Austen (obviously), Lawrence, Ian Curtis and of course rats

I'm going to carry on with the theme of Austen's Persuasion's "I am half agony, half hope." because I can't stop thinking about it.

Tonight I have limited time so these thoughts will be very half-formed.

I like characters who are torn up inside, like a chimera. Half-breeds. A friend of TE Lawrence, EM Forster, once said of him, "He has... a profound distrust of himself, a still profounder faith." Again, this idea of being torn in two contrasting ways, not out of personal indecision and weakness, but out of a recognition of the fallibility of humanity (and especially someone as smart as Lawrence who doubtlessly recognised more of the ills of humanity in himself and those around him than us normal folk), and yet still remains hopeful.

Indeed this balance is eerily similar to agony and hope. Perhaps it is an idea of looking past one's own many flaws, while hating oneself but loving things outside of oneself. It's almost like a "perfect" love - loving unselfishly. A willingness to dissolve into everything, as if camouflaged into the beauty of the world to hide your own ugliness. And yet, the "agony" from Persuasion is different... I don't have time now to explore!

To finish, a line from Joy Division, from "Isolation" (a very fitting song for this word vomit), that's always stuck with me:

 a blindness that touches perfection.

T E Lawrence, God, Austen and of course rats

I am half agony, half hope.

[Persuasion, Jane Austen]

There's a mangle of blood and hair on the floor and it beats with low thumps contracting and relaxing like heartbeats but obviously not heart beats.

I want to dig my heel into it and feel it pop, and blood bubble out from between my toes

like the Colorado through the Grand Canyon, or better yet a valley that doesn't already have a name or visitor track. There's a certain faraway look on T.E.'s expression in almost every photo of him - a distant, sad humour buried in sand and it always makes me wonder what he's looking at, what sad faraway world and memory he's drowning in.

distance on the look of death

[Dickinson]

Well I suppose wherever he'd buried himself, that's where he is now, in spirit and body. That place just out of the frame of the photograph, location, thought. He often speaks about a "household God", and indeed his journey in Arabia seems as much a philosophical odyssey as a political one, and describes remarkable events "like design"; a man goes blind from the brightness of the sun ("sun-blink had burned them out"), and creeps to him "chilled", "Lord I am gone blind", and Lawrence feels that he "shivered as if cold". According to the man (Aid, his name, the Harithi Sherif), "in the night, waking up, there had been no sight, only pain in his eyes". Lawrence mentions this story quite purposefully and precisely and yet gives it no conclusion. Needless to say, this obviously resonated with him deeply. Perhaps he too felt blinded by the immensity of his operation (both the literal political and emotional one), or by God and nature around him. Or perhaps, as he wrote this all with good hindsight, this memory resonates with him, how the sun and the outcome (read: failure) of his journey made him, to a large extent as I believe, lose his sense of direction and understanding of morality in life. Therein afterwards, in his lost-looking photos, he is blinded by sun-blink. Although it is of course notable that famous picture of him and his many brothers, as teens, wherein he is the only person who doesn't ever look into the camera. His whole body faces away. But I suppose then he was deeply lost in his dreams of knights and the Crusades. He calls the landscapes of his childhood imagination "vast and silent". Perhaps his thoughts and landscapes too were silent - a non-verbal humour and sadness, perhaps linked to God.

I shan't give context because, to an extent, it doesn't feel necessary here.

"The dark came upon us quickly in this high prisoned place; and we felt the water-laden air cold against our sunburnt skin." reminds me a bit of when, in Macbeth, the "sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care". 

Fascinating chapter LXIII. Lawrence decides to bathe his "soiled body", "I lay there quietly, letting the clear, dark red water run over me in a ribbly stream", when a "ragged man with a hewn face of great power and weariness" (very interesting here. "hewn" is an important word for Lawrence, in that "Wisdom hath builded herself a home. She has hewn the Seven Pillars.") comes up to him and groans "the love is from God; and of God; and towards God." which is a revalation for Lawrence as he had, before,  "believed the Semites unable to use love as a link between themselves and God" (herein he goes on interestingly about different kinds of love and understanding of God). But also hrere he explores the roots of Christianity which I find fascinating: that the only reason it even happened was because it originated in Galilee which the Jews saw as "unclean"; then it proceeded to become very popular in Europe because of the "stuttering verses" of the Gadarene poets, which "held a mirror to the sensuality and disillusioned fatalism, passing into disordered lust, of their age and place". Absolutely fascinating. Lawrence is a pool (although he sees himself as a "white thing splashing in the hollow beyond the veil of sun-mist").
Lawrence then gets this man to come with him and "utter doctrine" (discuss), and gives him a meal. However, the man only made groaning sound and eventually "rose painfully to his feet and tottered deafly into the night, taking his beliefs, if any, with him." Apparently "the man [life-long] wandered among [the Howeitat] moaning strange things, not knowing day or night, not troubling himself for food or work or shelter. He was given bounty of [the Howeitat], as an afflicted man: but never replied a word, or talked aloud, except when abroad by himself or alone among the sheep and goats."

A man and idea lost to history, but not his story, evidently.

Endless questions from here, accompanied by a distant, humoured looked.