D. H. Lawrence's Vision of a Demonic America

Jasper Johns: Flag (1954-55)

moma.org

I. 

I've never been to America. But I have always loved all things American, including the people. Perhaps this is due in some mysterious way to the fact that my mother-to-be dated a GI during the War (he even proposed and planned to take his teen-bride back with him to New York, but my mother-to-be said no).

Whatever the reason, I've always thought of myself as, in some sense, American and I fully appreciate why so many Brits - including Christopher Hitchens and Johnny Rotten - are proud to become US citizens.

Despite his determination to remain English in the teeth of all the world, I also believe D. H. Lawrence would have made a fine American. Indeed, it's rather surprising that he didn't settle in the States and turn his back forever on the country of his birth, which treated him so poorly on so many occasions.*        

For whilst Lawrence despised many aspects of modern life in America - telephones, tinned meat, automobiles, indoor plumbing, incomes and ideals, etc. - he was fascinated by the spirit of place and the alien quality also of American art-speech that he discovered in the classic literature:

"The furthest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached. The European moderns are all trying to be extreme. The great Americans I mention just were it." [12]

I think that's true: which is why, for example, I think The Scarlet Letter a more provocative novel than L'histoire de l'œil.

I also think Lawrence might be right to suggest that the real American day hasn't dawned as yet. And that when it does, it'll surprise everyone - not least the pale-faced, apple-pie loving idealists who think of themselves as the true Americans of today. For the America to come will be one that has reckoned at last with the full force of the daimon that belongs to the American continent itself.   

Troubling as it is to contemplate, I admire Lawrence's queer dark vision of a demonic America, inhabited by a people whose destiny "is to destroy the whole corpus of the white psyche, the white consciousness" [81]. This doesn't mean primitive regression - Lawrence is clear that there can be no going back - but it does entail a dusky-bodied posthumanism with a rattle snake coiled at its heart.**  

II.

Even before he had made his first visit in 1922, Lawrence was pinning his highest hopes on America. In a letter of October 1915 to the American editor, critic and poet Harriet Monroe, he writes:

"I must see America. I think one can feel hope there. I think that there life comes up from the roots, crude but vital. Here the whole tree of life is dying. It is like being dead: the underworld. I must see America. I believe it is beginning, not ending." 

Lawrence's contrasting of American vitality with European deadness is a constant in his work from this period. Thus, it's not surprising to find that in a foreword written for Studies in Classic American Literature, he attempts to persuade Americans to get up off their knees before European culture and tradition and be thankful for their own barbaric freedom from the past.

Like Nietzsche, Lawrence is only interested in serving history to the extent that it serves life; when it becomes disadvantageous - i.e., when it merely instructs without increasing or directly quickening human activity - then he's happy to draw a line under it.

It's a pity, says Lawrence, that Americans are always so wonderstruck by European monuments: "After all, a heap of stone is only a heap of stone - even if it is Milan cathedral. And who knows that it isn't a horrid bristly burden on the face of the earth?" [381]

He continues:

"America, therefore, should leave off being quite so prostrate with admiration. [...]
      Let Americans turn to America, and to that very America which has been rejected and almost annihilated. [...] America must turn again to catch the spirit of her own dark, aboriginal continent.
      That which was abhorrent to the Pilgrim Fathers and to the Spaniards, that which was called the Devil, the black demon of savage America, this great aboriginal spirit the Americans must recognise again, recognise, and embrace. The devil [...] of our forefathers hides the Godhead which we seek. [...]
       It means a surpassing of the old European life-form. It means a departure from the old European morality [...] It means even a departure from the old range of emotions and sensibilities. [...]
      [...] Now is the day when Americans must become fully, self-reliantly conscious of their own inner responsibility. They must be ready for a new act, a new extension of life. They must pass the bounds." [383-85]       

In a sense, as these lines indicate, Lawrence is transferring Nietzsche's project of a revaluation of all values into the wild west. One can almost picture the overman in a poncho, cowboy hat and spurs - a bit like Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name. (Readers might think I'm only teasing here, but, as Lawrence says, the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic ... and a killer.)*** 

 thedigitalpilgrimage.wordpress.com 

Notes

* In a letter written to his friend Catherine Carswell in 1916, Lawrence makes it clear that he had, at this time, determined that he wanted to leave England for good and at the earliest possible opportunity, transferring all his life to America, a country in which he could "feel the new unknown". 

