The blindness of the seeing eye

For Lawrence the seeing eye is always blind. The seeing eye is fixated on conscious perception and forgets darker connection it assumes that everything that is, is visual. In Studies on Hysteria Freud refers to a form of vision which disavows the seen at moments of crisis, which he calls the blindness of the seeing eye. For Lawrence, then, the metaphysical split between, on the one hand, mind and sight and speech and on the other, dark, living blood, does not exist in a gender vacuum; the virtues of Darkness and the vices of visual consciousness are inevitably bound up with his thinking on gender and authentic sexuality. Too much power to the outer mental consciousness and mental lasciviousness destroys the very blood in our bodies. The blood-consciousness and the blood-passion are the very source and origin of the author's. They have to sink back into the darkness and the elemental consciousness of the blood.