Jung Min Woo
Korea University, South Korea
Death, the end of experience or an experience?
Is death the end of experience or an experience?
In Lawrence's Last Poems, death, the return to the primal womb, silence and eternity is not a concept based upon the duration of time; it is a mythical and symbolic time span which starts at here-and-now without setting the final line. Perhaps 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. 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.
In this respect, the aesthetic of returning to the primal womb, death, silence and finally resurrection is 'a travelling' toward the hidden consciousness, 'terra incognita', 'the unknown region of mind'. Death is still a journey, for the end is unknown and oblivious. Thus he says it is 'the longest journey' which may never end, and 'nothing matters but the longest journey'. Death, like life, perhaps resembles the circle of Yin and Yang, or the Mexican Indian's weaving, or the Etruscan death art, which has no end but gives a passage into the unknown. The difference between life journey and death journey lies in that the former is the voyage to waken linguistic consciousness while the latter pursues non-linguistic Being, 'Silence'. It is a remarkable turning point for a writer whose duty is to use words to invent the Wittgensteinean 'language game' that frames 'forms of life'. By 'murmuring' – 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.