemption, his magna mater, the nurturing life-giver who sustains his rejuvenation to his old, debauched soul and spirit.
" And I have loved him, I have," she wept. '' I've loved him always, and he's always done this to me, he has — "
" It's been a love of opposition, then," he said. " Never mind — it will be all right. It's nothing desperate."
" Yes," she wept, " it is, it is."
"Why.?"
" I shall never see him again "
" Not immediately. Don't cry, you had to break with him, it had to be — don't cry."
He went over to her and kissed her fine, fragile hair, touching her wet cheeks gently.
*' Don't cry," he repeated, " don't cry any more."
He held her head close against him, very close and quiet.
At last she was still. Then she looked up, her eyes wide and frightened.
" Don't you want me ?" she asked.
"Want you?" His darkened, steady eyes puzzled her and did not give her play.
" Do you wish I hadn't come?" she asked, anxious now again for fear she might be out of place.
" No," he said. " I wish there hadn't been the violence — so much ugliness — but perhaps it was inevitable."
She watched him in silence. He seemed deadened.
" But where shall I stay?" she asked, feeling humiliated.
He thought for a moment.
" Here, with me," he said. " We're married as much to-day as we shall be to-morrow."
« But— "
" I'll tell Mrs Varley," he said. " Never mind now."
He sat looking at her. She could feel his darkened steady eyes looking at her all the time. It made her a little bit frightened. She pushed her hair off her forehead ner- vously.
" Do I look ugly ?" she said.
And she blew her nose again.
A small smile came round his eyes.
" No," he said, " fortunately."
And he went across to her, and gathered her like a be- longing in his arms. She was so tenderly beautiful, he could not bear to see her, he could only bear to hide her against himself. Now; washed all clean by her tears, she
was new and frail like a flower just unfolded, a flower so new, so tender, so made perfect by inner light, that he could not bear to look at her, he must hide her against himself, cover his eyes against her. She had the perfect candour of creation, something translucent and simple, like a radiant, shining flower that moment unfolded in primal blessedness. She was so new, so wonder-clear, so undimmed. And he was so old, so steeped in hea^'y memories. Her soul was new, undefined and glimmering with the unseen. And his soul was dark and gloomy, it had only one grain of living hope, like a grain of mustard seed. But this one living grain in him matched the perfect youth in her."
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"But the passion of gratitude with which he received her into his soul, the extreme, unthinkable gladness of knowing himself living and fit to unite with her, he, who was so nearly dead, who was so near to being gone with the rest of his race down the slope of mechanical death, could never be understood by her. He worshipped her as age worships youth, he gloried in her, because, in his one grain of faith, he was young as she, he was her proper mate. This mar- riage with her was his resurrection and his life.
All this she could not know. She wanted to be made much of, to be adored. There were infinite distances of silence between them. How could he tell her of the imma- nence of her beauty, that was not form, or weight, or colour, but something like a strange, golden light ! How could he know himself what her beauty lay in, for him. He said " Your nose is beautiful, your chin is adorable." But it sounded like lies, and she was disappointed, hurt. Even when he said, whispering with truth, " I love you, I love you," it was not the real truth. It was something beyond love, such a gladness of having surpassed oneself, of having transcended the old existence. How could he say ' I ' when he was something new and unknown, not himself at all ? This I, this old formula of the age, was a dead letter.
In the new, superfine bliss, a peace superseding knowledge, there was no I and you, there was only the third, unrealised wonder, the wonder of existing not as oneself, but in a consummation of my being and of her being in a new one, a new, paradisal unit regained from the duality. Nor can I say *' I love you," when I have ceased to be, and you have ceased to be : we are both caught up and trans- cended into a new oneness where everything is silent, be- cause there is nothing to answer, all is perfect and at one. Speech travels between the separate parts. But in the per- fect One there is perfect silence of bliss.
They were married by law on the next day."
