Orwell Versus Dalí

You can tell a lot about a man by his moustache ...

I.

One of the things I like about Salvador Dalí is that, like Bataille, he really got under the skin of André Breton, who objected to his counter-revolutionary fascination (and flirtation) with fascism and his love of fame and fortune.

Another thing I like about Dalí, is that he also repulsed George Orwell; that talented mediocrity whom, as G. K. Chesterton rightly pointed out, is precisely the kind of person the English love best; a man of sound reason who speaks his mind in plain and simple language. 

We find this mixture of common sense and candour - not to mention splenetic moralism - in Orwell's essay Benefit of Clergy: a series of notes written on the great Spanish artist who had recently published his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942).

As we shall see, Orwell considered Dalí's text flagrantly dishonest, seemingly unable to grasp that it was a surreal and fictionalised version of his life, rather than an attempt to write a truthful and accurate account. Dalí was perverting the genre of autobiography and playing with language in a darkly humorous manner, just as he played with paint on canvas.

II.

Actually, to be fair to Orwell, he does seem to understand that Dalí's text has been "rearranged and romanticised" and is more a "record of fantasy" than a genuine autobiography - it's just that he doesn't like it. He thinks it's a narcissistic book and a form of exhibitionism: "a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight" - which is the worst kind of limelight there is in Orwell's homophobic imagination.

Its only value, says Orwell, is in revealing how far the "perversion of instinct" has gone within the modern world and he then lists several episodes from Dalí's life to illustrate this process of corruption: "Which of them are true and which are imaginary hardly matters: the point is that this is the kind of thing that Dali would have liked to do."

Well, maybe ... Or maybe it's the case that Dali writes these terrible things - like kicking his little sister in the head or throwing another young child off a bridge - not because they are what he secretly wanted to do, but so that he doesn't have to think of doing them any longer; maybe, as D. H. Lawrence suggests, we shed our sickness in books.   

Interestingly, Orwell places masturbation alongside animal cruelty on his spectrum of corruption, as if choking the chicken and biting a dead bat in half are one and the same thing. Two things, he says, stand out from Dalí's paintings and photographs: sexual perversity and necrophilia - "and there is a fairly well-marked excretory motif as well".

It's true, of course, that Dalí - again like Bataille - was pornographically fixated on heterogeneous matter and that one can find plenty of unpleasant and disturbing elements in his work: shit-stained underwear, decomposing corpses, dead donkeys, and mannequins with huge snails crawling all over them. But Orwell makes no attempt to ask why this might be and to examine the role of base materialism within Surrealism.

All he wants to do is hold his nose and look away and that's not what one expects of a critic - even a left-leaning critic to whom such things are simply signs of bourgeois decadence.   


III.

To his credit, however, Orwell does at this point in his essay spring something of a surprise on his readers by admitting that whilst Dalí is an antisocial flea who makes "a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and [human] decency", he is nevertheless "a draughtsman of very exceptional gifts". Orwell continues:

"Dalí is also, to judge by the minuteness and the sureness of his drawings, a very hard worker. He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud. He has fifty times more talent than most of the people who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paintings."

That, I think, is true. But it's admirable of Orwell to concede such of someone he clearly despises and in so doing differentiate himself from those reactionary philistines who "flatly refuse to see any merit in Dalí whatever" and are incapable of admitting that "what is morally degraded can be aesthetically right".

Orwell doesn't stop here though: he also takes a pop at those devotees of Dalí who refuse to hear a word said against him or his work. If you say to such people that Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman, "is a dirty little scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage. If you say that you don’t like rotting corpses, and that people who do like rotting corpses are mentally diseased, it is assumed that you lack the aesthetic sense."

Orwell concludes that this makes the question of obscenity almost impossible to discuss: "People are too frightened either of seeming to be shocked or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able to define the relationship between art and morals." It's unfortunate, says Orwell: for one ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously "the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other."


IV.

In effect, says Orwell, Dalí's defenders are claiming a kind of benefit of clergy. In other words, the artist is thought to be "exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people [...] So long as you can paint well enough [...] all shall be forgiven you".

Personally, I rather like this idea: as someone who doesn't subscribe to the equality of all souls and universal rights - who thinks that exceptional people with exceptional tastes and talents should be allowed a certain licence - it doesn't offend me in the manner it does Orwell. I don't think individuals of genius should be allowed to get away with blue murder or ought never to be questioned. But nor do I think they should be subject to the same petty morality of the slave. 


V.

In conclusion: I still dislike Orwell, but I agree with Jonathan Jones that his attempt in this essay on Dalí "to express the delicate possibility that art can be right and wrong, good and bad, a work of genius and a thing of shame", shows a certain courage and intellectual honesty on his part.

See:

Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, (Dial Press, 1942). 

George Orwell, Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali (1944): click here to read online. 

Jonathan Jones, 'Why George Orwell was right about Salvador Dalí', The Guardian (9 June 2009): click here to read online.

For another recent post on Dalí, click here.

The Surreal Resurrection of Salvador Dalí

Still from a promotional video for Dalí Lives (2019)

© Salvador Dali Museum, Inc., St. Petersburg, FL.