** See what Lawrence writes in 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo' (Final Version, 1923), in Studies in Classic American Literature, pp. 126-28. And see also his remarks in 'Indians and an Englishman', in Mornings and Mexico and Other Essays, pp. 119-20. The essential point is that whilst Lawrence advocates Americans picking up where the native peoples left off, he also wants those who accept this challenge to perfect the old way of being as a new body of truth in the future; not make a vain and naive attempt to simply return to the past: I can't cluster at the drum any more. 

*** Reading Eastwood's movies - particularly the Dollars Trilogy - in terms of a postmoral existentialism, is not an original move on my part; several scholars have produced interesting work in this area. See for example the collection of essays ed. Richard T. McClelland and Brian B. Clayton, The Philosophy of Clint Eastwood, (University Press of Kentucky, 2014).

 
Bibliography

D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.

D. H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
 
D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II (1913-16), ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), letter 1028, to Harriet Monroe, 26 October, 1915.

D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III (1916-21), ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), letter 1306, to Catherine Carswell, 7 November, 1916.

Nietzsche, 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life', Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1997). 


Many thanks to James Walker of The Digital Pilgrimage for use of the Lawrence as cowboy image.

He That Aches With Amorous Love: Lawrence's Critique of Walt Whitman's Idealism

Lawrence's essay on Whitman in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) is more piss-take than critical analysis. Lawrence is particularly mocking of the American poet's claim to be he that aches with amorous love, which he thinks a ludicrous assertion born of the latter's idealism rather than genuine feeling.

Better, says Lawrence, to have a belly-ache, which is at least localised. For man is a limited creature and if he aches with love (i.e. physical longing) it's usually for someone or something specific; such as the girl next door, for example. Only some sort of superhuman being aches with amorous love for the entire universe: "And the danger of the superman is that he is mechanical." [149]  

Whitman insists on some kind of elective affinity between himself and every Tom, Dick and Harry he should ever happen to encounter and relates this to the gravitational pull of the earth: 'Does not all matter, aching, attract all matter? / So the body of me to all I meet or know.' 

In what is, for me, a crucial passage, Lawrence writes:

"What can be more mechanical? The difference between life and matter is that life, living things, living creatures, have the instinct of turning right away from some matter, and of blissfully ignoring the bulk of most matter, and of turning towards only some certain bits of specially selected matter. As for living creatures all hurtling together into one great snowball, why, most very living creatures spend the greater part of their time getting out of sight, smell or sound of the rest of the living creatures. Even bees only cluster on their own queen. And that is sickening enough. Fancy all white humanity clustering on one another like a lump of bees.
      No Walt, you give yourself away. Matter does gravitate, helplessly. But men are tricky-tricksy, and they shy all sorts of ways." [149]  

If Whitman finds himself gravitating towards everyone it's a sign not only of his promiscuous idealism, but of something having gone very wrong with him; the "lonely phallic monster" [150] of his individual and sensual self has either been murdered or mentalised. Or allowed to go all mushy and leak out into the universe.    

Healthy individuals keep themselves to themselves; happy to meet and embrace a few others, but unwilling to touch most people with a barge-pole.

Whitman, however, insists with false exuberance on grasping everyone to his bosom, believing as he does in One Identity as the great desideratum: "Walt becomes in his own person the whole world, the whole universe, the whole eternity of time", until he reaches the supreme state of Allness. Or until, as Lawrence rather cruelly says, he becomes a fat old man bloated with "senile, self-conscious sensuosity" [151].    

Lawrence - to his credit - knows that there are many things outside of himself that, in their very otherness, he can never know or assimilate: "But Walt wouldn't have it. He was everything and everything was in him. He drove an automobile with a very fierce headlight, along the track of a fixed idea, through the darkness of this world." [152]

Whitman was a great poet. But the very greatest poets are those who sleep under bushes in the dark and prefer the trackless wildernesses, or the woodpaths, to zooming along the Highway of Love in one direction only. For it becomes a dead end at last, as we'll eventually discover. 

