I'm Pretty Vacant - But I'm Not Sure I Belong to the Blank Generation

Virgin Records (1977)

I.

I remember listening to a run down of the charts in the summer of 1977; anxiously waiting to press record on my cassette player when Pretty Vacant by the Sex Pistols finally blasted out and hoping against hope that Tony Blackburn wouldn't ruin things by inanely talking over the greatest ever intro to a pop song; an intro that, if you like, consummated my love affair with punk.

Released on July 1st, Pretty Vacant was the band's third single and, unlike God Save the Queen, you could actually listen to it on the radio, despite Rotten's aggressive phrasing of the term vacant, sung repeatedly in the chorus with a strong emphasis on the second syllable. Indeed, you could even watch the official promo video, directed by Mike Mansfield, on Top of the Pops.


II.

According to Malcolm, Pretty Vacant was written at his instigation and directly inspired by Richard Hell's Blank Generation (which was itself a punk re-imagining of Bob McFadden's and Rod McKuen's 1959 single The Beat Generation).

Just as Rotten - by Hell's own admission - pushed the nihilistic persona that he'd originally developed in a more extreme direction, so is Pretty Vacant a far more provocative kettle of fish than its American counterpart. The latter is clever and vaguely amusing, but it lacks something in comparison. One can imagine Steve Jones hearing Blank Generation and crying out for it to be given some bollocks.

Perhaps the difference (and, for me, the problem) is that Hell allows himself the option of opting out of his own lifestyle - he can take it or leave it - but the Sex Pistols have no choice but to affirm the beauty of their own emptiness without caring what anyone thinks of this.

Is it a class thing, a cultural thing, or something else? Interestingly, Hell has spoken about the chauvinism of British punks who would sneer at the American bands and insist on the UK origins of the movement.

Whatever it is, there's something crucially different between the two songs. When one listens to Blank Generation one feels that one is listening to Hell's private vision or personal experience; it's basically a poem set to music. Pretty Vacant, by comparison, is a call to arms that genuinely articulates the feelings of a generation. And, whilst there's humour in both songs, it's more crudely sarcastic than cleverly ironic in the latter.

Ultimately, you don't need to have read Blake, Rimbaud and Burroughs to understand the Sex Pistols; you just need a mistrust of hippies, an eye for fashion, and an instinct for chaos. 

Play:

Pretty Vacant by the Sex Pistols: click here. 

Blank Generation by Richard Hell and the Voidoids: click here. 

They Eat Donkeys Don't They?

A box of donkey-hide gelatine from the 1960s 

Photo: George Knowles / South China Morning Post  

I. Meat is Murder - and So is Traditional Chinese Medicine

I suppose most people are aware of the Chinese practice of grinding up tiger bones and rhinoceros horns in the belief that these things have magico-medicinal properties and can help relieve numerous chronic ailments, cure disease, boost vitality and improve potency.

And I suppose most people are also aware that these crackpot claims lie behind an illegal international trade in body parts from critically endangered species; there are now less than 4000 tigers in the wild and only around 30,000 rhinos.    

But how many people, I wonder, are aware of the fact that the Chinese are also responsible for the dramatic decline in donkey numbers, both domestically and abroad? Twenty years ago, China had around 11 million donkeys; now the figure is less than 6 million.

As we will discuss, this, too, is mostly due to the mania for traditional medicine, although the fact that the citizens of the People's Republic of China also like to chow down on donkey meat - including so-called donkey burgers in which chopped or shredded meat is placed within a warm flatbread, known as a shaobing, and seasoned either with green pepper or coriander - is an added factor. 

II. How Eeyore is Turned into Ejiao 

Ejiao - or, as it is known in English, donkey-hide gelatine - is obtained from the skin of a donkey via a process of drying, soaking and stewing.

What was once believed to be a humble blood tonic, has successfully been re-branded as miracle product and marketed at China's expanding middle class. As well as being found in a wide variety of medicinal goods, ejiao also features in foodstuffs and expensive beauty products; for ejiao is said to not only make you feel better - but look better.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the ejiao industry has now become a global mega-business, with Dong-E E-Jiao, the world’s largest producer, reporting sales of £700 million in 2016.

But there's a problem: according to the ejiao industry's own figures, they process around 4 million donkeys each year, producing 5000 tonnes of gelatine. As domestic supply is capped at less than half this figure - 1.8 million, to be precise - it means manufacturers have to find an extra 2.2 million donkeys elsewhere and are thus heavily reliant upon imported skins often purchased from illicit supply networks at over-inflated prices and an unsustainable rate.

The shortage of genuine Chinese donkey hide has not only sent the cost of raw material through the roof, but it has encouraged the poor in Africa into (literally) selling their asses in order to cash in, undermining the long-term stability of rural economies.    

Whilst I'm vaguely sympathetic towards these people being exploited by Sino-capitalism, it's mostly the poor donkeys I feel sorry for; malnourished and mistreated during their short lives, they are then brutally killed and butchered in the unregulated slaughterhouses that can be found popping-up all over Africa, Asia and South America. 

As for the Chinese, who keep the ejiao industry grinding on ... one is almost tempted to share Morrissey's assessment of them - though, ultimately, aren't carnophallogocentrism and cruelty defining characteristics of humanity? 


Notes

For a related post on cruelty towards donkeys and the politics of zoosadism in Pakistan, click here. 

For an earlier post on Chairman Mao and the swindle of traditional Chinese medicine, click here. 

