Nobody's Perfect: The Case of Sam Harris

It's hard not to love Sam Harris. He may lack the louche charm of the late Christopher Hitchens, but he's an attractive man nevertheless; super-smart and good-looking in a Ben Stilleresque manner. And, like Hitchens, he's courageous enough to openly challenge religious stupidity in all its forms (including the most violent).

But nobody's perfect: not even Sam Harris. And some of his views - particularly those in relation to parapsychology, mysticism and the so-called wisdom of the East - leave me troubled and disappointed.

It's a shame that despite all the excellent work in The End of Faith mapping out the future of reason and insulting believers, Harris continues to write of spiritual needs and to argue that our highest purpose as human beings is to come to terms with the sacred dimension of existence on an intuitive (but rational) basis.  

This seems to mean not only admitting that there are transformative experiences that transcend "the ordinary limits of our subjectivity", but accepting that such experiences are empirically significant "in that they uncover genuine facts about the world" [40]. And, wouldn't you know, these also happen to be moral facts that (in part at least) help to make happy.

In effect, Harris wants to combine scientific skepticism with an openness of mind that accepts the reality of psychic phenomena and the claims of mystics concerning ideas of reincarnation, for example, as spiritual truths worthy of serious investigation: "It is time we realized that we need not ... renounce all forms of spirituality or mysticism to be on good terms with reason." [43]

Which is, of course, just another way of saying: I want to have my cake and eat it.

A philosophy graduate from Stanford with a Ph.D.  in neuroscience, Harris just can't help being a bit spooky when it comes to the question of consciousness and taking a pop at those scientists who believe that the latter is wholly dependent on the workings of the brain. Such materialism, says Harris, is merely another kind of faith position; a conviction for which there is no conclusive evidence.

Mind, suggests Harris, may be a rudimentary phenomenon that exists beyond "living creatures and their brains" [209]; one which can only be explored directly through sustained introspection - i.e., via meditation and other spiritual practices, including prayer and fasting.

Aware that such ascetic idealism may strike many of his readers as a "confusing eruption of speculative philosophy" [214], Harris claims such a response to be an unfortunate consequence of Western ignorance. We might understand theoretical physics, but we are conceptually unequipped to understand the spiritually advanced and more sophisticated claims of "the great philosopher mystics of the East" [215].

Further, we're too tied to our thoughts to ever experience true consciousness which transcends its contents, or grasp the roiling mystery of the world, that is non-conceptual but not inconceivable to those initiates who have woken up to the fact that "mysticism is a rational enterprise" and that the human mind has a natural propensity for spirituality [221].           

Oh, Sam!


See: Sam Harris, The End of Faith, (The Free Press, 2006). Page references in the text are to this edition.

In Memory of The Woman Who Rode Away

Kate Millett famously condemns 'The Woman Who Rode Away' as an insane pornographic fantasy - which, in some ways, it is.

But even if there's something a little lurid and misogynistic about it at times, we can do without the kind of psycho-sexual analysis which suggests that all Lawrence's writing is animated by an unconscious element of voyeurism and sado-masochistic relish.

Charges such as this ignore the fact that, in Mexico, Lawrence discovered a religious sensibility which threatened to extinguish all that he was too. And so the tale is not merely about the drugging and murder of a desperate housewife in search of adventure. Rather, it makes a sacrifice of white-faced modernity itself, even as it mocks the romantic idealism of those renegades who turn against their own race, culture, and historical experience and seek out an impossible return to the primitive.

Of course, as one critic points out, it's never easy to "disentangle the patterns of primitive religious ritual ... from those of the kind of sexual titillation which depends on the dehumanization of its object".* But we're obliged as readers of Lawrence to at least try ...

At the heart of all religious practice and belief - I'd suggest - lies an almost fetishistic obsession with death. This becomes most apparent in sacrificial rites which are not only often elaborate, but extraordinarily cruel in character and designed to reveal the flesh, to mark the flesh, and, ultimately, to consume the flesh. 

And, let’s be clear, when I speak of the consumption of the flesh, I mean this literally; human sacrifice very often involves cannibalism. If the victim isn't quite viewed as butchers' meat, nevertheless he or she is frequently feasted upon. 

Now, whilst we may find the desire to cannibalise one another completely alien, it's worth remembering that even the Christian communion involves the eating of flesh and drinking of blood: Christ is sacrificed and ritually consumed by his followers. Indeed, the conquistadors, who provided many of the accounts we have of Aztec practices, were both thrilled and horrified to note how such a savage and cruel religion presented many points of analogy to the doctrine and ritual of their own faith.