If someday I die, though it is unlikely, I hope the people will say: 'Dali is dead - but not entirely'.

I.

I have to admit: I've never been a great fan of Dalí.

Having said that, I did once make a trip to Figueres, his hometown, in order to visit the Dalí Theatre-Museum, that's famously topped with giant eggs.

And I do love the fact that the railway station at Perpignan, which Dalí declared to be the centre of the universe after experiencing a moment of cosmogonic epiphany there in 1963, has a large sign proclaiming the fact.  

What's more, Dalí is also responsible for inspiring the title of Serge Gainsbourg's infamous love song, having once declared: "Picasso is Spanish ... me too. Picasso is a genius ... me too. Picasso is a communist ... moi non plus."

So, whilst not a fan, there are elements of his work and aspects of the man and his life that I nevertheless greatly admire. Not least of all his attitude towards death: a biological fact that he refused to believe in. Indeed, in his final public appearance (until now), Dalí made a brief statement to the effect that, because of their vital import to humanity, a genius doesn't have the right to die. 

This idea amuses me and, as someone who - despite the evidence - doesn't quite accept their own death as a future certainty, I'm sympathetic to it. That is to say, whilst I understand it's a possibility - and, since my own father died, death could even be said to run in the family - I also think that, as a writer, as long as I still have something to say, then this affords me protection.


II.

Thirty years after his death, aged 84, in January 1989, Dalí is back - proving once more that Nietzsche was right to assert that some individuals are born posthumously and that the day after tomorrow belongs to them.  

I don't know how Jesus pulled off his final stunt, but Dalí has achieved his uncanny resurrection with the assistance of the curators at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, working in collaboration with the clever people at San Francisco ad agency Goodby Silverstein and Partners, using the very latest AI-based digital technology.

Visitors to the exhibit, which opens in April, will be able to interact with the artist via a series of screens, as well as enjoy the collection of his works. For those who can't wait or those who, like me, can't go, here's a taste of what can be experienced: click here.  

Thanks to Kosmo Vinyl for tipping me off about the exhibition and suggesting this post.

Übernatürlich: Jason DeMarte's Augmented Reality

Jason DeMarte: Invasive Apathy

(Photo Assemblage / Pigmented Ink Print, 2018)

I.

The idea of art as an innocent imitation of nature is, of course, a very old one. Indeed, despite everything that's happened during the last 150 years, there are people who still subscribe to this ancient Greek concept of mimesis.

Personally, however, I tend to agree with Nietzsche on this question and view art more as a metaphysical supplement to the reality of the natural world; one that transforms rather than merely represents the latter.

Art is thus a way of either enhancing or diminishing nature; perfecting or perverting reality. And the most interesting artists - artists like Jason DeMarte - understand the ambiguous character of this game; how nature can paradoxically appear more-than-natural and less-than-natural (even unnatural) at one and the same time.        

It's been said that DeMarte's cleverly composed works combining images of flora and fauna with artificial objects and sugary treats would make Mother Nature blush - though whether that would be with pride, passion, anger, embarrassment or shame, isn't clear. His playful yet sophisticated juxtapositions call into question the relationship of nature and culture and what it might mean for man to be translated back into the former, or to conceive of culture as a form of transfigured physis.  


II.

Unlike many visual artists, DeMarte has a clear conceptual insight into his own project, as can be seen from the following statement found on his website that he has very kindly granted me permission to reproduce here in full:


"I am interested in modern understandings of the natural world and how that compares to the way western society approaches its immediate consumer environment. It’s important for me to compare established idealist utopian ways of representing the landscape to the hyper-perfect way products and modern consumer life are represented in media. I’m particularly interested in the idea of disillusionment through false or misleading representation. I’m interested in creating photographs that merge simulated forms of life and colorful processed foodstuffs with idyllic pop material goods, in an effort to create a dialog of consumption, duplicity and homogenized ecstasy.

I work digitally combining images of fabricated and artificial flora and fauna with commercially produced and processed products. I look at how these seemingly unrelated and absurd groupings or composites begin to address attitudes and understandings of the contemporary experience. I represent the natural world through completely unnatural elements to speak metaphorically and symbolically of our mental separation from what is 'real' and compare and contrast this with the consumer world we surround ourselves with as a consequence. Ultimately this work is an investigation into the manipulation of truth.

My process draws from a long history of constructed narratives in photography, artist like Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Julia Margret Cameron, were early pioneers in manipulating truth with the medium, while later artists like Gregory Crewdson, Jeff Wall and Anthony Goicolea made the ordinary surreal with their highly choreographed stills. My process aims to simultaneously embrace a manipulation of truth by hyper exaggerating the ordinary and to also work within a kind of truth by utilizing the inherent believability of the photographic medium.

Like the early tableau photographers I draw inspiration from painting, specifically naturalist painting from movements like the Hudson River School. I’m interested in rekindling the romantic notions of nature while simultaneously subverting those romantic notions by juxtaposing pop consumption and visual gluttony."


III.