Anyone interested in doing something to help donkeys, should visit the website of The Donkey Sanctuary: click here. 

Donkey Punch: On the Politics of Zoosadism

Photo: ACF Animal Rescue 

According to the author and journalist Fatima Bhutto, it makes little real difference who wins the election held today in Pakistan amidst predictable violence and claims of widespread vote-rigging. 

It is, she says, the nation's supreme tragedy "that such a young, hopeful, promising people are offered this glut of shoddy candidates", all eagerly playing their role in a political circus - including the ex-cricketer turned sinister clown, Imran Khan, peddling a morally flexible manifesto and relying upon the support of the powerful military establishment. 

Khan's mixture of militancy and misogyny is shocking and depressing enough. But most shocking and depressing of all is the following tale of animal cruelty reported by Ms Bhutto ...

On 17 July, Karachi-based supporters of Khan's political party - the PTI  - tied a donkey to a pole: 

"They punched its face till its jaw broke, ripped open its nostrils, and drove a car into its body, leaving the animal to collapse, having been beaten to within an inch of his life. Before they left, they wrote 'Nawaz' (the name of the former prime minister) into its flesh, seemingly inspired by their leader, Imran Khan, who has taunted [his opponents in the PML-N] as ghaddhay or donkeys. The donkey was rescued by the ACF Animal Rescue team, a private organisation, who noted that, even days later, it could not stand up on its own because of the ferocity of its torture. It soon succumbed to its injuries, an innocent creature beaten to death for entertainment."

As if that wasn't horrifying enough:

"A day later, another donkey in Karachi was mercilessly attacked, this time the skin on its face was ripped off, the flesh on its forehead torn apart till all that remained between its eyes was a pulpy, bloody hole."

What, really, is one supposed to make of such disgusting acts of cruelty?

Bhutto worries that it is yet one more sign of the horror to come in her homeland. And maybe she's right: for zoosadism is one of those behaviours often considered a precursor to psychopathic violence; i.e., research indicates that madmen who can cheerfully punch a donkey in the face, are far more likely to punch their fellow man in the back of the head.

See: Fatima Bhutto, 'Imran Khan is only a player in the circus run by Pakistan's military', The Guardian, (24 July, 2018): click here to read online. 

Thanks to Afiya Zia for bringing the above article to my attention. 

Notes on A Glam-Punk Childhood

20th century boy (c. 1973)

I. 

1977 - the year of punk - may have been of crucial importance in shaping my tastes, attitudes, and ideas, but it certainly wasn't the beginning of my long love affair with pop culture. 

Thus, whilst the first album I ever bought may have been Never Mind the Bollocks, I'd been buying singles since 1971, when Benny Hill released Ernie (the Fastest Milkman in the West), an innuendo-laden comedy song that was the Christmas number one that year and which has remained a much-loved favourite with many of those who remember it, including former prime minister David Cameron.  

The second single I remember spending my pocket money on was Crazy Horses, by the Osmonds, which reached number two in the UK charts in the autumn of 1972 and proved that even clean-living Mormons can rock out. Looking back, it's clear that the song was ahead of its time with its concerns to do with the environment and fume-spewing motor vehicles smoking up the sky. But even back then, I hated cars and knew that - like my father - I never wanted to drive.

It was the following year however - the year of glam - that I really started buying singles on a regular basis; by Slade, by Sweet, and - of course - by Gary Glitter, whom I adored and had a large poster of on my bedroom wall. I spent many, many happy hours stomping around in my older sister's platform boots and singing along to the smash hits released by the above in that golden year of 1973, including: Cum on Feel the Noize, Blockbuster, Ballroom Blitz, Do You Wanna Touch Me, Hello Hello I'm Back Again, I'm the Leader of the Gang (I Am), and I Love You Love Me Love.           

What was it about these artists and their songs that appealed so powerfully to the ten year old child (and, if I'm honest, still appeal even now) ...?


II.

Obviously, the outrageous clothes, make-up and hairstyles caught my eye and I was seduced also by the camp nature of their performance - even if I had no idea then what campness was. But, mostly, it was the music: loud, fast, tribal and ridiculously catchy - making you want to pogo up and down years before Sid Vicious was credited with inventing the dance.

There was also something distinctly British and working class about glam. Perhaps it was the fact that it didn't take itself too seriously; that, like punk, it seemed to be more in the theatrical tradition of music hall and even pantomime, rather than serious rock with its roots in rhythm and blues. It was about dressing up and messing up and having a laugh - not perfecting one's skills as a musician or soulful songwriter.

As "Whispering" Bob Harris sneered after a performance of Jet Boy by the New York Dolls on the Old Grey Whistle Test in November 1973, it was mock rock - sexy, stylish, superficial, and shiny - not something that real music lovers and old hippies such as himself needed to take seriously (the Dolls, of course, formed the bridge between glam and punk - as the fact that they were briefly managed by Malcolm McLaren in 1975, prior to his involvement with the Sex Pistols, perfectly illustrates).


III.

Those cunts who now sneer with politico-moral correctness and a sense of their own cultural superiority at the music, the fashions, the TV, and pretty much every other aspect of life in the 1970s need to be told (or in some cases reminded) that it was more than alright - it was better. 

Or, at any rate, despite all the boredom, blackouts and bullshit of the time, people were happier and I'm pleased to have been born (and to have remained at heart) a 20th century boy.    

