If the encounter between Ursula and Birkin in Women in Love, when they are in front of an inn fire and waiting for their tea to be brought, is barely comprehensible, it seems to me that it is not comprehensible at all without some knowledge of Lawrence's interest in body or nerve centres. Although he had first been made aware of these in 1917, his Fantasia of the Unconscious, in which they are so important, was not published until 1921; but in the intervening period they had remained a prominent part of this thinking (as Women in Love illustrates). They figure significantly, for example, in the essays on the great American writers which he began composing while he was still in Cornwall and eventually published as Studies in Classic American Literature. Alternately profound and eccentric, these essays concern figures such as Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville and Poe but perhaps the most personally important to Lawrence was Whitman whose influence on him stretches back well beyond the war years. It was after all Whitman who had helped him to throw off the shackles of regular verse forms (which he rarely handled well), and to adopt free verse in his poetry; but he was also well known as the poet of manly love, the love of comrades. Lawrence's essay on him went through several stages but in one of these, written in 1919, his concern with body centres is very much in evidence. One of Whitman's weaknesses, Lawrence claims, is that he concentrated too much on the out-going and sympathetic chakras in the front of the upper torso, always wanting to find his reality in ‘Allness or infinitude’ and merge with the outside world. Yet there are of course two kinds of merging: one in which what is other is incorporated into the self, and its obverse in which there is the ‘ecstasy of acute physical passing away … in a self-loss keen and delirious as death or sheer delight’. The problem with the latter is that ‘a man cannot endlessly merge into all things without endlessly departing from his own integral self ’. Lawrence appears to find a model for thinking about relations with what is other, and with other people especially, in electricity.