(Excerpt from Spirituality and the Writer June 2019)

Perhaps the finest spiritual essay in English is “The Spinner and the Monks,” the second chapter of D. H. Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy.In 1912, Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen, having just met and gone lust-mad for each other, spent the winter/spring seasons on Lake Garda in Gargnano, Italy. High above Gargnano and its tangled streets sits the Church of San Tommaso. The small chapel, which Lawrence espies from the lakefront, seems to float in the sky, looking out at the snow-capped peaks of the Tyrol. Climbing ancient cobblestone streets up through the village, passing walled houses atop steep stairways, he discovers San Tommaso’s terrace, “suspended” “like the lowest step of heaven,” a place with an earthen sacredness in between (or joining) the sky and the earth. He enters the Church and inhales “a thick, fierce darkness of the senses.” His soul shrinks, he says, and he hurries outside.

There, in the courtyard, he finds an old woman spinning. More strangeness. “She made me feel as if I were not in existence.” Something in her he desires, something in her he fears, it’s not clear. Speaking with her in his poor Italian, the encounter is filled with Lawrence’s ecstatic portrait. “Her eyes were clear as the sky, blue, empyrean, transcendent. They were clear, but they had no looking in them. Her face was a sun-worn stone.” Lawrence, the vagabond Englishman who can “read” a people’s soul (the Italians are “Children of the Shadow”), compares the woman to “the visible heavens, unthinking.” She is “without consciousness of self,” a state that briefly nettles Lawrence, a man who easily flares with a kind of unrequited passion.

This peasant is “not aware that there was anything in the universe except her universe.” In his description, he moves her from a servile condition to an archetype—a glowingly fixed embodiment of the unconscious. An otherness. Like the stars. (To which all life eventually returns.) He places the woman, metaphorically, into the firmament, where his being, momentarily, is absorbed into the macrocosm, the universe that she represents. But, he declares, “the macrocosm is not me.” He is the microcosm. So, he concludes, “there is something which is unknown to me and which nevertheless exists.” The woman’s bearing lets Lawrence address the void-like divide between him and the nonhuman. He’s stunned: “There is that which is not me,” he writes, over and again, as if this were a newly discovered substance like a spaceship or an artificial heart.

He walks on, going higher, picking primroses, lamenting the waning sun. He stops to gaze down into a garden, full of “bony vines and olive trees.” There, two monks are walking and talking, in late afternoon light, unseen by him. Here is yet another rapprochement between Lawrence and the mystical, the “not me,” a scene in which “it was as if I were attending with my dark soul to [the monks’] inaudible undertone.” Their walking “backwards and forwards,” a phrase he rivets in repetitious prose; they are busy striving, in tandem, pacing and turning back to pace and turn again. This “backwards and forwards” between life and death, now and then, soul and matter, is like a fulcrum. “Neither the blood nor the spirit spoke in them,” Lawrence writes, “only the law, the abstraction of the average.”

The monks embody a kind of neutrality: being in the world yet also passing through it, which Lawrence (or any of us) broods upon as his, as our lot, while the old woman is the permanence of the world, its psychic wholeness, observable but unembraceable, which Lawrence (or any of us) seeks to experience. Still, he dreads this here-and-gone sensibility. Why? Such knowledge defuses his nature, that which manifests in and through his efflorescent prose. Indeed, his prose, too, walks “backwards and forwards,” contemplating existence and evanescence, carrying water, chopping wood, before and after this hilltop moment. It is equally discoverable and unknown.

Then comes a “meeting-point” where Lawrence takes “possession of the unknown” with a salty question. “Where in mankind,” he asks, “is the ecstasy of light and dark together, the supreme transcendence of the afterglow, day hovering in the embrace of the coming night like two angels embracing in the heavens . . .?” Where is it? It is there, right in front of him, he realizes. But it is also forever unrealized, its elusiveness its reality. Where is where Lawrence sees that which “is not me,” that is, the apprehending consciousness with which he accepts, satisfied, his ultimate absence.

Thus, the final paragraph:

Where is the supreme ecstasy in mankind, which makes day a delight and night a delight, purpose an ecstasy and a concourse in ecstasy, and single abandon of the single body and soul also an ecstasy under the moon? Where is the transcendent knowledge in our hearts, uniting sun and darkness, day and night, spirit and senses? Why do we not know that the two in consummation are one; that each is only part; partial and alone for ever; but that the two in consummation are perfect, beyond the range of loneliness or solitude?

The intimacies of the spinner and the monks in their Italianate bowers deliver to a receptive Lawrence one of life’s enigmas. I call it spiritual because once he merges “spirit and senses” into “one,” he finds a way to temporarily cage his capture, at least, for psychic transport. The only way he holds onto this merger is with questions. Why don’t we know what we know? We know the truth. It’s staring us in the face. And yet the questions continue to mount. Lawrence passes a clothmaker and robed walkers who themselves dally or trudge on, unaware their otherness is him. Seasons and buds and desiccated blooms and we busy ourselves going to and fro, “backwards and forwards,” like the monks, or spryly haunched with a bobbin, like the old woman. In short, this is the Lawrencian body, companioned by “bony vines and olive trees,” conjuring the transcendent realm of “not knowing,” or, less severe, “cloudy knowing.” All that work—a delight, I must say for the reader—to be reminded of what is not me. If you wish to lay bare the spiritual questions, disinterred from their religious answers, let the writing indulge the body and its felt abstractions, and the spirit will speak.