It’s not that I disagree with D.H. Lawrence’s key insight on what must not be done concerning the subjection of the unknowable in the service of the will to know. His objection to “a culturally imposed oppression of prurient and sadistic puritanism” that seeks “not liberty, but a gloomy and tyrannical sense of power” is correct for its condemnation of an inefficient and short-sighted enterprise, one that leaves unintegrated (and therefore dependent on false myths) vast swaths of “all that is joyous and intuitive” in the repressed consciousness (E. Wright 1998). However, Lawrence’s use of allegorical parallel that draws from the story of the American conquest of the native is itself not entirely free of myth. Rather it conceives of a white settler mind that delimits native mindlessness, and only the native appears to be possessed of joyous, intuitive natural life force. The new place of America does have its own latency that can circumvent the censor and find fulfillment, but the Lawrentian narrative obstructs the view of white settlers as equally possessed of this natural force, just as the curtailing, cultivating knowledge that marks self-governance must have been all along characteristic of the native inhabitants. To acknowledge both sides of this dichotomy as capable of the full range of latencies and repressions would deny any knee jerk retreat to punitive tribalism in the face of “resistance” by “the other consciousness,” its resistance to being denied the life force unique to it and which life force itself must be of the full range, but not so without mind as to lack self-regulation. Wright describes Lawrence’s theorizing of imaginative writing or ‘art speech’ as granting special privilege to the author as the “repository of truth,” which is helpful in defining ‘true myth’ as that which “concerns itself centrally with the onward adventure of the integral soul” (Lawrence 1977, in Wright 1998, p. 45). However, it also strikes me as still informed by a pervasive restricted and narrow existence in time.

Separately, the time-boundedness confronting artist Khalid Abdalla seems to have enabled a kind of ‘art speech’ that allows for a re-ordering of matter in what I regard here as a kind of cognitive disarmament. His perception of a “profound disconnect between the world as it seems” and what he “is witnessing as an unrelenting assault” on his senses, seems to me to accomplish motivation at the highest level of vraissement. Abdalla essentially calls the bluff on that which presents itself simply as what is, “humbly” anchored in realism, absent meaning (Jonathan Culler). Recasting this rather as naturalized nonsense (the only good use of ironic reversal), a new social contract is discernable, one that I see as marked by what Abdalla calls “a massive shift in consciousness” (Frank Barat). The position seems to have recognized not only the risk of reprisal that keeps so many in check, but more fundamentally that one has already lost everything if what they are given is contingent on their silence. So central is the correct understanding of silence or complacency as instrumental to war that it may even displace the dichotomization of war and peace to a new conceptualization in which the opposite of peace is not war but complacency as its necessary supplement.

Here it may be objected a binding oath already obtains whose price is this very silence, in lieu of which there could have been some committing of error. However, I assume at that point equalities as much as equivalencies would come into play. The unlovely mantra whose jagged edges break my hard shell of consciousness is not the same as what I use to walk and chew, which is still of another order than what one gives up for Lent, this lattermost use of form which I nonetheless credit for its matching of mockery for mockery. But even if inclusion contingent on silence enjoys a firstness of premise relative to that of a suspect normalcy, it is a silence bought too cheap, one recognized in what will appear later as the neurotic desire to reverse the good scene gone bad, at which point it will be called “intransigent” (Tomkins).

As well, where previously the abstraction from depersonalized subjects-turned-objects denied their necessary depth and paved the way for the presentation of space as uninhabited, the new formulation of consciousness now regards that scene as a misuse of the subjective faculty of intuition, by virtue of which property of subjectivity it is claimed as possessable by a self or selves. But this tendency, too, can and has been recast, such as with Freud’s writing of his essay, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through.” There, a Victorian ethos informs the placement of restrictions ever further to a single point of shame reinforced by sexual prohibitions. With Freud’s essay an individual autonomy is conceivable as having grown out of an individualized shame, one that is most demanding of ownership and therefore what must be circumvented to arrive at the most “authentic” site of freedom. But Sedgewick and Frank locate in the “sublimely alien” work of Tomkins early expressions of shame that precede prohibition, and Deleuze and Guattari would rework Freud’s essay in their Anti-Oedipus to give primacy to the social field over “narrow familial investments of desire” (Wright). An understanding of these theoretical interventions could greatly reduce the chances of an ill-fated outcome for all due to a single bad actor whose methods are nonetheless recorded in the stars, to be played back passively by a horrified Greek chorus.