Ultimately, Whitman's major mistake was confusing his own message of sympathy, with Christian moral-idealism: "He didn't follow his Sympathy. Try as he might, he kept on automatically interpreting it as Love, as Charity." [158]

What a shame, says Lawrence, that Whitman didn't see that sympathy is a form of compassion, i.e.,  feeling with rather than feeling for, and has nothing to do with identifying (or merging) with others in the name of solidarity, social justice, and self-sacrifice.

In other words, sympathy means "partaking of the passion" [159] which inspires the other; it doesn't mean that their experience, their pain, their struggle, is yours. It means lending support where and when you can, but without trying to walk in shoes (or wear headscarves) that don't belong to you. 

For sympathy also means drawing limits, even to love, and preserving integrity: Love what the soul loves; hate what the soul hates; be compassionate, but don't be an indiscriminate. And remember: it's better to display starry indifference, than sentimental stupidity and false feeling. 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman', Studies in Classic American Literature (Final Version, 1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 148-61. 

See also the Intermediate Version (1919) of the Whitman study in the above edition, pp. 358-69, and the 1921-22 version which appears as Appendix V, pp. 401-17. In many respects, these versions are more interestingly complex, although Lawrence's argument remains the same: Whitman is the best modern example of the great triumph into infinitude. 

Every Little (Act of Animal Cruelty) Helps ...

A nest full of swallows 

Photo by Amy Sancetta / AP

The shocking tale of retail giant Tesco using nets to prevent returning swallows from nesting in one of their trolley parks, was widely reported in the press earlier this month and rightly caused a storm of protest from bird lovers up and down the country and across social media.   

As the writer and conservationist Kate Blincoe rightly argued, this isn't just a small inconvenience for the birds, but an action that can have fatal consequences, as swallows - a species that, like so many others, has suffered a significant decline in numbers during recent decades - return faithfully to the same breeding sites year after year.

At best, therefore, the extensive use of netting in this case - making the birds' summer home completely inaccessible - will result in no eggs being laid (and thus no young being raised); at worst, the adult birds may become trapped and die. What it doesn't do is encourage the birds to find alternative nesting sites, as some spokescunt for the supermarket suggested.

Thankfully, after Kate and others started an online campaign to save the swallows - and after hundreds of customers threatened to boycott the Norwich store at the centre of the row - Tesco relented and removed the netting, allowing the birds to find refuge after their long migratory flight from Southern Africa.    

Unfortunately, however, just as one swallow does not a summer make, nor does one happy ending mean the national scandal of bird netting has been resolved. For this incident in a Tesco trolley park is by no means an isolated one. Farmers and developers all over England, are covering trees and hedgerows with nets in order to prevent birds from nesting, so that they can then dig the trees and hedgerows up - a practice that is not only perfectly legal, but increasingly widespread as more and more land is set aside for new housing.     

I agree entirely with Ms. Blincoe, using nets in this manner is not only vile and pernicious, it's anti-life. And every little act of animal cruelty such as this helps reinforce my misanthropic contempt for Man.  

See: Kate Blincoe, 'Are nets to stop swallows nesting any way to treat the natural world?', The Guardian (21 March 2019): click here to read online.

See also: Samantha Fisher, 'Why are nets appearing over trees and hedges?', BBC News website (23 March, 2019): click here. 

Sign: the petition to make netting hedgerows to prevent birds from nesting a criminal offence: click here.

Cicchetti and Toxic Masculinity

cecconisshoreditch.com

I finally got to eat at Cecconi's last week, at the Redchurch Townhouse, Shoreditch; something that I've been wanting to do since it opened in October of last year.

Basically a stylish but informal pizza and pasta restaurant, the food and wine is predictable but delicious, and the mostly Italian, mostly female staff are friendly and very easy on the eye. Lunch with Zed should've, therefore, been a perfectly enjoyable occasion. 

Unfortunately, however, there was a prick at the next table displaying hegemonic masculine character traits that some - not unfairly - might label toxic; angry, boorish, sexist, super-sensitive to any perceived slight, unable to admit any weakness or failing, etc.