Reflections on Cat Cognition and Feline Intelligence

Black cat looking out of window 
Stephen Alexander (2018)

I.

I don't have a cat: but I like cats. And I particularly like the friendly black cat who comes to visit - even after the Little Greek accidently trod on his paw.

Sometimes he sits in the garden; sometimes he prefers to stretch out on the back porch, sharpening his claws on the doormat. But he also likes to nose around the house and rub himself against the furniture. This morning, he jumped on the windowsill and stood staring out of the window.

I don't know what caught his attention and I don't really know what he thinks of things - or me for that matter. But, clearly, he's exercising an intelligence of some kind as he familiarises himself with a strange environment and interacts with new people, learning how to exploit and manipulate both.  

II.

Apparently, the brain of the average domestic moggie is just about large enough in size for cats to qualify as big brained animals - though of course, this doesn't necessarily mean they are intelligent; for whilst a correlation has been shown between these things, correlation does not mean causation.

However, thanks to behavioural observation, I think we can take it as a given that cats are smart - they dream, they scheme, they solve problems and they play. And even when told that dogs have twice as many neurons as cats, I refuse to accept that mutts are twice as intelligent. For whilst dogs can be vicious, only cats are sophisticated enough to derive pleasure from cruelty. Give a dog a bone and it's perfectly happy; but a cat only really gets excited at the thought of live prey.       

Apparently, cats also have excellent memories. Indeed, one of the reasons that stray cats adapt so well to extremely demanding urban environments is because they are able to retain and recall information and learn from past experience. They have also memorized their hunting and survival skills - unlike dogs, that have become almost completely dependent upon their human masters.

Ultimately, it's because cats have retained their indifference, mistrust, and contempt of man that they have also kept their savage beauty and seductive mystery across the millennia. They live alongside us, but have never really been domesticated; they have, as anthrozoologist Dr John Bradshaw says, three out of four paws still firmly planted in the wild and can easily revert within only a few generations back to the independent way of life enjoyed by their ancestors 10,000 years ago.


III.

Finally - and perhaps most interestingly of all - it's clear from extensive research that dogs pereceive us as different (superior) beings. They don't behave around us as they behave around other dogs and they know they live in our world. 

But cats, however, seem to regard people merely as bigger, clumsier versions of themselves and have thus not bothered to adapt their social behaviour; they act towards us in a manner that is indistinguishable from how they would act towards others of their kind.

Essentially, for cats there is only one world - and its theirs.

See: John Bradshaw, Cat Sense, (Basic Books, 2013). 

Diversity: What Would Nietzsche Think?

Image: Scotty Hendricks (2018)  

bigthink.com

I.

The word diversity is frequently used today, particularly by those who regard it as a value and like to signal their politico-moral correctness even if that means denigrating or disprivileging their own people, culture and history.

In order to illustrate this latter point, one might refer to the recent case of students at the University of Manchester who painted over a mural of a poem by Rudyard Kipling and replaced it with a verse by the African-American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou.

This was done in the name of anti-racism - for Kipling, a well-known British imperialist, was said to dehumanise people of colour - and in order to celebrate the diversity of a student body looking to reclaim history by - quite literally - whitewashing it.            

I don't here wish to discuss the merits (or otherwise) of either Kipling's or Maya Angelou's work; nor do I want to express my concerns about historical revisionism and literary censorship. But I would like to say something further about diversity and the idea of multiculturalism, from a post-Nietzschean perspective ...


II.

If confronted with a world in which everyone was retreating to their own safe space from which to assert an identity (on the basis, for example, of sex, gender, race or religion) whilst, at the same time, speaking about the benefits of ever-greater diversity within society and culture, I suspect that Nietzsche would feel himself compelled as a philosopher to argue that greatness belongs only to the individual or the people who find a way to stylise chaos and give birth to a dancing star - the latter being a sign of unity within diversity.

Nietzsche loves words like difference, plurality and multiplicity; he thinks of the will to power as composed of a large number of competing forces, flows, and desires. But - and this is important to understand - he doesn't affirm diversity as a good in itself nor as a goal to be aimed at.

On the contrary, Nietzsche insists that culture, for example, has to be unified; that the only alternative to such is a civilization based upon a barbarism of styles and tastes and incapable of ever producing art or sovereign individuals. Nietzsche opposes the systematic anarchy, the aggressive philistinism, and the Volkerchaos that characterise European modernity and are the symptoms of culture's extermination.

Thus, whilst he may have announced the death of God and thereby decentered and demoralised the world, he still believes in shared ethical bonds between people. His nihilism is not the same as the nihilism of those who devote themselves to free markets and money-making, or to the neo-Platonic fantasies of science and technology; those who lack the ability to act under the constraint of a single taste or - as Heidegger would say - to dwell poetically upon the earth.


III.

Deleuze is right to say that, for Nietzsche, history can be read as the process by which "reactive forces take possession of culture or divert its course in their favour". That the will to diversity can therefore be understood as part of an ongoing slave revolt in morals and the overcoding of active forces by the modern State - that coldest of all cold monsters that thrives at the expense of culture and sucks the life out of people in the name of human rights and globalism.

Nietzsche is aggressively opposed to all this and when faced with the ways in which societies become decodified and unregulated, makes no attempt at recodification. But, again, we must be careful here. For whilst Nietzsche makes no attempt to recodify along old lines or patch the holes ripped in the great social umbrella, he very much wants to bring together newly liberated forces onto what Deleuze terms a plane of consistency and regain mastery over the chaos that has been released.

