Going Through Death, An Experience or the End of Experience?

Abstract

D. H. Lawrence has been an ever-wanderer; yet he belongs where he was from, despite the “infinite repulsion” and detachment he felt towards England, especially his Midlands home, the wanderer knew that the origin was inescapable. Thus, through travelling, he gained and regained different identities which belong everywhere yet nowhere. In a way, he knew that he would return, for travelling is to return, not to go away. Wavering between the instinctive repulsion from, and attraction to, his native land, he once more, and for the last time, revealed his honest feeling that he would not come back yet was unable to forget the memory of the other. During his last years, hopelessly threatened by the prospect of death, the returned outsider chose to be creative in mind at least to confront and go beyond his past memories by writing his "Last Poems." By composing the death poems he seems to test the writer’s task which excludes his individual language from public communication and brings about the aura of silence in words. And he seeks the eternal freedom by returning to the primal and final shelter, womb and death, to realize that silence emerges as the form of language, as death emerges as the form of birth. Thus his final language, through which silence is revealed, is a language "a travelling" toward the hidden consciousness, "terra incognita," "the unknown region of mind." In this respect, his "Last Poems" has an interesting traits that may be analogous to Zen Buddhist's transcendental view on language and desire. In both Lawrence and Zen Buddhism, I would like to argue that the eternity of death may be an experience, not the end of experience: death is the starting point where one enters the world of eternity. And death, the entering into the eternity, for Lawrence, is a sojourning experience, whose impact and duration are not necessarily confined to the rational sense of reality but to the flow of mind which Lawrence adopted and developed throughout his life.