(my commentary): The end of the book, full stop. The last mournful reminiscences of the man who is capable of love, but not fully to another woman, and the woman who loves him unconditionally but without awareness of options, or of possibilities or of ability to make other choices in a closed and cloistered environment, where women were kept for marriage and for spawning children and taking care of the cleaning and cooking and tending and nurturing and that includes for the male. The other dead man who loved unconditionally committed suicide when his cold wife, Gudren, who was capable of questioning, of not loving unconditionally and surrendering to the man who rules her--cast him aside in what she called a "hate triangle"..the eternal hate triangle of passionate death to love with a 3rd party interloper as a mere prop for the explosive cataclysm of the inevitable chasm between those who have no real bond but are put together, glued into a fashionable domestic arrangement.
The first woman, Ursula, gentle and naive, open like a multiple-petaled flower waiting for the first and final thrust of impregnation of commitment and solidarity to security, cannot begin to understand the yearnings for unfathomable thirsting for the forbidden love and the forbidden fruit that a male lusts for in other men but not as completely as in the love found in his "other" soul flame, the domesticated women. The modern term for this is "male bonding". The end is death, the beginning is an incomplete sense of longing that can never be satiated. The book was written by a male describing women who are in love partnerships but it's really about men who can't love other men in secret or in private or in public--in the rural sphere of normal existence in small town and middle city death trap life. Trying to escape, going to the Tyrol and finding only black rocks heaving up like daggers into the sky as the masterful controlling man kills himself in response to realizing that his attempt to love found himself in concert with a woman as equally incapable of love as himself.
" You can't have two kinds of love. Why should you ! " " It seems as if I can't," he said. " Yet I wanted it." *' You can't have it, because it's false, impossible," she said.
*' I don't believe that," he answered.
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(my commentary):
THE other pair that survived is left with a gaping hole betwixt them. The woman has been programmed to love a male forever and the male, in this case, has spent much of his time hanging out with aristocracy where male bonding is not forbidden and is held in higher esteem than in the milk cow mud fields of England. The story is called woman but it's about men and their control of women so that in the end, they can never receive nor give or offer another woman infinite unbounded love that they give and taste from other men in their bonding and respect for one another in this bond of control over women--who are in love but not really, are trained in a cloistered environment and are not able to spread their wings and fly to other realms of concept or identity. DH Lawrence wrote a quote about beating women if they respond with hostility towards a man, in the marriage. He doesn't mention what grounds a woman may have for such a reaction towards the man. That infinite desire to bond into a special unit of one solidarity remains an unfolded flower, a gem uncut and a promise eternally broken by a divinity that is as uncompromising in lackadaisical unconcern as the father in the book is towards his questioning and outspoken daughter--punishing for not doing what one is told, and beaten for questioning authority--and the men can only love one male god and truly love other men while women remain as Eve in the fallen garden, left out of the conversation, left ignorant and left without the information to make informed consent a possibility of kicking these men to the curb and finding independence from codified attachment and meaning in the mysterious concept of Love and of, in fact, the love that men hold for other men and their lessor love for women, unless they play the Madonna love nurturing mother figure to them until they are ready for the final diaper stage of old age. That, in essence, is my rendition of a commentary on DH Lawrences Women in Love and his resounding in-the-closet book on how badly he wants to break free of the bonding rituals and of society's thrust into his desires and foregoing his Hobbit Shires of the glorification of the mundane bourgeoise existence of conformity to the boundaries of acceptable love and it's practical and violent assumptions about women--who are trained to love abusers while men love abusers as well. In reality, when the situation is set out of the Shires of postcard bliss, the real love is reserved for the cold, dead hearts of those who cannot love but master the animals and tame the throbbing desires of other men until it's a cold, death-like experience of love restrained and women can't dare complain. Thus, in order to get away, they kill those they cannot love who cannot love them but cling to them for the sake of appearances and are unable to love those they control--other men with woman falling far down the food chain of desire, unity and unification of true love abandoned and lost.