If he was trying to impress the woman he was with on the one hand, he was clearly trying to intimidate the waiter on the other. Thus, for example, when the latter very politely attempted to explain the menu - after being informed of its overly-complex layout - the prick ejaculated: 'I've been to some of the best restaurants around the world so I know how to read a menu.'    

A few minutes later, having given his suggestions at how to simplify the menu, he decided he next wanted to discuss staffing levels and complain about what he regarded as a poor quality of service. Then, rather surprisingly, he wanted to know why they didn't lay the tables with white table cloths, as this always adds a little class.  

I felt so sorry for the waiting staff. And so sorry for his companion - particularly when, at one point, he left her sitting alone at the table for twenty minutes whilst he took a call on his mobile ...

I don't know what the antidote to this rude, inept, and bullying model of masculinity might be - castration seems a rather drastic last resort - but it would be nice if such men could learn to moderate their own behaviour, check their privilege, and overcome the social and sexual anxiety that surely drives it.  

Sur la terre et le terrorisme: A Brief Sadean Response to Rebecca Solnit

According to the American writer Rebecca Solnit, it was no coincidence that the Christchurch mosque massacre took place on the same day and in close vicinity to a climate protest by youngsters with hope and idealism in their hearts: "It was a shocking pairing and also a perfectly coherent one".

Was it? Surely such perfect coherence - or synchronicity - is in the mind of the beholder ... 

But then Solnit is an idealist who specialises in discerning causal relations and meaningful connections between events; a woman who believes in harmonious global unity, which she describes as "the beautiful interconnection of all life and the systems [...] on which that life depends".

Other than the murderous racism, the thing she really dislikes about white supremacists is that they refuse to care about climate change and thus threaten to destroy or disrupt the above systems, making the world not just warmer, but more chaotic, "in ways that break these elegant patterns and relationships".  

This chaos, according to Solnit, is essentially an extension of terrorist violence; the violence not of guns and bombs, but of "hurricanes, wildfires, new temperature extremes, broken weather patterns, droughts, extinctions, famines" that the poor Earth is coerced or triggered into unleashing.

And this is why climate action, she says, has always been and must remain non-violent, in stark contrast to the actions carried out by men like Brenton Tarrant. For environmentalism is a movement to protect life and restore peace and harmony; protesting against global warming is "the equivalent of fighting against hatred" and disorder. In other words, it's a form of counter-terrorism. 

Personally, I think such claims are highly contentious, to say the least. But who knows, perhaps Ms. Solnit is right. After all, not only does she know a lot of climate activists, but she also knows what motivates them ... Love! Love for the planet, love for people (particularly the poor and vulnerable), and love for the promise of a sustainable future.

How many people at the opposite end of the political spectrum from herself and her friends she also knows isn't clear. Presumably not many. But that doesn't stop her from dismissing them all as irresponsible climate change deniers, unwilling to acknowledge that "actions have consequences", and full of the kind of libertarian machismo and entitlement that ultimately ends in violence.    

What Solnit doesn't seem to consider is that the Earth is a monster of chaos and indifference; that it's not a living system or self-regulating organism and is neither sentient nor morally concerned with the preservation of life.

I think it's mistaken to think of the planet as some kind of home, sweet home and to ascribe the world with some sort of will. But, if we must play this game, then it's probably best to take a neo-Gnostic line and accept that all matter and events are imbued with the spirit of evil.

Indeed, push comes to shove, I'm inclined to think that human agency and geological catastrophe conspire not because innocent Nature has been groomed by terrorists or provoked into taking her revenge due to man-made climate change (as some followers of Lovelock like to imagine), but because they are both expressions of what is a fundamentally immoral existence. 

Finally, Solnit might like to recall this from Sade writing in Justine: "Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power."

See:

Rebecca Solnit, 'Why climate action is the antithesis of white supremacy', The Guardian (19 March 2019): click here to read online. 

Marquis de Sade, Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, trans. John Phillips, (Oxford University Press, 2012). 

See also the excellent essay by David McCallam entitled 'The Terrorist Earth? Some Thoughts on Sade and Baudrillard', in French Cultural Studies 23 (3), (SAGE Publications, 2012), 215-224. Click here to access as an online pdf via Academia.edu.

