13 - Apocalypse now (and then). Or, D. H. Lawrence and the swan in the electron

Summary

Look then

where the father of all things swims in a mist of atoms

electrons and energies, quantums and relativities

mists, wreathing mists,

like a wild swan or a goose . . .

And in the dark unscientific I feel the drum-winds of his wings

Lawrence, ‘Give Us Gods’

Prophecy versus postmodernism: Lawrence at the millennium

Inevitably, so Lawrence might have said, death and rebirth, or at any rate transformation of some kind, have been both projects and subjects for the much anticipated and perhaps overhyped millennium, an event towards which he and his cohort of modernists seem to have been far more sensitively attuned than we ourselves. Rough beasts and second comings, chantings in orgy on summer morns, new styles of will, deaths of the old gang, strange lights in the sky, doves descending and swans arising: the apocalyptic ambitions of Lawrence's generation loom as grandly over ours as Stravinsky heaves high over MTV, Virginia Woolf over Fay Weldon.