Project Update: Locating Lawrence

We are currently working on a new feature for the website which will help map out Lawrence’s travel as well as capture his initial observations on places. I am often asked, what is creativity? And my answer is simple: creating problems and solving them. Or finding problems and solving them. Another recurring question is, what is the point of creativity? And, again, my answer is simple: we have to fill our allotted three score years and ten doing something. Time is there to be filled and creativity adds a crackle and spark to the precarious clock hands. Creativity leads to obsession as the desire to perfect a process becomes inevitable. This is pretty much what has happened with the Locating Lawrence feature in the Memory Theatre. These are a monthly video essay based on the letters of D.H. Lawrence, published one hundred years to the month. Originally, I was looking for some quotes to use in the D.H. Lawrence bulletin that I edit. This then transformed into a monthly blog. Then it became a video essay on YouTube. The first Locating Lawrence started in April 1922 (published April 2022) and has been running ever since – and will do so until his death in 1930. This means I’ll be making them till 2030 whether you want them or not. It’s quite the commitment but inspired by Frank Delaney’s superb Re:Joyce podcasts which deconstruct Ulysses a sentence or paragraph per podcast! I mention this as the official date for the start of the Memory Theatre project was 2019 – to mark the centenary since Lawrence began his self-imposed exile and embarked on his savage pilgrimage. Technically, I need to back-date the video essays till then but for now I have completed the 1922 ones. The January, February, and March videos will be published over the next month. This is important as I’ve created a playlist for each year and so they need to be filled. The downside to this is I love reading Lawrence’s letters each month and published the video essay and blog exactly one hundred years on. Updating messes with the chronology as well as with my head. Paul and I are now working on a map for the website that takes inspiration from the Indiana Jones films and will include the videos as well as quotes. This will eventually run in real time. My initial idea is to include polaroid type images to mark out the journey, such as the one at the top of this post, but we’ll have to see how this looks. If you subscribe to this blog or follow our YouTube channel, please don’t think I’ve suddenly lost the plot if random years start appearing in your timeline. Think of it as a spring clean and an attempt to get things back in order, as well as an excuse to create more problems for myself with less time to solve them in… This post was originally published on The Digital Pilgrimage here. References

D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre project launch on Lawrence’s 135th birthday

For the last five years, Paul Fillingham and I have been working on a digital project to celebrate the life of D.H. Lawrence. We’ve done this without any funding (because we haven’t had time to apply) filling up every spare second of our evenings after a hard day’s slog. Our intention is simple, to bring Lawrence (kicking and screaming) into the 21st century. We don’t claim to be Lawrencian experts and fully expect some of our suggestions to be ripped apart. So please do tell us when and where we have got something wrong and we will consider revisions (although not biases). Our memory theatre will contain the good, the bad and the ugly: the complexities and contradictions of a human life.

It’s taken five years because this is how long we’ve needed to immerse ourselves in Lawrence’s phenomenal literary output – and we still haven’t touched the surface. Lawrence once chided Mabel Dodge Luhan that, ‘You don’t know your floor until you have scrubbed it on your hands and knee’. We’ve taken this attitude with the memory theatre. We don’t know Lawrence until we’ve read every word written by him or about him.

Representation of any author’s work is a challenge because there are so many interpretations of their work. This is particularly true for Lawrence who has been reviled and loved across the decades.  We understand how important it is to get things right. This means reading, reading, reading. Lawrence is a complex beast who can easily be misinterpreted. He can be infuriating and unbearable. Then profound and evocative. One thing he is not is mediocre.

To help challenge and cement ideas, the Memory Theatre project has been a dissertation option at Nottingham Trent University for the past four years. This has given me time to select and curate various aspects of Lawrence’s work, to identify recurring themes, and, more importantly, to understand what these themes mean to younger, digitally literate audiences. His ideas on money, industrialization, rananim, and the environment seem increasingly more relevant.

Paul has been constructing the website and coding for the project, thinking about the way the Memory Theatre can be accessed via different devices, developing the logo and branding, and visualising how the artefacts will appear. Due to Coronavirus, the memory theatre will have to be digital for now and so we need this to look right. This takes time.

Our intention was to launch the memory theatre in 2019 to mark the centenary of his self-imposed exile. But instead we are doing this today, on his 135th birthday, where we have our first artefact: Mr. Muscles. This is in recognition of his incredible work ethic, and the good spirit in which he approached life. Juliette Huxley said Lawrence cooked ‘as he did most things, with a radiating creativeness which was contagious. Even washing-up had its own charm, enriched with the satisfaction of putting everything back in its chosen place, glowing with fresh cleanliness.’

Lawrence constantly reminds us that we are transmitters of life and what we transmit has an impact on the way we perceive the world as well as the way we make others feel. Paul and I have given the memory project every ounce of our being. We hope it ‘radiates creativity,’ by pushing the boundaries of digital literary criticism and as an alternative to the linear biography.

You can visit the project website here and read the opening artefact essays using the links below.

Artefact 1: Mr. Muscles

Essay 1: A model of Neatness and Precision

Essay 2: Loves the Jobs you Hate

Essay 3: Roadmap to Happiness

Essay 4: We are Transmitters