I find all of this fascinating: particularly his confession that at the heart of his project (or process as he calls it) is the question of truth - something which Nietzsche decouples from goodness and beauty and provocatively describes as that from which we would perish were it not for the skilful and deceptive reworking to which it is subjected by the artist.

Only art, says Nietzsche, has the power to make experience bearable by providing us with vital illusions. And for that we should be grateful ...  

Notes

Jason DeMarte's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums, both in the US and abroad, and featured in numerous journals, books, and other publications. He is currently represented by Rule Gallery in Denver Colorado and is part of the Photographers Showcase at Photo-Eye Gallery in Santa Fe. 

He is also an Associate Professor of Photography in the School of Art and Design at Eastern Michigan University and Assistant Professor of Photography in the College of Architecture, Art and design at Mississippi State University. 

Those interested in knowing more can visit his personal website by clicking here.

Nietzsche was preoccupied with the question of truth in relation to art throughout his writings. He does not reject the importance of the former as a will expressed in science, for example, but does question whether such might prove nihilistic and harmful to life. He proposes that the untruth of art might ultimately be more conducive to human wellbeing. The lines to which I refer above are found in The Will to Power, section 822, and The Gay Science, section 107.   

In Praise of Vintage Fashionistas (With Reference to the Case of Anastasiia Grigoruk)

Miss Anastasiia Grigoruk

Vintage fashion model

I.

Vintage fashion is an attempt to harvest the glamour of the past by wearing the clothes, accessories, hairstyles and makeup from a previous era, sometimes creating an entirely new look by mixing and matching styles and periods. Nietzsche might describe the latter chaos of styles as a form of barbarism, but as someone with a punk background this doesn't greatly trouble me.

That is to say, whilst I want people to invest care in their sartorial ensembles, I don't demand absolute authenticity and I'm happy to see non-vintage elements added, including retro designs that merely imitate the originals.  

II.

I'm particularly smitten with some of the vintage fashionistas who go to extraordinary lengths to create a stylish and sovereign model of agency and find a new mode of relating to contemporary reality and the passing of time; of capturing something of the eternal feminine that is not beyond the present but still immanent within it.

Those puritans who criticise these young women for being vacuous and conceited and sneer at their constant posting on social media, are simply not Greek enough to understand what their passion for artifice and things of the surface tells us.

Such moralists think it's just a silly game of dressing up and recycling appearances; a nostalgic exchange of real history for hopeless fantasy. But the revolt into vintage style, like other forms of dandyism, signifies something philosophically important; for it transgresses the principle of utility and seriousness to which the grey-beards would keep the world tied and affirms instead gay insouciance.

III.

What's more, to be successful within the terms set by such an elaborately mannered ethic requires admirable self-discipline; thus one might even suggest there's an element of stoicism within the world of vintage fashion. Again, the idea of building and maintaining a lifestyle is often derided, but people who think it's easy obviously haven’t tried it.

In order to become who she is, a girl like Anastasiia Grigoruk has to spend many long hours before her mirror and display an almost fetishistic obsession with the smallest of details. The adding of style to one's nature is much more demanding than accepting a pre-given way of being. It demands sustained activity and knowledge of what Foucault terms the arts of existence and techniques of self:

"those intentional and voluntary actions by which [individuals] not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria."


IV.

Finally, I'd like to close by commenting on the notion of community within the world of vintage fashion; for it strikes me that amongst those who devote themselves to such there's a good deal of shared kindness and mutual support. 

If, first and foremost, vintage fashionistas are driven by a will to create a singular existence, they nevertheless seem to instinctively understand: (i) this is not something that can be carried out in isolation - that giving birth to the dancing star of the self is not an experiment in solitude, but a true social practice; and (ii) that when a line of narcissistic flight collapses into the black hole of solipsism, this is a sign of failure. For being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with, as Heidegger says. 


See: Foucault, The History of Sexuality 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1992), pp. 10-11.

For a sister post to this one on the fabulous French vintage fashion model Miss Alba Banana, click here. 

The Queer Case of Barry Jeans (aka The Menace)

One of the most charismatic - and yet also least vital - characters in literature is Barry Jeans, aka The Menace: Daphne du Maurier's movie heart-throb: "someone with wide shoulders and no hips" who, like most tough guys, doesn't say much or betray any hint of emotion. Women around the world adored the little scar on the side of his temple "that suggested a brush with a rhino or a knife thrown in a Shanghai joint [...] But above all it was the mouth, firm and decisive above that square jaw with the cleft in the chin, which maddened millions".

Commentators often discuss his apparent asexuality: the fact that he felt no interest in making love to women - including his wife - and would never dream of making a pass at a beautiful broad. This becomes starkly evident when Barry is taken by his all-male entourage, known as the boys, to Poncho beach, in order to revive his libido. Unfortunately, not even a parade of naked teens or the young lovelies at the Silver Slipper can do the trick; all Barry can think about is having his porridge. 

But what many readers of the tale fail to pick up on is the reason for Barry's lack of interest in conventional pleasures of the flesh: the fact that he prefers to direct his tenderness towards objects rather than human beings, with a special fascination for cars and sail-boats. In other words, The Menace is an objectum sexual and once one has discovered the seductive charm of inanimate objects, then, as du Maurier writes: "It makes ordinary romance seem so trivial." 