Why? Because for Nietzsche culture is above all unity of style in all the expressions of a people and this requires harmonious manifoldness - not fake diversity built upon idiotic identity politics and an ugly jumble of all styles and peoples. Multiculturalism is not just a failed experiment, it's an absurd fallacy.

Of course Nietzsche's thinking has anti-democratic and illiberal implications - and he wasn't shy about saying so. But I would suggest we need to urgently think about these questions and not simply attempt to close down conversation by calling anyone who does so a fascist or a supporter of the alt-right. 


Notes

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, (The Athlone Press, 1992), p. 139.

D. H. Lawrence: Priest of Kink

Ooh, he was awful - but I like him!

In a famous letter written to Sallie Hopkin on Christmas Day, 1912, Lawrence insists that once you know what love can be, then - even if the skies have fallen - "there's no disappointment anymore, and no despair". He then announces that his future task as a writer will involve "sticking up for the love between man and woman".

And, in the years and books that followed, he did indeed posit heterosexual coition as central to his erotics and defend what he called in his late work phallic marriage, i.e., marriage founded upon complimentary gender opposition, the seasonal and sacred rhythm of each calendar year, and a penis that only ever ejaculates inside a vagina.  

However, despite his own sexual politics forever oscillating between the romantic and the reactionary, Lawrence's work also provides us with an explicit A-Z of perversions, paraphilias and fetishistic behaviours, obliging readers to think about subjects including adultery, anal sex, autogynephilia, cross-dressing, dendrophilia, female orgasm, floraphilia, gang rape, garment fetishism, homosexuality, lesbianism, masturbation, naked wrestling, objectum-sexuality, podophilia, pornography, psychosexual infantalism, sadomasochism, and zoophilia.       

One is almost tempted to suggest that Lawrence was, in fact, a priest of kink ...

See: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 492-3. 

See also Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, (Oxford University Press, 1991). I am very much in agreement with Dollimore when he writes that there is a perverse dynamic at work within Lawrence's text and that he audaciously eroticises (and queers) Western metaphysics. Certainly, Lawrence is far more than a prophet of heterosexual experience conceived in a conventional manner and ultimately he deconstructs his own phallogocentrism; thus his continued importance and interest as a writer. 

The Broken Heart Knows No Country

A short guide to D. H. Lawrence country

by Bridget Pugh (Nottinghamshire 

Local History Council, 1972)

I. The View from Walker Street

In a letter to Rolf Gardiner written in December 1926, Lawrence provides a fairly detailed description of the East Midlands landscape in which he grew up; the so-called country of his heart - a phrase much loved by those who would forever tie Lawrence to Eastwood and fix his work within a literary tradition of English Romanticism.  

It is, for me - as for all those who prefer to think of Lawrence as a perverse European modernist, writing after Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud rather than Byron, Shelley and Keats - another of those deeply unfortunate expressions.

Like his self-description as a priest of love, I really wish he'd never said it. But, say it he did. And so let's examine this phrase and see if we can interepret it in a manner that doesn't serve a depressingly provincial purpose - as if the view from Walker Street was the only one that shaped Lawrence's perspective upon the world.

II. The Savage Pilgrimage

As is clear from much of his writing - particularly his letters - one of Lawrence's driving obsessions was to stage an angry engagement with England, whilst also making good his escape from the place of his birth in all its perceived dullness. 

His savage pilgrimage is usually said to begin after the War and refer to a period of voluntary exile. And whilst it's true and important to recall the fact that Lawrence left Britain at the earliest practical opportunity - only returning for brief visits, the last of which was in 1926 - I think we find this schizonomadic desire to flee from the suffocating familiarity of home from the start.

The fact is, Lawrence always hated Eastwood and couldn't wait to get away - first to Nottingham, then to London and to Cornwall, before drifting with Frieda around Europe, America and Australia. In 1913, he once confessed as much to his sister Ada, telling her that he should be glad if the town were one day blown off the face of the earth. 

We shouldn't forget that nostalgia is a type of disease - not a sign of health - and that if Lawrence occasionally displayed symptoms of homesickness he was essentially sick of home: 

"It always depresses me to come to my native district. Now I am turned forty, and have been more or less a wanderer for nearly twenty years, I feel more alien, perhaps, in my home place than anywhere else in the world. I can feel at ease in ... Rome or Paris or Munich or even London. But in Nottingham Road, [Eastwood], I feel at once a devouring nostalgia and an infinite repulsion."

That's the Lawrence I admire: refusing to belong to any community or region; a singular individual who is no longer their Bert - and probably never was.

And as for the heart to which memories of childhood landscapes are said to belong, well, like Lawrence, I would prefer for it to be broken rather than preserved in formaldehyde; for it's wonderfully liberating to abandon the past and to find new things to treasure, new people and places to love, within the dawn-kaleidoscopic loveliness of the crack.

See: 

D. H. Lawrence, letter to Rolf Gardiner, 3 Dec. 1926, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V. March 1924 - March 1927, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

D. H. Lawrence, [Return to Bestwood], Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 15. 

Punk bonus: Stiff Little Fingers: Gotta Gettaway (Rough Trade, 1979): I'm sure this is how the young Lawrence felt (it's certainly how I felt at 16): click here to play on YouTube.