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(my commentary--out of sync and order on my Facebook page but I will add it at the end, although the paragraph above was intended to be the last. If it turns out in this hacked and haphazard way, it's because I will take this as a form of synchronicity that the mention of God is contemplated and commented upon by the poetic lover who can really only love a cold, dead God and a colder dead would-be male lover, love unrequited and thus, to him, the infinite potentials of love are lost in his miserable state of regret and disappointment in his former bliss in the unification of the woman he has chosen to be his one and only --mommy remembrance of nurturing love unconditional and unspoiled by knowledge of the forbidden fruit of knowledge. Near the end of Women in Love...Birkin the living bemoans to himself the loss of his near Brokeback Mountain moment, eulogizing about the love's labor lost:
" "God can do without man. God could do without the ichthyosauri and the mastodon. These monsters failed creatively to develop, so God, the creative mystery, dis- pensed with them. In the same way the mystery could dis- pense with man, should he too fail creatively to change and develop. The eternal creative mystery could dispose of man, and replace him with a finer created being. Just as the horse has taken the place of the mastodon.
It was very consoling to Birkin, to think this. If humanity ran into a cul de sac, and expended itself, the timeless creative mystery would bring forth some other being, finer, more wonderful, some new, more lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation. The game was never up. The mystery of creation was fathomless, infallible, in- exhaustible, forever. Races came and went, species passed away, but ever new species arose, more lovely, or equally lovely, always surpassing wonder. The fountain-head was incorruptible and unsearchable. It had no limits. It could bring forth miracles, create utter new races and new species, in its own hour, new forms of consciousness, new forms of body, new units of being. To be man was as nothing compared to the possibilities of the creative mys- tery. To have one's pulse beating direct from the mystery, this was perfection, unutterable satisfaction. Human or inhuman mattered nothing. The perfect pulse throbbed with indescribable being, miraculous unborn species.
Birkin went home again to Gerald. He went into the room, and sat down on the bed. Dead, dead and cold !...Then suddenly he lifted his head, and looked straight at Ursula, with dark, almost vengeful eyes.
^* He should have loved me," he said. " I offered him."
She, afraid, white, with mute lips answered :
" What difference would it have made ! "
" It would !" he said. " It would."
He forgot her, and turned to look at Gerald. With head oddly lifted, like a man who draws his head back from an insult, half haughtily, he watched the cold, mute, material face. It had a bluish cast. It sent a shaft like ice through the heart of the living man. Cold, mute, material ! Birkin remembered how once Gerald had clutched his hand, with a warm, momentaneous grip of final love. For one second — then let go again, let go for ever. If he had kept true to that clasp, death would not have mattered. Those who die, and dying still can love, still believe, do not die. They live still in the beloved. Gerald might still have been living in the spirit with Birkin, even after death. He might have lived with his friend, a further life.
But now he was dead, like clay, like bluish, corruptible ice. Birkin looked at the pale fingers, the inert mass. He remembered a dead stallion he had seen : a dead mass of maleness, repugnant. He remembered also the beautiful face of one whom he had loved, and who had died still having the faith to yield to the mystery. That dead face was beautiful, no one could call it cold, mute, material. No one could remember it without gaining faith in the mystery, without the soul's warming with new, deep life- trust.
And Gerald ! The denier ! He left the heart cold, frozen, hardly able to beat. Gerald's father had looked wistful, to break the heart : but not this last terrible look of cold, mute Matter. Birkin watched and watched"
*my final commentary on this book about men in love (or not):
And that's the story of women in love and the men who love other men and their fathers who beat animals, women, wives, daughters and control and keep regurgitating more children in that old marriage system as the pondering philosophers stuck in the suburbs or yet worse the rural areas have to ponder alone the existence of God or whether God cares just like father doesn't care in the household to their womenfolk--(following the plot and the line of violence and activity in the book--not my personal commentary on existence, rural kinfolk and their disputes or on homosexuality in general).