The key, however, to all acts of sacrifice, is that they allow us as mortal or discontinuous beings to experience a sense of life's inhuman never-endingness; that is to say, via the death of an individual, the continuity of existence is confirmed. Christianity is fundamentally mistaken not in sacrificing its central protagonist, but in denying us the pleasure of this death.

One of the things Lawrence does in 'The Woman Who Rode Away', is give readers license to imaginatively exercise in good conscience those drives which direct us towards carnal pleasure, including the forbidden pleasure of anthropophagy. 

So, yes, it’s true that the woman who rode away is abused and victimized - and yes it's disingenuous to speak of her having submitted voluntarily to the above - but any sensational aspects should not obscure the story's religious dimension; in fact, they fully belong to it. Further, it should be remembered that within pagan religious culture the fatal element within eroticism was acutely felt and fully justified linking sex with sacrifice.
 
Thus, rather than try to disguise our discomfort as readers or mistakenly call for censorship, we should accept it. Anguish is one of the great religious feelings and has always accompanied human sacrifice. Bataille reminds us that within Aztec society anyone who couldn't bear to see victims being led to their deaths and allowed their anguish to collapse into pity, would be subject to punishments. Young and old alike were expected to stare death in the face and to share in the tragedy and horror of life.

In sum: I understand (and share) feminist concerns with works that portray women being raped, tortured, murdered or, in this case, ritually sacrificed - but isn’t it refreshing to think that female blood can also have redemptive power?

Besides, whilst the woman who rode away is passive in comparison to the priest who actively wields the knife, the latter too ultimately loses himself in the ritual (just as in the act of love). The ritual of sacrifice destroys the self-contained character of all participants (just as coition leaves both parties fucked). In a crucial passage, Bataille writes:

"In sacrifice, the victim is divested not only of clothes but of life … the victim dies and the spectators share in what [her] death reveals. This is what religious historians call the element of sacredness. This sacredness is the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature's discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one.”

The woman who rode away seeks this oneness; she is tired of living out of touch. In death, she achieves her freedom and fulfilment and she shares this with those who witness her death. Only a violent death which is carried out as a solemn and collective religious act has the power to allow men and women to experience immortality and live the life of the stars and the gods.

Or, as Bataille puts it, "divine continuity is linked with the transgression of the law on which the order of discontinuous beings is built" - namely, the commandment not to kill. Human sacrifice brings life and death into harmony, opening the former onto the latter whilst simultaneously transforming the latter into something paradoxically vital.

But this is not, of course, an argument for dusting off the obsidian knife and even Lawrence, thankfully, rejects violent, authoritarian theocratic culture at last and questions those writers who remain obsessed with the transgression of limits and only palpitate to thoughts of murder, suicide and rape ...  


See:

Georges Bataille, Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood, (Penguin Books, 2001).

D. H. Lawrence, The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995). *Note: The Penguin edition of this text (1996) has an introduction by Neil Reeve and he's the critic I'm quoting here.

On Orgasm and the Will to Merger (Another Thanatological Fragment)

Man can find his individual isolation or discontinuity hard to bear. Thus he often seeks primal unity, or a return to universal oneness. But this will to merger is, of course, a sign of fatigue and decadence; a thinly disguised longing for oblivion.

Lawrence is clear: "The central law of all organic life is that each organism is intrinsically isolate and single in itself". When this is no longer the case - when individual singularity breaks down - death results.

And yet love, of course, is a vital attraction that brings things together into touch ...

This obliges us, therefore, to admit the relationship between Eros and Thanatos and acknowledge that the French description of orgasm as la petite mort is not merely a metaphor.

As Nick Land writes:

"Orgasm provisionally substitutes for death, fending off the impetus toward terminal oblivion, but only by infiltrating death into the silent core of vitality … The little death is not merely a simulacrum or sublimation of a big one … but a corruption that leaves the bilateral architecture of life and death in tatters, a communication and a slippage which violates the immaculate [otherness] of darkness."

When we come, we open ourselves onto this otherness and to the possibility of personal annihilation; losing identity in a spasm and an exchange of shared slime.

Despite the primary law that dictates singularity, the greater truth is that we need one another and we need love. Thus the secondary law of all organic life - according to Lawrence - is that "each organism only lives through … contact with other life". 