Thus, it's not his lost love Pinkie and her rice puddling that rekindles Barry's fire and gets his Force rating up from a G to an A, it's the fact that, knowing his erotic penchant for furnishings as well as modes of transport, she takes him back to her apartment and "made him lie down on the settee in the living room and take his ease" [my italics].   

I'm reading this idiomatic expression as a euphemism for masturbate and I think the piece of newspaper she gives him "so that he did not spoil the new covers" is not intended to go under his feet. While she made him some breakfast in the kitchen, Barry stretched out his long legs and "settled himself more comfortably on the cushions".

Yes, he enjoys looking at Pinkie's photos of her family and reminiscing about the past. But it's the opportunity to romance the settee with her blessing (and perhaps even with her watching) that really moves and excites him: "'I can't tell you, Pinkie,' he said, 'what this has meant to me.'" Before leaving and giving her a perfunctory kiss goodbye, Barry washes (the semen off) his hands.

Obviously, this is a speculative and rather queer reading of the tale by du Maurier. But it's not, as we have seen, one without some textual support - and nor is it one I feel she'd be shocked by or unhappy with. 

Note: the image, by Chester Gould, is of Dick Tracy, but it's how I imagine The Menace would also look from du Maurier's description of him. 

See: Daphne du Maurier, 'The Menace', in The Breaking Point, (Virago Press, 2009), pp. 200-39. All lines quoted are from this edition. 

I have written several recent posts on tales from The Breaking Point - click here and here, for example. I have also written previously on objectum sexuality and encourage readers interested in this topic to click on the appropriate label.    

Toilettenphilosophie

"[There are] three different attitudes towards excremental excess: 

an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; 

a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way."

- Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (1997)

I.

Faced with a 48-hour (non-figurative) shitstorm, I've come to the conclusion that there's really nothing funny about anorectal dysfunction and that bowel incontinence is not only beyond the pale, but beyond a joke.

Scatological humour might solicit laughter, but I agree with Cindy LaCom that this laughter is always rather hollow and "limited in its power to diminish public shame around the biological fact of shit".

Indeed, we might think of such gross-out comedy as a nervous defence mechanism designed to reduce anxiety and distance ourselves from the grim - often disgusting - reality of bodies subject to chaotic violence (bodies that have lost all integrity and self-control).     


II.

If the obscene is a loss of perspective that renders aesthetic judgement impossible, then horror might be defined as a shattering of taboo that results in a loss of illusion; i.e., it's the way in which the world rubs our noses in our own filthy mortality and its own base materialism. No matter how idealistic you are, you can't polish a turd. And you can't stop it stinking. 

Thus, even if there's nothing to laugh about when a frail and demented old woman shits her pants seven times in a weekend (the consequence of prescribing an aggressive laxative administered during a month long stay in hospital), there is something philosophically important to reflect upon ...


III.

Whilst clearly understanding the complex psycho-cultural reasons behind coprophobia, Georges Bataille and D. H. Lawrence both affirm the fact that human beings shit. Indeed, rather than seeing the act of defecating as something shameful, they think it should be acknowledged and celebrated.

Thus, in Lady Chatterley's Lover, for example, Mellors famously tells Connie as he strokes her soft sloping bottom and fingers the two secret openings to her body - "'An' if tha shits an' if tha pisses, I'm glad. I don't want a woman as couldna shit nor piss.'" 

I understand the point that Lawrence is trying to make here: he wants the human mind to free itself of its fear of the body and the body's potencies. For in his view, "the mind's terror of the body has probably driven more men mad than ever could be counted" and it's monstrous that anyone should be made to feel morally ashamed of their natural bodily functions.

That's fine. But I can't help wondering whether Mellors would be quite so un-Swiftian if Connie experienced a catastrophic loss of bowel control during the night of sensual pleasure ... Further, I have to admit - following recent experiences - that perhaps we need our illusions, our taboos, our lies surrounding the body.

Ultimately, perhaps it's preferable to have stars rather than shit in our eyes and not so unforgivable to find comfort in the reassuring smell of bleach ...

Notes

Cindy LaCom, 'Filthy Bodies, Porous Boundaries: The Politics of Shit in Disability Studies', Disability Studies Quarterly, Winter/Spring 2007, Volume 27, No.1-2. Click here to read online. 

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 223 and 309.  

To read a related post to this one from March 2015, click here. 

The Trapeze Artist

He flies through the air with the greatest of ease,

That daring old fraud on his flying trapeze.

Someone I know recently claimed that he was a trapeze artist in the circus of life and, at first, it amused me to think of him as an aerial acrobat performing amazing feats of daring; a kind of postmodern Jules Léotard.* 

Nietzsche would certainly approve: the way in which one extracts the sweetest pleasure from existence is, he says, to live dangerously and whilst Zarathustra doesn't - as far as I recall - encounter a trapeze artist on his wanderings, he does meet a tightrope walker, who is surely a kindred spirit.