In Memory of Hypatia

Rachel Weisz as Hypatia in the 2009 film  

Agora (dir. Alejandro Amenábar)

I. Hypatia: The Spirit of Plato and the Body of Aphrodite

Whether we choose to think of her romantically as the last of the Hellenes, or as the first early-medieval woman to be murdered for practising the pagan arts of science, mathematics, and philosophy (things regarded as suspiciously close to heresy and to witchcraft within the Christian imagination), Hypatia was an astonishing figure; virtuous, tolerant, and highly intelligent. Whilst no ancient depictions of her have survived, she was also said by Damascius to be exceedingly beautiful and fair of form.


II. Hypatia: From Philosophical Martyr to Feminist Icon 

Born in 4th century Alexandria, Hypatia was a prominent Neoplatonist and renowned teacher, who, in her later life, advised the Roman prefect Orestes, who was then feuding with the anti-Semitic Christian bishop of Alexandria, Cyril.

This would prove to be fatal: for - as we shall discuss in more detail below - Hypatia was accused by Cyril's supporters of deliberately sowing discord and preventing any reconciliation between the latter and Orestes. In March 415, she was murdered by a brotherhood of fanatic monks known as the parabalani, under Cyril's command.

The particularly brutal nature of her death - Hypatia was flayed alive by the monks who scraped the flesh from her bones using razor sharp oyster shells - caused shock waves throughout Byzantium and she was honoured, like Socrates, as a martyr by her fellow philosophers who became increasingly dismayed by the moral fanaticism that characterised early Christianity.

Many centuries later, Hypatia was celebrated as an embodiment of reason and freedom of thought; Voltaire declaring her to be a universal genius. In the 20th century, she was also regarded as a feminist icon; Judy Chicago giving her a prominent place at the triangular table in her famous installation The Dinner Party (1974-79).

And still, today, in the 21st century, Hypatia's life continues to fascinate many scholars, writers, and artists. Most recently, for example, we were treated to the 2009 film, Agora, directed by Alejandro Amenábar and starring Rachel Weisz. Despite its numerous historical inaccuracies, the film should be commended for identifying religious fundamentalism as the great curse or blemish upon mankind, then as now.     


III. Hypatia Versus the Crucified

When Cyril succeeded his uncle, Theophilus, as the bishop of Alexandria, it was obvious there was trouble ahead for Hypatia. For whilst Theophilus was strongly opposed to Neoplatonism, he was prepared to tolerate Hypatia, whom he admired. But not so Cyril - a man happy to persecute his enemies and put his prejudices into practice. In 414, for example, he closed all the synagogues in Alexandria and confiscated all property belonging to the Jews before expelling them from the city.

This action appalled Orestes and he sent a scathing report to the emperor. The conflict between these two men quickly escalated and the parabalani made an attempt on the life of the Roman prefect who, as noted, frequently consulted Hypatia for advice - much to Cyril's irritation. Thus, despite her universal popularity, Cyril set out to discredit Hypatia and undermine her reputation; he alleged, for example, that she had engaged in occultism and beguiled people through her Satanic wiles.       

Things came to a bloody head when, during the Christian period of Lent, the parabalani attacked Hypatia's carriage as she was travelling home. She was dragged into a nearby church, stripped, tortured, and killed. Not only was she flayed alive, as previously mentioned, but her body was dismembered and the limbs burnt.

So much, then, for the religion of Love ... Hypatia's vain hope that Neoplatonism and Christianity might peacefully coexist and cooperate was now seen as an impossibility by philosophers, who now regarded the followers of Jesus with contempt and proudly emphasised the noble Greek origins of their ideas.

As Nietzsche would say, the battle lines were drawn: Dionysus versus the Crucified ...      

D. H. Lawrence: The Hammer of Love

19th-century wooden poacher's priest

Image: Country Home Antiques

In a letter written to Sallie Hopkin on Christmas Day, 1912, Lawrence declared: I shall always be a priest of love.  

This self-description has proved very popular with his devotees and has served as the title for a critically acclaimed biography of the author by Harry T. Moore and a film of his life, based on Moore's biography, produced and directed by Christopher Miles. Personally, however, I have always rather regretted the phrase and the way in which it's been interpreted by those who insist on viewing Lawrence's work as a type of moral idealism - which, let's be clear, it isn't.       

For whilst Lawrence may have had a beard and been steeped in the language of the Bible, he wasn't a Christian and his understanding of love is radically different from the Love of Christ founded upon self-denial and self-sacrifice and invariably leading us to the Cross.

For Lawrence, this ideal model of love should be regarded as a disease that turns a healthy process of the human soul into something malignant. Altruistic values of pity and equality, which lie at the heart of Christian teaching - and the secular humanism that has grown out of such - are anathema to Lawrence; he believes that such ideals have to be abandoned, allowing us to know one another, as Richard Somers tells Kangaroo, at a deeper level than love.

When the latter lies dying in a hospital bed and insists that there is nothing more essential or greater than love, Somers silently refuses to agree. Not because love isn't an important part of life, but because it is only a part and can never become an "exclusive force or mystery of living inspiration". There is always something else. And this something else is power: that which love hates.   

To argue for love as an absolute - something universal and unbroken, binding all things into Oneness - results ultimately (and ironically) with a recoil into hate and war. Thus, whereas for Freud all that doesn't conform with Eros is permeated with a death instinct, for Lawrence - as for Nietzsche - it is Love with a capital 'L' that expresses a nihilistic will to negate life's difference and becoming.