Of course, if we go too far in this direction, then love is no longer vivifying, but destructive and deadly. Men might live by love, but so too do they die, or cause death, if they love too much or allow their love to become infected with idealism.

Lawrence values coition precisely because it is a coming-close-to-death, but not a form of merger; a meeting but not a mixing of separate blood-streams. There is no real union during sexual intercourse and, once the crisis is over, the discontinuity of each party remains intact.

But such intimacy brings us to the very point of fusion and leaves us changed, or wounded by the experience (which is why love is often poignant, painful, and transformative all at the same time).

Orgasm gives us a clue regarding the return to the actual and the deep communion that awaits us. It is, as Bataille says, a betrayal of life as something individual and distinct.

Thus, ultimately, the truth of eroticism is ... treason.

See:

Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992).

D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed.  Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Note: this is a revised extract from a paper presented at Treadwell's on 28 Feb, 2006 as part of a lecture series entitled Thanatology. Those interested in reading related thanatological fragments can click here and here.

Amorous Ruin (Or Why Nick Land Makes Bad Boyfriend Material) #TBT

In the name of Love, the amorous subject is prepared to burn himself up to the point of destruction within that exhausting wound like a madman for whom duration has no meaning. If we are blessed with enough courage and good fortune, he says, then the object of our desire is the one most likely to destroy us.  

For the terrible truth is that we have no real happiness except that of ruinous expenditure. What makes blissful is to betray the world of utility, the world of work, the world of self-preservation:

"Erotic passion has no tolerance for health, not even bare survival. It is for this reason that love is the ultimate illness and crime. Nothing is more incompatible with the welfare of the human species."

This is certainly the case when love is unrequited:

"One wastes away; expending health and finances in orgies of narcosis, breaking down one’s labour-power to the point of destruction, pouring one's every thought into an abyss of consuming indifference. At the end of such a trajectory lies the final breakage of health, ruinous poverty, madness and suicide."

But it can also be the case even when love is returned:

"There are times when the morbid horror of love infects the beloved, or one is oneself infected by the passion of another, or two strains of love collide, so that both spiral together into a helix of strangely suspended disintegration … Each competes to be destroyed by the other … to exceed the other in mad vulnerability. When propelled by an extremity of impatience this can lead to suicide …" 

Or murder.

Of course, it has to be admitted that neither outcome is common; most lovers seek security within the confines of bourgeois marriage and "conspire to protect each other from the lethal destiny of their passion … relapsing into the wretched sanity of mutual affection".

But, asks Nick Land, isn’t it the case that a love that doesn’t end tragically is always at some basic level disappointed ...?

See: Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992), pp. 189-90. 

Note: this is a revised extract from a paper presented at Treadwell's on 28 Feb, 2006 as part of a lecture series entitled Thanatology. Those interested in reading a related thanatological fragment should click here. 

Splashback (An Exchange of Views on Urine Therapy)

Following a recent post on undinism and the value of sentiment within a post-Romantic world [click here], I received the following email from someone describing himself as an alternative-thinking Lawrentian:

"Thank you for a fascinating piece. Around fifteen years ago, I became a vegan and started to think seriously about questions concerning nutrition and well-being. I was eventually introduced by a friend to urine therapy and have since gained a significant insight into this particular subject.
      Might you not publish a future post that discusses the amazingly beneficial properties of urine? I believe your readers would benefit greatly if they were to discover how pee is good for hair, skin, eyes, nose, throat and ears and can be used to treat all manner of minor cuts, bruises, and stings thanks to its practical healing powers. There's nothing magical about this - it' simply that urine is rich in nutrients which the body has been unable to absorb.
      Finally, can I just add that your pee is only as good as your diet; I wouldn't recommend meat-eaters, sugar-addicts, or consumers of salty junk food to practice urine therapy. The pee produced mid-flow by a healthy, clean-living, organic vegan is ideal - rather lovely tasting, in fact, and it makes a marvellous mouthwash (don't worry either about getting it on your face and hands, as it makes a perfect moisturiser)." 

Now, as anyone familiar with this blog will know, this is the kind of tosh that I'm increasingly impatient with. Not only do I think it nonsense, I also think it potentially dangerous nonsense; when, for example, such alternative therapies are not only used to (ineffectually) treat minor ailments, but are also promoted as ancient and natural miracle cures for serious conditions including cancer.