And when the funambulist falls to the ground thanks to the malicious actions of a fool, Zarathustra comforts the dying man by allaying his fear of damnation and assuring him that he has lived a noble and worthwhile life: 'You made danger your vocation and there is nothing shameful in that.' 

The thing with my friend, however, is that he hasn't really made danger his vocation; for he performs at all times with a (financial) safety net provided by his parents. This protects him in case of a fall and, in so doing, removes mortal risk from the equation.

No one can deny his skills. But there's something a little disingenuous (almost deceitful, almost cowardly) about his performance. Real courage is always displayed in the face of real danger.

* Note: Jules Léotard (1838 - 1870) was the French acrobatic performer and aerialist who developed the art of trapeze. He also popularized the one-piece outfit that now bears his name and inspired the song 'The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze' (1867), written and sung by the popular Victorian music hall entertainer George Leybourne (aka Champagne Charlie).  

See: Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book IV, Section 283 and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, Section 6. 

Miss Alba Banana: What's Not to Love?

 Paris and Petticoats   

She's French ☑

She lives in Paris ☑

She loves vintage fashion ☑

She's very beautiful ☑

She has an amusing name ☑

She appreciates that truth is a sophisticated play of appearances  ☑

She knows, like Nietzsche, that the greatest and rarest of arts is to give style to one's character ☑

In sum: Miss Alba Banana ticks all my boxes. 

Notes on Nietzsche's Philosophical Naturalism

Nietzsche (detail) by Robberto

from the personal collection of Naima Morelli

click here for more details 

I think it's fair to characterise Nietzsche's philosophy as a kind of augmented naturalism, that is to say, one that comes with some surprising additional features; or what my mother would describe as naturalism with knobs on.

This is why Nietzsche can never quite bring himself to fully endorse modern science or accept that there is an objective, mind-independent reality governed by natural laws, etc. Hard realism and mechanical materialism aren't quite frölich enough for his tastes.      

Nevertheless, Nietzsche does like to speak of translating man back into nature [BGE 230] and to conceive of culture in terms of physis. So he's basically a 19th-century naturalist and both his atheism and his monism (the world is will to power - and nothing besides) are rooted in this intellectual tradition. 

What's interesting, however, is how Nietzsche relates his naturalism to his wider project of revaluation. Arguing that morality is a method for exercising power over wild nature - including the animal man - he suggests that we can now use the same method to elevate and strengthen, rather than tame and make sickly.    

In other words, having gained mastery of the earth and produced the human being, we can now begin work on the creation of an enhanced nature and a transhumanity: Übernatur und Übermensch, with the latter conceived as a strange and exquisite plant.

In sum, Nietzsche's moral naturalism is an attempt to translate values that many philosophers like to think of as transcendent ideals back into the world as a monstrous phenomenon of will to power and to life in all its splendid immorality. It is preferable, he says, to live as a satyr rather than a saint - and homo natura comes with horns upon his head rather than a halo of light floating above it.

However, we should note that the breeding of such a figure would require cultural and social conditions that are entirely alien to our age, which is why Nietzsche's politics cannot easily be squared with liberal humanism and why to think beyond good and evil remains such a dangerous (and intriguing) proposition.

Note: I also discuss Nietzsche's concept of translating man back into nature (with reference to the work of contemporary artists Willy Verginer and Orly Fayer) in two other recent posts: click here and here.
  

This post is dedicated to Keith Ansell-Pearson for 25 years of Nietzschean inspiration, friendship and support.  

Further Thoughts on the Art of Translating Man Back Into Nature (with Reference to the Work of Orly Faya)

Image by Orly Faya 
orlyfaya.com 

Italian sculptor Willy Verginer - whom I recently wrote of here - isn't the only artist to have made an all-too-literal interpretation of Nietzsche's idea of translating man back into nature ...

Orly Faya, for example, is a body-painting visionary, ecotherapist, and activist from Down Under who also wishes to facilitate some sort of healing of mankind by reminding us that the source of all wellbeing and creativity is the Earth itself.

How does she aim to do this?

By asking models to strip so that she might then merge* them into the natural environment with a clever use of colour; a process she describes as a transformation into the transpersonal - which sounds like fun and philosophically quite intriguing, until we realise this simply means affording individuals the opportunity to discover themselves as authentic human beings via an experience of otherness.

In other words, Ms Faya encourages us to lose ourselves so that we may at last find our true selves; become-other so that we may broaden - not shatter or dissolve - our intellectual and cultural horizons. There's no real abandonment of identity or becoming here - and no real translating of man into nature, which, for a Nietzschean, means rather more than camouflaging subjects into the landscape, be it a forest, desert, or beach.**

Ultimately, rather than transport us beyond good and evil, Orly offers us the same old hippie idealism - born of anthropocentric conceit and middle class privilege - that we encounter all too often in the art world. And that's disappointing to say the least ...   

Notes

*According to Ms Faya's website:  "Merging Ceremonies are a Unique Opportunity to become ONE with yourself and the earth in a multi-dimensional, multi-sensory way [...] to experience ourselves beyond the physical body, unified with nature [...] internalised with light and love and eternalised via photographic art." So it's not just about getting naked, having a quick paint job and then posing for a slightly saucy snap.   