Those who think that love is all you need fail to understand that you can, in fact, have too much of a good thing. It's because love cannot recognise limits that it ends in tears if allowed to progress too far; men cause or accept death not because they love too little, but too much, says Lawrence. It's important to always remember that above the gates of Hell - and every concentration camp - is a sign that reads: Built in the name of Love.

In sum: Lawrence didn't love Love or posit even his own rather queer model of Eros as his highest ideal, even if he declared himself to be a priest of such.

Indeed, we might even interrogate this term: for is it not possible that Lawrence - who had a penchant for gamekeepers and a familiarity with the tools of their trade - was punning on the word priest and thinking of himself not as a religious figure, but as a blunt instrument who would hammer home his own philosophy and knock the great lie of Love on the head once and for all ...?   

See:

D. H. Lawrence, Letters, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 492-3.

D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 134.

George is Getting Upset! (Notes on Illeism)

There are doubtless reasons why some people refer to themselves in the third person. But outside of books, where it's sometimes used as a literary device, I'm not sure there's ever a good reason to do so. For it makes the speaker sound (at best) like an idiot; or, more worryingly, like someone with mental health issues (a sign perhaps of dissociative identity disorder).

Thus, whilst not encouraging anyone to use 'I' other than sparingly and ironically, I would strongly advise those who frequently practise third person self-referral without embarrassment or any comic intent, to reconsider - unless, that is, they don't mind being thought to have a borderline personality (like Donald Trump, for example, who frequently refers to himself in the third person).

Having said that, I'm told by someone who understands more about this subject than I do, that some individuals find speaking in the third person helps improve their self-esteem, better manage their thoughts and feelings, and successfully navigate their way through complex or stressful social situations.

In other words, a little psychological distancing from oneself (and one's anxieties) can be a very positive thing. Stephen didn't know that - but it seems to be common knowledge within certain Eastern religions, including Hinduism and Buddhism, where it's viewed as a sign not of madness, but enlightenment. Jnana yoga practitioners, for example, are actively encouraged to refer to themselves in the third person; for wisdom, it is said, results from the mind's transcendence of ego.    

Waxing Philosophical on Insincerity

Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

azquotes.com

As a writer, one lives more in fear of being taken seriously than being thought superficial and fraudulent. Thus, like Wilde, one greatly values insincerity ...

If sincerity is the ideal virtue of speaking clearly in accordance with one's true feelings and genuine beliefs, then insincerity is the demonic gift of speaking in tongues and a method for multiplying our personalities and proliferating perspectives.

Insincerity is, therefore, one of the crucial components of art, which, of necessity, is an impure and unhealthy practice; that is to say, a form of decadence that is the very opposite of sincerus. And yet, there are surprisingly many writers who deny this and defend sincerity in all spheres, including artistic sincerity.

Orwell, for example - whom we might regard as the the anti-Wilde - argued that insincerity gives rise to muddled thinking and that this in turn has pernicious (sometimes fatal) political consequences. He condemns writers who seek to disguise their real thoughts and authentic selves by using complex metaphorical language and long words, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.          

But as Nietzsche pointed out, plain speaking Englishmen are the least philosophical creatures on earth and hardly deserve even to be considered as artists, lacking as they do the imagination to lie and the immoral playfulness of those who delight in wearing masks.  

The problem, ultimately, is that sincerity requires perfect knowledge of self - and that isn't possible; not even for philosophers, who remain (of necessity) strangers to themselves just like the rest of us. It's because - as Nietzsche says - Jeder ist sich selbst der Fernste that we remain beings born of insincerity ...

Notes

The line from Nietzsche that reads in English 'everyone is furthest from himself' is found in the 'Preface' to On the Genealogy of Morality. See p. 3 of the Cambridge University Press edition, 1994, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson and trans. Carol Diethe. 

For a sister post to this one on the ethics of ambiguity, click here.   

On the Ethics of Ambiguity

Jastrow's ambiguous figure of the duck-rabbit made famous by 

Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), II, §xi

As a writer, one lives more in fear of being understood than misunderstood. Thus, like Nietzsche, one greatly values ambiguity ...

Ambiguity enables one to appear transpositional and to create an open text in which meaning is always subject to interpretation and, ultimately, deferral; i.e., it allows one to have it not only both ways, but all ways and no way.

(I suppose that's why criminal defence lawyers also like ambiguity. Only prosecutors hoping for a conviction or judges looking to pass sentence, worry about certainty and establishing the facts of a case beyond a reasonable doubt.)    

It's naive, of course, to think that meaning can ever be fully determined; for language is never innocent. Not only does it lack transparency, but ambiguity is built into every word. If grammar is the presence of God within language, then ambiguity is the devil hiding behind every sentence.

 

Thus it is that man - a being who dwells within language - is the ambiguous animal par excellence. Even if we faithfully dot our i's and cross our t's, our relationship to the world, to others, and to ourselves is never straightforward.

Sartre famously follows Heidegger here and, interestingly, Simone de Beauvoir attempts to base an entire ethics on ambiguity, arguing that we need to accept the latter and, indeed, learn to love our fate: 

"Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us, therefore, try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting."

Ethics, she goes on to say, cannot be based on the mathematical certainty of science and the attempt to think the world and ourselves in such clear and absolute terms invariably leads to fascism and to genocide. It's not grey uncertainty but black-and-white conviction that should trouble us.

Thus we should learn to love those philosophers who privilege the dangerous perhaps; for it expresses not only vagueness concerning the present, but future possibility - which is why, of course, ambiguity is also the basis of creativity.       