And so, politely, I replied to my correspondent, explaining that whilst I was perfectly happy for him to gargle with piss each morning, I didn't share his beliefs and wouldn't be writing a post promoting urotherapy anytime soon. This brought forth the following:

"May I say how disappointed I am with your ignorant rejection of urine therapy, which betrays prejudice and puritanism on your part. I fear you have swallowed one too many conventional lies and simply don't understand.

      Remember, a large and unscrupulous element in the pharmaceutical industry don't want you to be self-reliant and to treat yourself. It's bad for their business. They, and those involved in cruel and unreliable animal research, will do anything to rubbish vitally important alternative therapies and it's only too easy for them to find skeptics like you who will sneer and try to trash uropathy. But before you say something insulting, I would ask you, as one Lawrentian to another, to consider his hostility towards modern medical science and mainstream thinking."

Ok - let's consider Lawrence's position ... It's true that he subscribed to all kinds of crackpot ideas himself and spent a lifetime ignoring the advice of doctors. But it's also true that Lawrence keenly differentiated between bodily flows which, whilst complimentary, are nevertheless utterly different in direction.

Thus, for Lawrence, there are vital forces and creative libidinal flows and, in stark contrast, excrementory functions that result in flows of waste toward dissolution:

"In really healthy human being the distinction between the two is instant [and] our profoundest instincts are perhaps instincts of opposition between the two flows.
      But in the degraded human being the deep instincts have gone dead, and then the two flows become identical. This is the secret of really vulgar people and pornography: the sex flow and the excrement flow is the same thing to them."

This is why Lawrence was vehemently opposed to coprophilia and urophilia (or hardsports and watersports) and why he would also, I believe, have had little interest in coprophagy or urophagia (shit-eating and piss-drinking) - whatever the supposedly therapeutic benefits of the latter.


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Lines quoted are on p. 242. 

Note that whilst my correspondent requested anonymity, he kindly gave me permission to quote from his emails, thereby presenting his side of the argument in his own words, for the purposes of writing this post. 

Having said that, readers are reminded that all characters portrayed in this post are fictitious: no identification with actual persons outside of the text should be inferred. For a further and fuller disclaimer click here.

Sons and Killers

A still from the death-bed scene in Sons and Lovers (dir. Jack Cardiff, 1960)
Dean Stockwell as Paul Morel and Wendy Hiller as his mother, Gertrude 

One of the key scenes in Lawrence's Sons and Lovers is the death of the mother, Gertrude Morel, due to an overdose of morphia administered by her son, Paul (in complicity with his sister, Annie).

This termination of a terminal condition by Paul - his mother has cancer and is suffering acutely - is little discussed in the critical literature, leading one to surmise that euthanasia remains a more problematic and uncomfortable subject even than incest.

It's arguable, however, that whilst Lawrence proclaimed himself a priest of love, he's as devoted to Thanatos as to Eros and as death-intrigued as he is sex-obsessed. Indeed, there are times when Lawrence seems to value death as a limit-experience, far more than fucking. And so I think we're justified in exploring the tragic scene in chapter 14 closely and without reserve.  

It's difficult to do so, however, without referring to Lawrence's own experiences, as loath as I am to read fiction as a disguised form of autobiography and to seek extra-textual support for literary analysis. For Lawrence, like Paul, had a fatal role to play in the mercy killing of his own mother, who, like Mrs Morel, was dying a painful death with cancer.

Doubtless both Lawrence and Paul experienced the same sense of helplessness and horror that many people feel when obliged to watch over loved ones in pain or distress; it's not easy, it's not pleasant, and it's not edifying. Most will secretly wish that the burden of providing palliative care is lifted sooner rather than later. Some will be tempted to bestow the gift of a good and gentle death.

But only a very few will have the courage to actually do what needs to be done and risk not only a lifetime of grief and guilt, but criminal prosecution for murder. For there are times when death doesn't always set quite so free as hoped and as promised by the chapter's title, 'The Release'.

Thus I admire and respect Lawrence/Paul for being generous with the morphine in the milk and for understanding that there are times when one best expresses fidelity to life's promise not by preserving it at all costs and under all circumstances, but by killing those who are incapable of either living or dying with an affirmative will; i.e., those who linger on, afraid to die, but effectively already dead-in-life, feeding off of the vitality of those around them.

Euthanasia - like suicide - is, at it's best, not only a practice of joy before death, it's also the active negation of the negative; a form of counter-nihilism. Ultimately, we must all learn to remove the grey hairs off our jackets and let them go up the chimney (even those of our mothers).


