In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

396 CODES COLLAPSED
theme of forbidden sexual desire accompanied by a crisis of cognitive
certainty provides an interpretive frame for this text-a frame that goes
beyond the scope of its dense historical reference. [see Uncertainty vs.
Reality] The book is dedicated to a loved one for whom Lawrence
wanted to win liberty, and who has died:
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
to earn you Freedom, the seven pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
when we came.
Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, our brief wage
ours for the moment
before earth's soft hand explored your shape, and the blind
worms grew fat upon
your substance.
(Lawrence, 5)
This allusion is never completely clarified in the hundreds of pages of
Lawrence's narrative. Only the first paragraph of the brief epilogue may
close the open bracket: "Damascus had not seemed a sheath for my
sword, when I landed in Arabia; but its capture disclosed the exhaustion
of my main springs of action. The strongest motive throughout had been
a personal one, not mentioned here, but present to me, I think, every
hour of these two years. Active pains and joys might fling up, like towers,
among my days; but, refluent as air, this hidden urge re-formed, to be
the persisting element of life, till near the end. It was dead, before we
reached Damascus" (661).
On a less intimate level, Lawrence writes explicitly about homosexual
practices. He does so, however, under the license of the conventional
understanding that, in the specific situation of warfare, such practices are
an unavoidable substitute for heterosexual contacts:
The body was too coarse to feel the utmost of our sorrows and of our
joys. Therefore, we abandoned it as rubbish: we left it below us to
march forward, a breathing simulacrum, on its own unaided level,
subject to influences from which in normal times our instincts would
have shrunk. The men were young and sturdy; and hot flesh and blood