Notes:

Joseph Jastrow's duck-rabbit (or, if you prefer, rabbit-duck) illustration originally appeared in 'The Mind's Eye', Popular Science Monthly, Issue 54, (1899), pp. 299-312.

Simone de Beauvoir's, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman, (Citadel Press, 1949), can be read online by clicking here.
 
Nietzsche speaks of Philosophen des gefährlichen Vielleicht in Beyond Good and Evil, Pt. 1. 2. 

For a sister post to this one waxing philosophical on insincerity, click here.

Reflections on the Death of Steve Ditko

Steve Ditko: self-portrait (1964)

The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1

steveditko.com

Regarded by many as a thinking man's Jack Kirby, American comic-book artist and co-creator of Spider-Man, Steve Ditko, has just been announced dead, aged 90. 

To be honest, I wasn't a great fan of his work; it was a little too weird for my rather conservative and conventional tastes as a child. But I'm perfectly happy to concede his genius to those who insist upon such and know better than I.

As always when someone dies, I can't help thinking about what happens to the corpse. The immortal soul of man conceived in spiritual-personal terms is of zero interest to me. But, as a thantologist, I'm fascinated by the body's shipwreck into the nauseous and the cosmo-molecular dispersal of atoms and their eventual recycling into all kinds of things, including new life forms.   

Interestingly, it just so happens that Ditko was an Objectivist (i.e., a devotee of Ayn Rand), so he would probably have agreed that there is no supernatural or spooky-mysterious aspect to death. There are physical processes and sub-atomic particles, but no heaven, no angels, and no life-after-death as theists conceive of it.

And to imagine that the mind might somehow transcend the demise and destruction of the body is just a ludicrous fantasy. Once your brain has liquidised and dribbled like snot out of your nose, you'll not be able to worry about it. In death, one does not exist; it's not the end of the world, but it is the end of the world for you ...

And so, after a long life of approximately 780,000 hours, Ditko's atoms are in the process of ending their happy affiliation and he's about to get a whole lot skinnier ...

Hurrah for the Horta! (Notes on the Possibility of Silicon Based Life)

The Horta: 'The Devil in the Dark'
Star Trek: The Original Series (S1/E25, 1967)

Image: startrek.com

I. C (6)

Carbon - as everybody knows - is the key component of terrestrial life and it's commonly assumed that, if there is life elsewhere in the universe, then it too will be carbon-based.

The reason for this, explains astronomer and popular science writer David Darling, "is not only carbon's ability to form a vast range of large, complicated molecules with itself and other elements, especially hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, but also its unique facility for maintaining the right balance of stability and flexibility in molecular transformations that underlie the dynamic complexity of life".

Nevertheless, this is an assumption and Darling concedes that we may - as carbon-based life-forms ourselves - suffer from what Carl Sagan termed carbon chauvinism; i.e., a form of prejudice that prevents us from seriously considering viable alternatives. And so, whilst it's true that scientists have yet to find anything in the chemistry of other elements that suggests they might be able to give rise to organic compounds, we shouldn't dismiss the idea out of hand.

Indeed, it seems to me perfectly legitimate to consider silicon, for example, as a possible basis of alien life. For not only is silicon a similar element to carbon, but it's also an important constituent of many living cells. In fact, silicon is the great white hope of many astrobiologists and science fiction writers who dream of strange and beautiful possibilities of being ...

II. Si (14)

People began speculating on the suitability of silicon as a basis for life at the end of the 19th century and they have continued to do so to the present day. In 1894, and drawing closely on the ideas of his time, H. G. Wells wrote:

"One is startled towards fantastic imaginings by such a suggestion: visions of silicon-aluminium organisms - why not silicon-aluminium men at once? - wandering through an atmosphere of gaseous sulphur, let us say, by the shores of a sea of liquid iron some thousand degrees or so above the temperature of a blast furnace."

Over sixty years later, American screen-writer Gene L. Coon conceived of a silicon-based entity called the Horta in an episode of Star Trek.

Basically a living rock, the Horta was both sentient and sensitive - a bit too touchy-feely for me, as a matter of fact - and moved through rock like a hot knife through butter, shitting bricks as it went, thereby solving one of the main problems that would face siliceous life (one of the flaws in silicon's biological credentials is that the oxidation of silicon yields solid waste material that would be difficult - to say the least - for a creature to excrete). 

Sadly, even if silicon has had a part to play in the origin of life, the astronomical evidence suggests it's unlikely we're going to be encountering any silicon-aluminium organisms, or mind-melding with Horta, in the near future. For as Darling notes:

"Wherever astronomers have looked - in meteorites, in comets, in the atmospheres of the giant planets, in the interstellar medium, and in the outer layers of cool stars - they have found molecules of oxidized silicon (silicon dioxide and silicates) but no substances such as silanes or silicones which might be the precursors of a silicon biochemistry."

See: 

David Darling, entry on carbon in his online encyclopedia of science: click here. 

David Darling, entry on silicone-based life in his online encyclopedia of science: click here. 

H. G. Wells, 'Another Basis for Life', Saturday Review, (December 22, 1894), p. 676.

Hollywood Tales: Notes on the Relationship between Kirk Douglas and John Wayne

John Wayne as Taw Jackson and Kirk Douglas as Lomax in

The War Wagon (dir. Burt Kennedy, 1967)

I.

