Birkin says, "If we are going to make a relationship, even of friendship, there must be something final and infallible about it." He continues:
'I can't say it is love I have to offer--and it isn't love I want. It is something much more impersonal and harder--and rarer.'
There was a silence, out of which she said:
‘You mean you don’t love me?’
She suffered furiously, saying that.
‘Yes, if you like to put it like that. Though perhaps that isn’t true. I don’t know. At any rate, I don’t feel the emotion of love for you—no, and I don’t want to. Because it gives out in the last issues.’
‘Love gives out in the last issues?’ she asked, feeling numb to the lips.
‘Yes, it does. At the very last, one is alone, beyond the influence of love. There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional relationship. So it is with you. But we want to delude ourselves that love is the root. It isn’t. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does NOT meet and mingle, and never can.’
She watched him with wide, troubled eyes. His face was incandescent in its abstract earnestness.
‘And you mean you can’t love?’ she asked, in trepidation.
‘Yes, if you like. I have loved. But there is a beyond, where there is not love.’
She could not submit to this. She felt it swooning over her. But she could not submit.
‘But how do you know—if you have never REALLY loved?’ she asked.
‘It is true, what I say; there is a beyond, in you, in me, which is further than love, beyond the scope, as stars are beyond the scope of vision, some of them.’
‘Then there is no love,’ cried Ursula.
‘Ultimately, no, there is something else. But, ultimately, there IS no love.’
[Project Gutenberg, an on-line eBook, url to the page where this passage begins.]
There was a silence, out of which she said:
‘You mean you don’t love me?’
She suffered furiously, saying that.
‘Yes, if you like to put it like that. Though perhaps that isn’t true. I don’t know. At any rate, I don’t feel the emotion of love for you—no, and I don’t want to. Because it gives out in the last issues.’
‘Love gives out in the last issues?’ she asked, feeling numb to the lips.
‘Yes, it does. At the very last, one is alone, beyond the influence of love. There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional relationship. So it is with you. But we want to delude ourselves that love is the root. It isn’t. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does NOT meet and mingle, and never can.’
She watched him with wide, troubled eyes. His face was incandescent in its abstract earnestness.
‘And you mean you can’t love?’ she asked, in trepidation.
‘Yes, if you like. I have loved. But there is a beyond, where there is not love.’
She could not submit to this. She felt it swooning over her. But she could not submit.
‘But how do you know—if you have never REALLY loved?’ she asked.
‘It is true, what I say; there is a beyond, in you, in me, which is further than love, beyond the scope, as stars are beyond the scope of vision, some of them.’
‘Then there is no love,’ cried Ursula.
‘Ultimately, no, there is something else. But, ultimately, there IS no love.’
[Project Gutenberg, an on-line eBook, url to the page where this passage begins.]
Yes, I understand this. In meditation, I, too, have discovered what Lawrence writes about. But can I write about the void that is beyond love? Even a few lines will do - only a draft and a re-entry into my Venus Manuscript.
We can love only when we are emptied of ourselves. When we have given ourselves to the other.
In the depths of this giving, profound, scary, unsettling, is a union beyond self, ego, personhood, the particular state of time and space in the here and now that we are.
If we enter this spiritual state of being, dependent as it is on the erotic, on the sexual forces of attraction, desire and excitement, melt into the beyondness of the orgasmic moment, and allow it to be a portal where we can spin, tilt, go deeper into the mystery, letting ourselves dissolve, even to the point of extinction, giving ourselves over to the enigma, then, yes.
There remains something alone in each of us even in the union of love, and there is a "beyond, in you, in me, which is further than love."
And I apologize, this is as far as I can go tonight. Tomorrow images may emerge to give flesh to these thoughts; who knows.
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