**It's important to understand that when Nietzsche writes of translating man back into nature he is not advocating a Romantic or reactionary return to some primal and pristine state of being, so much as the future overcoming of man as interpreted within modern history and society. In other words, it's a call for a creative rescripting of the self via a becoming-woman rather than a becoming-animal or becoming-plant - for, paradoxically, homo natura is ultimately a question of style. See Beyond Good and Evil, section 230.

Traducendo l'uomo nella Natura: Thoughts on the Work of Willy Verginer

Willy Verginer: Komm, lieber Mai, und mach ... (2015)

Lindenwood and acrylic colour (147 x 107 x 60 cm)

The carved wooden works of Italian sculptor Willy Verginer, with their often dramatic zones of colour, certainly arouse my interest, but, not knowing very much about him, I hesitate to say what his philosophical project is.

It seems, however, to involve translating man back into nature, if I might borrow a phrase from Nietzsche. That is to say, he wishes to show how human being and human culture and society - even at its most technologically advanced - remains part of the natural world.

Verginer does this by demonstrating how vibrant colour can be born from industrial grayness and how, as Lawrence writes, even iron can put forth. Further, Verginer imagines a future in which young bodies begin to (quite literally) blossom in new and different ways, forming delicate contacts between themselves and evolving an intuitive sensitivity, as they become plant.

This idea of a floral or botanical becoming perhaps explains why the faces of Verginer's figures look so blank; for whilst plants have passions and desires, they're not human passions and desires and, as Wilde noted, the beauty of flowers is ultimately rooted in the fact they have no souls. 

Of course, there will be those who will not only find the idea strange and insane, but point to the paradox of translating man into nature via a series of unnatural participations.

As Deleuze and Guattari argue, however, such queer nuptials and unholy alliances are in fact fundamental to nature; for nature should not be thought of as a united kingdom, but rather a perverse multiplicity made up of heterogeneous terms and combinations (or interkingdoms).

verginer.com

Notes

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), section 230.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Almond Blossom', The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 259.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996).

For a follow up post to this one, click here.

The Silver-Studded Blue Butterfly Post

If there's one thing I love almost as much (perhaps even more) than a blue flower, it's a blue butterfly: from the smallest of small blues to the largest of large blues, and including the common blue, holly blue and the brilliant Adonis blue, I find them all extraordinarily beautiful to behold (even if only ever seen in photographs).    

I think my favourite, however, is the silver-studded blue (Plebejus argus), found gaily dancing amongst the heather during the long summer months and befriending the black ants that protect their eggs and larval young. Although the females are far less splendid than the male - blueness giving way to a drab brown colour - they do retain the distinct silver spots on their hindwings.

Of course, numbers of both sexes have undergone a major decline during recent decades across most of its (restricted) range in the UK, thanks to all the usual causes; habitat loss, agricultural practice, landscape development, etc.
  

This, to me at least, is a genuinely depressing fact. I really don't think I would want to live in a world without blue butterflies, blue flowers, blue birds, and what Lawrence terms the blueness of the Greater Day that, in a sense, these things embody and symbolise, existing as they do beyond the everyday beauty of things that belong solely to the yellow sun.  

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Flying-Fish', Appendix II, St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 

For a sister post on the blue flower, click here.

The Blue Flower Post

I.

Even though some floraphiles like to parade their knowledge of its modern Latin name - derived from the Greek terms mēkōn and opsis - and insist that the Himalyan blue poppy is not a true poppy at all, it's always been one of my favourite flowers and there's surely no denying the beauty (and authenticity) of its colour. 

In fact, I'm very fond of all blue flowers - from the palest of pale forget-me-nots and delicate little alpine plants that glory in the snow, to those large Bavarian gentians that Lawrence described as darkening the day with a smoky-blueness belonging to the underworld.   


II.

Simon says all this reveals the Romantic aspect of my character. And perhaps he's right: for the Romantics were certainly enchanted by die blaue Blumen and gave it crucial symbolic meaning within their aesthetics and wider philosophy.

Novalis, for example, the 18th-century German poet and mystic who preached a Liebesreligion based on his reading of Fichte, used the symbol of the blue flower in his unfinished novel entitled Heinrich von Ofterdingen based on the life of the fabled Middle High German poet of that name.

In the book, the blue flower betokens man's metaphysical striving for the infinite whilst also symbolising the importance of remaining true to the natural world, for, according to Novalis, the development of the human self - and the ideas and emotions experienced by that self - is also a form of miraculous flowering. 

III.

Having conceded my own Romanticism, it's important to note that, ultimately, I'm not a Romantic; that I am, in fact, anti-Romantisch. I wouldn't go so far as to shout: Schlagt die Germanistik tot, färbt die blaue Blume rot!, but I agree with Walter Benjamin that it's become impossible to share the intense longing for transcendence that marked the true Romantic, or remain an uncritical devotee of the blue flower (as a symbol, not as an actual blossom).         

As Benjamin nicely noted: "No one really dreams any longer of the Blue Flower. Whoever awakes as Heinrich von Ofterdingen today must have overslept."