Notes   

D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron, (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

For an excellent essay on this topic see Claudia Rosenhan, 'Euthanasia in Sons and Lovers and D. H. Lawrence's Metaphysic of Life', in the D. H. Lawrence Review, 2003/04, Vol. 32/33. 

See also the related post on Torpedo the Ark: In Praise of Euthanasia as a Practice of Joy before Death. 

In Praise of Euthanasia as a Practice of Joy before Death

Thanatos: god of death tattoo, by L4ndX

deviantart.com 

There are, apparently, over 850,000 people in the UK diagnosed with some form of dementia, including my mother. An ill-fated consequence of an ever-ageing population, this terminal condition is now the leading cause of death in elderly women.

According to the pressure group Care Not Killing, everything that can be done to extend the life of the individual should be done and whilst promoting more and better palliative care on the one hand, they campaign with conviction against euthanasia and/or assisted suicide, hoping to influence both public opinion on this issue and the opinion of the law makers.

To be fair, they do have arguments as well as moral concerns and some of these are perfectly valid and legitimate. But, ultimately, these arguments fail to persuade and I don't share their position. Nor indeed do I accept their narrow definition of euthanasia as the intentional killing a person whose life is felt not to be worth living.     

This definition not only robs the term of its gay and affirmative element which is clearly present in the original Greek, εὐθανασία, meaning a good or happy death, but it deliberately - and I think cynically - echoes the phrase Lebensunwerte Leben by which the Nazis designated sections of the population whom they judged fit for destruction.   

One of the regrettable things about National Socialism is that it continues to cast a dark and ominous shadow over several ideas - including euthanasia - that would otherwise be open for rational debate and calm philosophical reflection. 

If the Nazis hadn't spoken so callously of useless eaters and hadn't tied their thinking in this area to a genocidal machine, then perhaps those of us who, like the great English empiricist Francis Bacon, regard euthanasia not merely as a pragmatic measure in the face of pain and suffering, but also an ethical practice of joy before death, would be able to speak freely and not have to sit in silence as assorted humanists, healthcare providers, and faith-based busybodies lecture us about the sanctity of life. 

On Piss Play and the Revaluation of Values

Mario Tauzin (c. 1930)

I recently read that English sexologist and social reformer Havelock Ellis was impotent until the age of sixty when, to his surprise, he discovered he could be aroused by the charming sight of a woman pissing. 

He was so delighted with this discovery, that he gave his own perverse pleasure the scientific-sounding name of undinism and, after the death of his wife, the openly lesbian writer and feminist, Edith Lees, Ellis formed a relationship with a French woman, Françoise Lafitte, who, apparently, was more than happy to indulge her man's penchant for watersports.

Today, undinism is more usually known as urophilia or urolagnia. Either way, it refers to an erotic fascination with urine and watching someone piss, or, indeed, having them piss on you and perhaps consent to be pissed on in turn. Like most paraphilias, there are many variations on a basic idea. Some like the sight, some like the sound, some like the smell of urine. And some even like the taste. 

Other illicit lovers find something joyous and liberating in the thought of an amorous object with a particular propensity to pee. To paraphrase Roland Barthes and thereby allow a little queer sentimentalism into the text: 

By releasing the contents her bladder without constraint, hers is a body in liquid expansion, a body showered in gold. To wee together, to play together, to come together, is to rediscover the innocence of early childhood.

Autogynephilia (The D. H. Lawrence Birthday Post 2016)

Garry Shead: The Dancing Lesson

There's been a significant amount of discussion around the question of D. H. Lawrence's sexuality.

Unfortunately, most of it has been conducted in boring, restrictive and ultimately untenable binary terms. And so, despite all the heat generated, there's not been much light shed on the subject. Frequent accusations of misogyny, homophobia, and phallocentrism haven't helped matters either.       

Not that these accusations are entirely unjustified. With reference to the latter charge, for example, it's true that Lawrence privileges, fetishizes, and wants to be penetrated by the phallus. But what's most interesting - to me at least - is that he expresses a genderqueer desire in his final novel to be penetrated as a woman, not as a man. 

