Ignorance is bliss. D. H. Lawrence understood that, but in order to understand that, he first had to know. He had to acknowledge his knowledge and therefore grapple with his enhanced intelligence, an awareness that is impossible to shake. Once one knows they can never unknow, save for an increasingly likely case of dementia. Animals fuck. Humans are animals. Humans fuck, so why, then, is it shameful? “It didn’t become ‘sin’ till the knowledge-poison entered” (90). It wasn’t a sin until we had a word for it, until we weaponized language to oppress and shame and introduce “blood knowledge” (91) to the people. It is used against women, it is used against men too. Knowledge is a curse, we all know that. But then to acknowledge knowledge is a conundrum in and of itself– as D.H. says, “men nowadays do hate the idea of dualism” (91). If I didn’t know the word “know,” would I know anything? Or is that part of it all? One “knows” how to breathe before they know what a breath is, but they do not know that they are doing it. Doing is another thing in and of itself. Americans are always “doing” (91), he says. Doing and toiling and wasting our lives for some promise of Capitalism based on words Jesus never really said. We never wanted knowledge, maybe we were never meant to evolve so much. Maybe that’s why men hate women, because Eve acquired knowledge when the snake tricked her into biting the apple, they place blame on us because now we know too much. “The sensation of knowing, knowing, knowing” (93) is a drug more powerful than orgasm, but once you know you cannot unknow. You cannot unfeel, and once you put a word to that feeling, you cannot unknow that feeling. Inherently, we know ourselves. Our blood vessels work to pump life into our mind, our veins work unrelentingly to move the blood throughout us, without which there would be no brain, there would be no thinking, there would be no knowing. But our bodies would work regardless, as the dragonfly’s does, as the baby’s does, as Eve’s did before she bit the apple. “The mind is ashamed of the blood” (92). It all comes back to sex, doesn’t it? It’s the only way we can continue, and yet it is what is most stigmatized. We are ashamed of what we cannot control. The wanting, yearning, feeling that the blood rushing around inside of you prompts is incomprehensible to the knowledgeable mind. We are turned on by our biggest nightmares. Blood is rushing and there is no way to control it. Men go to war, and there they fuck other men simply to satisfy the blood. The mind is ashamed. The mind is ashamed because this is the one thing that knowledge cannot explain. We fell into knowledge as we might fall into each other, onto each other, within each other. Torture and pleasure are such similar feelings. D. H. Lawrence knows this, he knows it intrinsically. But what are torture and pleasure? What, even, is blood? We put these words on things to try to understand. Understanding is the work of the devil.