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Bavarian Gentians', The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 610-11. This verse can be read online by clicking here. 

Friedrich von Hardenberg, (aka Novalis), Heinrich von Ofterdingen, unfinished work written in 1800 and first published a year after his death in 1802. An English translation of this work is available to read as a Project Gutenberg eBook by clicking here.   

Walter Benjamin, 'Dream Kitsch', in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others, (Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 236. Click here to read the essay online. 

For a sister post on the silver-studded blue butterfly, click here.

His Bowels Did Yearn Upon His Brother (Notes on Ganymede, by Daphne du Maurier)

Zeus küsst Ganymed (1758)

Fresco by Anton Raphael Mengs and Giovanni Casanova.*

(Palazzo Corsini, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome.)

I. 

One of the distinguishing traits of the true pervert is that they have a very active imagination, one that is often informed as much by classical scholarship as by their sexual proclivities. They never quite see the world as it is, or the people in it - including themselves - as they are. They have what Lawrence terms glimpses. That is to say, they see in the faces and forms of young adolescents something divine as well as erotically fascinating:

[...] when lads and girls are not thinking,

when they are pure, which means when they are quite clean from self-consciousness,

either in anger or tenderness, or desire or sadness or wonder or mere stillness,

you may see glimpses of the gods in them.    

- D. H. Lawrence, 'All sorts of gods'

Thus it is that when the fastidious academic who is the narrator of Daphne du Maurier's third tale in her astonishing collection The Breaking Point (1959) goes on holiday to Italy, he quickly finds himself besotted with a youth and in a whole heap of trouble ...

II.

Arriving in Venice, our anonymous protagonist immediately feels as if he has entered an extratemporal space "outside the rest of Europe and even the world". This was Venice as an electrifying inner experience rather than actual location on a map. One that existed, magically, for him and for others who shared his tastes and were susceptible to the same secret enchantment. 

His excitement as he strolls the streets was "intense, almost unbearable", but it's as nothing compared to the moment when he first sees a young waiter, aged "about fifteen, not more", working at a café on the piazza:

"I told you I was a classical scholar. Therefore you will understand - you should understand - that was happened in that second was transformation. The electricity that had charged me all evening focused on a single point in my brain to the exclusion of all else; the rest of me was jelly. I could sense the man at my table raise his hand and summon the lad in the white coat carrying a tray [...] and this self who was non-existent knew with every nerve fibre, every brain-cell, every blood corpuscle that he was indeed Zeus, the giver of life and death, the immortal one, the lover; and that the boy who came towards him was his own beloved, his cup-bearer, his slave, Ganymede. I was  poised, not in the body, not in the world, and I summoned him. He knew me, and he came. 

      Then it was all over. The tears were pouring down my face and I heard a voice saying, 'Is anything wrong, signore?'"

It's significant how quickly he persuades himself that the blue-eyed boy is fully aware of the strange scene unfolding between them; how when the latter gives a smile and a little bow after the bill has been paid, the former takes this as a sign of Ganymede's knowing complicity.

The next night, he returns to the café and this time the glimpse goes beyond the first instantaneous flash:

"I could feel the chair of gold, and the clouds above my head, and the boy was kneeling beside me, and the cup he offered me was gold as well. His humility was not the shamed humility of a slave, but the reverence of a loved one to his master, to his god." 

The pursuit - the grooming - of Ganymede continues, despite an early premonition of danger; indeed, doesn't danger merely add spice to the game for an illicit lover? Of course, the affair quickly turns sour as reality begins to intrude: Ganymede is actually a very ordinary boy, of whom one could not expect too much, more interested in the latest rock 'n' roll records than he is in Shakespearean sonnets.

Just as well then, since he was bound to disappoint, that Ganymede is killed in a water-skiing accident. He may have been "beautiful as an angel from heaven", but he would soon have grown fat, grown ugly, grown old.

Besides, whilst the accident had been terrible - "a mass of churning water, of tangled rope, of sudden, splintering wood", and the young body of Ganymede drawn into the suction of the speedboat's propeller blades, turning the sea crimson with his blood - the horror soon passes and one comes to accept even the unfortunate consequences of such an affair, such as being forced to resign from one's job.   

At least that's true for du Maurier's cultured paedophile in this tragic tale. Having lost his old life and old friends and colleagues, having moved to a different part of town (the area near Paddington known as Little Venice), he happily adapts to a new regime of existence. At seven o'clock each evening, for example, he goes to his favourite local restaurant:

"The fact is, the boy who is training there as a waiter celebrates his fifteenth birthday this evening, and I have a little present for him. Nothing very much, you understand - I don't believe in spoiling these lads - but it seems there is a singer called Perry Como much in favour amongst the young. I have the latest record here. He likes bright colours, too - I rather thought this blue and gold cravat might catch his eye ..."  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'All sorts of gods', The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 579. 

Daphne du Maurier, 'Ganymede', The Breaking Point, (Virago Press, 2009), pp. 83-123. All lines quoted and paraphrased above are from this edition. 

*Amusingly, the work was an imitation of an ancient Roman fresco, created to fool the famous archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, well-known for his interest in pederasty.