In other words, Lawrence shows signs of anatomic autogynephilia and is clearly excited by the thought of having a female body so that he might experience vaginal as well as anal penetration. He doesn't want to be Mellors, he wants to be Connie and in Lady Chatterley's Lover he is able to intimately describe a woman's lusts, fears, and hopes not because he was in some ways a bit womanly or had a feminine eye for fashion and rugged gamekeepers, but because he's unafraid of exploring an eonistic fantasy of sexo-aesthetic inversion, regardless of the ridicule or opprobrium this would inevitably result in.

This makes him not only a courageous and transgressive writer, but also one who still has something to say to us today - after the orgy - in a transsexual age of gender fluidity and gender flux. Lawrence, it seems, the kinky crossdreamer, wasn't as committed to essentialism as many critics believe; he often uses terms such as 'male' and 'female' metaphorically and knows very well how these things are constructed, stylised, and performed.   


Notes

Autogynephilia is a term coined by the sexologist Ray Blanchard, to refer to "a man's paraphilic tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman". See 'The concept of autogynephilia and the typology of male gender dysphoria', in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 177 (10): 616–623 (1989).

Eonism is a term coined by the sexologist Havelock Ellis, which he derived from the name of the 18thC French spy and diplomat, Chevalier d'Éon, who claimed to be a woman in a male body and spent the second half of his life dressed in female clothing. For Ellis, eonism is an extreme form of mimetic identification by the male with the admired object (woman) on what may be a neurotic basis. See Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Volume VII: Eonism and Other Supplementary Studies (1928).

Picture at the Top of the Stairs

Perhaps not surprisingly, my mother doesn't remember where, when, or even why she came into possession of the above print by 20thC French landscape painter Georges Robin. All she knows is that she's had it since her early married days - perhaps it was even a wedding gift - and that it has hung on the landing for over sixty years.

As a painting, with its lovely soft colours, it has a simple charm I suppose. But as an object that has hung on the wall at the top of the stairs for my entire life, I loathe it. For, like Lawrence, whilst I'm perfectly happy to regard pictures as a crucial element of interior decoration, I have a problem with "some mediocre thing left over from the past, that hangs on the wall just because we've got it, and it must go somewhere".

And, like Lawrence, I do think it necessary to destroy old things that rob a home of freshness. Spring cleaning isn't enough; it takes more than a good dust and polish to stop a home feeling stale and oppressive. We must actively renew the household, just as we must freshen up our wardrobe from time to time. For a home, says Lawrence, is only a greater garment subject to changing fashions.

Of course, it's not only fashions that change - we change too "in the slow metamorphosis of time" and our homes should reflect this fact; changing as we change. Some things - beds, wardrobes and other items of heavy furniture - might last us for decades, but decorative items, including wall pictures as well as cushions and curtains, should change far more frequently; for it is inevitable that these objects will begin to become stale after a couple of years.

This is particularly important for people who, like the English, spend so much time indoors; "our interiors must live, must change, must have their seasons of fading and renewing, must come alive to fit the new moods, the new sensations, the new selves that come to pass in us with the changing years", writes Lawrence.

He continues: "Dead and dull permanency in the home, dreary sameness, is a form of inertia ... very harmful to the modern nature, which is in a state of flux, sensitive to its surroundings far more than we really know."

And pictures - be they original paintings, prints, posters, or photographs - "are in some way the key to the atmosphere of a room". Leave up drab images and it really doesn't matter how gay the colour of your curtains. The only solution is to burn them - frames and all!  

Having said that, I don't, of course, have the heart to take down the only picture my mother has ever owned; something that must have fascinated and delighted her as a young woman starting married life in a home of her own.

And besides, even dead things can still give a posthumous sentimental pleasure - something which Lawrence undervalues I think, subscribing as he does to a form of inflammatory aesthetic vitalism in which the living moment is everything and nostalgia counts for nothing. 


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Pictures on the Wall', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Ours is Essentially a Tragic Age ...

The opening passage of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, which more or less establishes Connie's precarious position at the beginning of the book, is one of the great opening passages in twentieth-century literature: 

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."

What I love most about this passage is the insouciant refusal to take an essentially tragic age tragically, thereby paradoxically rendering the essential inessential and denying the need to be determined by that which masquerades as fundamentally determining, or absolute necessity.

There might be blood on the floor, implies the narrator, but there's no use crying over it any more than spilled milk: the cataclysm has happened - get over it and move on  - no matter how many skies have fallen.

In other words, like Nietzsche when faced with the death of God and the problem of modern nihilism, the narrator displays not only admirable courage, but also a certain ironic intelligence that laughs in the face of earnest stupidity (not so much transforming tragedy into comedy, but recognising that the drama of human existence is born in the space between them).