Commenting on a recent post illustrated with a photo of Kirk Douglas playing Vincent van Gogh in the 1956 movie Lust for Life, someone wrote to ask if I was aware of John Wayne's homophobic - though somewhat touching - reaction to his friend taking on this role.

Well, as a matter of fact, I did know of this comical exchange between Wayne and Douglas, that the latter recounted thirty-odd years later in his memoir The Ragman's Son (1988) ...


II.

According to Douglas, Wayne attended a private screening of the film and was horrified:

"Christ, Kirk! How can you play a part like that? There's so few of us left. We've got to play strong, tough characters. Not those weak queers."

Somewhat taken aback - though more amused than angered or insulted - Douglas explained that, as an actor, he enjoyed taking on challenging roles, before adding: "It's all make-believe, John. It isn't real. You're not really John Wayne, you know."

It's an intriguing response that seems to suggest Douglas's relaxed attitude towards acting and the fact that he didn't take himself or his on-screen persona too seriously - nor that of others, including The Duke.

However, when playing the role of the emotionally intense Dutch painter, Douglas would later admit he came very close to losing his sense of professional detachment. In his autobiography, for example, he confessed:   

"I felt myself going over the line, into the skin of Van Gogh. Not only did I look like him, I was the same age he had been when he committed suicide. Sometimes I had to stop myself from reaching my hand up and touching my ear to find out if it was actually there. It was a frightening experience. That way lies madness . . . The memory makes me wince. I could never play him again.''

It should also be noted that whilst Douglas wasn't fooled by Wayne's hardman image, he nevertheless thought very highly (and very fondly) of him, describing Wayne as the perfect movie star who could get away with any line, no matter how corny, in any script, no matter how poor.

Not because he was an excellent actor, but because he had the courage to play every part in his own inimitable manner: "It wasn't John Wayne who served the roles; the roles served John Wayne."

Further - and slightly dispappointingly - Douglas expresses his preference for a John Wayne action movie, or any good, honest picture with balls, over more sophisticated art-house films. 

III.

At the end of his life, when lying in a hospital bed and dying of cancer, Wayne exchanged several mailgrams with Douglas. In one such, he jokes that he's been admitted to the hospital in order to have a cleft added to his chin so that he might look more like his friend, who replied:

"Dear John, Have you ever noticed that I never call you Duke? If I were going to use a title, it would be no less than King. Please get your ass back here soon. Love, Kirk."

It's not quite Brokeback Mountain, but it does reveal a delightful degree of playful tenderness between these two Hollywood tough guys. 

Note: Kirk Douglas and John Wayne worked together on several movies, including: In Harms Way (1965); Cast a Giant Shadow (1966); and The War Wagon (1967).   

See: Kirk Douglas, The Ragman's Son: An Autobiography, (Simon and Schuster, 1988).

Here's to the Crazy Ones: In Praise of Emotional Intensity

Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh

Lust for Life (1956)

Austrian-American psychoanalyst Ernest Hartmann was famously interested in what he termed boundaries of the mind - particularly those that determine the degree of separateness or connection between mental functions and processes and help shape distinct personality types.

According to Hartmann and his followers, emotionally intense individuals with less robust boundaries between themselves and the world, should be valued by society rather than derided as thin-skinned drama queens who confuse fantasy and reality and obsess over things of little or no interest to most people.

These complex and often uniquely gifted individuals - who are frequently misunderstood even by their family and friends - feel more powerfully, think more poetically, and have uncanny powers of perception rooted in a rich inner life. It's not surprising then, that so many of them become artists, philosophers, religious visionaries, or daydream believers.

If it's difficult for those of us not blessed (or cursed) with their abilities to fully understand or appreciate them, it's often just as difficult for these rare spirits to fully accept themselves and they can be subject to strongly negative emotions of self-doubt and self-loathing as well as positive states of euphoria. 

Sometimes, they can feel disoriented or acutely pained even by everyday experience and their proneness to psychological stress or anxiety can physically manifest itself in the form of migraines, asthma, panic attacks, hallucinations, or seizures. Thus, it isn't easy living in a state of heightened sensitivity or being possessed by dreams, desires, and demons.

Nor is it much fun being reminded on a daily basis that one is odd and needs to calm down, grow up, and get real. Often, even those who say they celebrate neurodiversity still treat emotional intensity as a disorder or form of psychopathology akin to bipolarism and borderline personality.

But, in the end, are we not all defective in some manner and to a greater or lesser degree? Indeed, isn't it our imperfections and failings that not only give rise to creativity and comedy, but make us human?

I wouldn't go so far as to say that sanity is merely a form of disguised madness, but I'd accept that irrational and impulsive behaviour is an important component of who we are and that sickness, perversity and passion often serve to advance culture.      

In sum: we need our décadents, as Nietzsche would say; though, as Paul Gauguin discovered, dealing with friends who are as handy with a razor as they are with a paintbrush, isn't always easy ...

See:

Ernest Hartmann, Boundaries in the Mind: A New Psychology of Personality, (Basic Books, 1991).

Ernest Hartmann, Boundaries: A New Way to Look at the World, (CIRCC EverPress, 2011).

Imi Lo, Emotional Sensitivity and Intensity, (Hodder and Stoughton, 2018).

Note that the author of the above work - who describes herself as a Specialist Psychotherapist and Arts Therapist who has trained in yoga and holistic health and practices in a manner that combines psychology with "other physical and spiritual healing modalities" - has a website devoted to Eggshell Therapy for those who identify as emotionally intense: click here.