For a sister post to this one on du Maurier's tale 'The Blue Lenses', also in The Breaking Point, click here. 

On Miracles and Absolute Contingency in the Work of Daphne du Maurier and Quentin Meillassoux

I.

The opening tale of Daphne du Maurier's astonishing and disturbing collection of short stories entitled The Breaking Point (1959), is not so much a whodunnit as a who did what and reveals what she describes as "the lovely duplicity of a secret life" [22] and it's potential for tragedy.

But, whilst the latter is a fascinating notion - explored at length by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray - what really caught my interest is the moment of revelation at the very beginning of the story when James Fenton realises that miracles can happen at any moment and dramatically mark the end of one's old life. This liberating thought had never come to him before:

"It was as though something had clicked in his brain [...] time had ceased [...] everything had changed [...] he had stepped out of bondage into a new dimension." [2-3]

What's more, Fenton feels himself strangely empowered, as if he had become a miracle-worker himself; i.e., an instrument of fate capable of altering the lives of strangers with a single gesture, be it a random act of kindness, or one of sadistic cruelty.


II.

In some ways, it's nice to know that miracles, far from being rare or unusual, are actually the natural unfolding of things and events and can not only happen at any time, but are, in fact, happening all of the time. For one thing, it releases us from the grip of absolute necessity or what's known within philosophical circles as the principle of sufficient reason (i.e., the metaphysical insistence that the world is at is with good cause and could only be as it is).  

To think in terms of miracles, the unfolding of fate, and what Quentin Meillassoux terms unreason, is to enter a world of absolute contingency in which there is no reason for anything to be as it is or to remain so; everything - including the laws that govern the world - could be otherwise:

"Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing." [53]

For Meillassoux, this is the only absolute: a kind of hyper-chaos that du Maurier, at the point of breakdown - when reality must be faced - discovered for herself. Thus, when her protagonists suddenly step outside the gate, what they encounter is:

"a rather menacing power - something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses [...] a power with neither goodness nor wisdom, ill-disposed to reassure thought about the veracity of its distinct ideas." [64]

Further, whilst conventional time ceases, they observe something akin to it - an uncanny form of time that is:

"inconceivable for physics, since it is capable of destroying without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity [...] even God. This is not a Heraclitean time, since it is not the eternal law of becoming, but rather the eternal and lawless possible becoming of every law. It is a time capable of destroying even becoming itself by bringing forth, perhaps forever, fixity, stasis, and death.” [64]

Notes

Daphne du Maurier, 'The Alibi', in The Breaking Point, (Virago Press, 2009).

Quentin Meillassoux, After Infinity, trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2009).

For a semi-related post to this one on miracles understood from a Deleuzean perspective in terms of the fold, click here.

A Brief Note on How Miracles Unfold as a Form of Cosmic Origami

A miracle is an object or event that not only obliges us to reflect with wonder upon phenomena that seemingly transgress or suspend natural and scientific laws, but has a radically transformative effect upon our lives.

Although often attributed to a deity or demon, I prefer to think of miracles without agency and as part of a materialist metaphysics vaguely based upon Deleuze's work on the potential of things to differ from themselves.

In other words, I conceive of miracles as:

(i) A fateful inward folding of the outside ...

Like Deleuze, I regard the entire universe as an origamic process of folding and unfolding that creates an interior that is a doubling of the outside, rather than something that develops autonomously and separately from that which is external to it.

And this is true also, one might note, of the way in which the self is formed; the concept of the fold allowing Deleuze to think not only about the production of human subjectivity in a non-essential manner, but also about inhuman possibilities of becoming. 

(ii) A momentary actualisation of virtual chaos that shatters the parameters of the everyday, thereby allowing all things - good and evil - to become possible ...

To think of miracles only in terms of what benefits mankind or as the work of a heavenly Father, is a laughable mix of anthropocentric conceit and moral stupidity. Ultimately, the great advantage of thinking in terms of the miraculous and loving fate is that one no longer has to believe in such a loving God or subscribe to a model of sentimental humanism.


Note: readers interested in this area of Deleuze's work might like to see The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, (University of Minnesota Press, 1992) and 'Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivation)', the final section of Foucault, trans. and ed. by Seán Hand, (The Athlone Press, 1988).

Reflections on a Rose and a New Year's Resolution

SA/2019

New Year's Day: the world of my little garden forever undying. Roses, stained with the blood of Aphrodite, bloom and make happy. Sometimes, I think it would be nice to remain alone with the flowers and do nothing but quietly reflect upon their perfection.

But then, after a few minutes, I realise that not only is such a life impossible, it's also undesirable; that one's main duty as a Lawrentian floraphile is to actively shelter the rose of life from being trampled on by the pigs.      

Thus, in 2019, I resolve to "go out into the world again, to kick it and stub my toes. It is no good my thinking of retreat: I rouse up and feel I don't want to. My business is a fight, and I've got to keep it up." 

In other words, I shall continue in my attempts to torpedo the ark ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Risen Lord', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 271. 

D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), Letter 4034, to Earl Brewster (28 May, 1927), pp. 71-73.