Further, when confronted with the way in which an established order can rapidly become chaotic and disintegrate at every point, there's no call for reterritorialization along old lines, or a nostalgic longing for past wholeness; new little habitats and new little hopes are the key - and this, too, I greatly admire.
                 
As much as I love this passage, however, I can appreciate that some readers might have problems with certain aspects of it - not least of all with the presence of a phantom narrator who despite being outside of events is nevertheless a privileged spectator to them; not to mention a narrator who, from the get go, cheerfully deploys a possessive pronoun, thereby implicating us all in the fictional affair that is about to unfold.   
 
The narrator's presumption that readers inhabit the same moral and spatio-temporal universe as the lovers, is a way of homogenizing the text (and shaping interpretations of the text), as well as soliciting sympathy for Connie and Mellors; their position is our position; their feelings are our feelings; their sins are our sins.

Not everyone is comfortable with such complicity, or happy with the attempt to ensure consensus. As readers, we've got to live and that means - as Lawrence himself knew, anticipating the postmodern aesthetic - trusting the tale and not slavishly obeying the author or agreeing with their (often unreliable, sometimes manipulative) textual proxy, the narrator.                

See: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

They Don't Shoot White Women Like Me ...

Photo by Alex Klavens: 

Protestor at a Black Lives Matter event

Boston, MA (4 Dec 2014)

Someone I used to know back in the day has recently got in touch after a thirty year hiatus in our friendship, during which time she's been married and divorced, raised a brat and battled cancer, whilst, it seems, all the time holding true to the radical ideals of social justice and equality that shaped her youth. Indeed, she tells me that she has been re-energized politically by Jeremy Corbyn.   

In the distant, punky-reggae past she was involved in all kind of things, including Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Apartheid Movement. I don't know who she loved more; Joe Strummer, whom she wanted to fuck; or Nelson Mandela, whom she wanted to free. 

And today, it's still black issues that seem to exercise her most - even though she is herself lily-white and from a privileged, privately educated background. She forgets, I suspect, that this was one of the things that originally caused friction between us, as I grew increasingly impatient with her and those like her who - to paraphrase Jello Biafra - play ethnicky jazz to parade their snazz on their five grand stereos / bragging that they know how the ghettos feel cold and the slums have so much soul. 

I don't know why she does this. I think in part she genuinely cares about the issues and the people she champions. But I suspect she's also trying to enhance her own reputation and self-esteem. Whatever the reason, it irritated me then and it irritates me now, so I won't be renewing our friendship ...

As for black lives ... well, yes, of course, Black Lives Matter. But they matter more to her than to me.

And, without getting all Rod Liddle about this - or playing a game of diversionary tactics - I do wonder if the focus of such a campaign shouldn't be on crime, drug use, gang culture, etc. rather than institutionalised white racism and police brutality. 

The latter are doubtless realities that need to be addressed; as do issues of poverty and poor education. But to deliberately whip up anger and resentment whilst turning a blind eye to the involvement of young black men in the former activities, isn't helpful and isn't honest.      


Note: The lyric I'm quoting (from memory and with slight revision) by Jello Biafra is from Holiday in Cambodia (1980), by the great American punk band the Dead Kennedys: click here to play on YouTube.    

Generation Snowflake

Photo: Getty Images / Uppercut

It's never nice (and probably not even very helpful) to negatively characterize a generation. And I'm particularly sensitive to the fact that when it's members of my generation negatively characterizing a younger generation, it's often born of bitterness and betrays a certain envy.

For whereas we were the future once, now it belongs to the millennials and their future is ever-absorbing our present and spitting it out as a past that, far from deserving respect or admiration, needs to be apologised for: 

OMG! Don't you realise how inappropriate that is? Check your privilege!    

Having said that, it's very hard for those of us who were shaped by an age of confrontation and provocation - who relished the opportunity to offend and incite controversy - not to despise members of Generation Snowflake; a subset of young people, typically students with an acute sense of their own entitlement, who call for the establishment of safe spaces in which to avoid hearing or discussing ideas that might distress them, or conflict with their own politically and morally correct worldview. 

I don't doubt their generational fragility, or believe them to be feigning hurt. It's their obvious sincerity, indeed, which I find most most troubling. For, as Oscar Wilde once warned, whilst a little sincerity is a dangerous thing, too much can prove fatal ...