Amongst other things, McCallam indicates how eighteenth-century discourses on revolutionary politics and the aesthetics of the sublime provide the conceptual framework for the contemporary idea of the Earth as terrorist; an idea, developed by Jean Bauadrillard, that allows us to think terror attacks and natural disasters interchangeably.   

Note: The photo of Rebecca Solnit is by John Lee: johnleepictures.com

Gallows Corner (Reflections on Capital Punishment and Lessons in Paganism)

I.

Living as I do just north of the notorious road junction known as Gallows Corner - a large roundabout with five exits, a flyover, a nearby retail park, and an above average number of collisions -  mean my thoughts often turn to the subject of capital punishment; particularly in the wake of some ghastly local crime, such as the murder of Jodie Chesney ... 

I'm not suggesting that they should demolish the drive-thru KFC and re-erect the gallows as a place of public execution, but it has to be asked what should be done with violent felons who have placed themselves outside of the law and society and what role cruelty, punishment and death (as a form of truth) should play within the socio-legal space.


II.

Historically, as Foucault notes, public executions were always about more than justice; they were a theatrical display of force within a system founded upon a notion of sovereignty. But we, of course, no longer live in such a world; as citizens and as subjects, we are are constituted by a very different regime of power - one that has given itself the task (and the right) to administer life, rather than take it.

Such a regime - let's call it liberal humanism - prides itself on its ability to sustain and coordinate life within a system of law and order: "For such a power, execution was at the same time a limit, a scandal, and a contradiction." It's because this is the case - because having to execute a prisoner is an embarrassing sign of failure - that most Western democracies have abolished capital punishment (and why those states that still carry out executions do so behind closed doors as a joyless, bureacratic procedure witnessed only by officials and a few selected individuals). 

It's not that they - we - have become more humanitarian or more squeamish; death isn't carefully evaded or hidden away within our culture due to a heightened moral sense or some peculiar form of modern anxiety, but due to the fact that death is that which frustrates (bio-)power's desire to micro-manage every aspect of an individual's life. 

III.

Again, I'm not saying that we should attempt to turn the clock back and resurrect violent spectacles or what Nietzsche would term festivals of cruelty, though one suspects that here in Essex - home of the witch trials - there would be an enthusiastic audience for such.

I'm just reminding readers that, as Foucault suggests, public executions were once an occasion also for the exercise of popular power; a chance for citizens to directly vent their anger and make their views known; to not only rejoice in the execution of a criminal, but to mock those who act with pretensions of higher (universal) authority.   

Perhaps there is still something important to learn from Lyotard's lessons in paganism after all ...


IV.

By the term paganism Lyotard refers to a style of thinking which affirms the idea of incommensurable differences founded upon an ontology of singular events. For Lyotard, all things - including crimes - should be considered on their own terms, without attempting to arrive at a universal law of judgement that can make sense of (or do justice to) each and every unique happening.       

In other words, paganism is a kind of godless politics; one that abandons One Truth and One Law in favour of a multiplicity of specific judgements that have no pre-existing (ideal) criteria to refer back to. This would, arguably, allow us to develop a kind of post-Nietzschean legal sytem wherein judgement becomes an expression of an active and affirmative will to power.   

I have to admit that I find it difficult to see how this plurality of judgements would work in practice, but that might simply be because I lack the constitutive imagination to do so (a Kantian notion that Lyotard also invokes in his work on paganism).

See:

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1998); see Part Five: 'Right of Death and Power Over Life'.

Jean-François Lyotard, 'Lessons in Paganism', The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin, (Blackwell, 1998). 

Onychophilia: Notes on Two Types of Nail Fetish

I. 

Ninkondi (one of the variant plural forms of nkondi, meaning 'hunter') are fetish objects made by the Kongo people of Central Africa's Congo region. They are intended not merely to offer protection, but to house a powerful spirit that can be enlisted to track down one's enemies, inflicting misfortune or illness upon them.

As can be seen in the above image, a nkondi is usually a carved human figure - though it can sometimes be an animal - with a cavity in the abdomen, into which a medicine man stuffs ingredients thought to have supernatural properties. The figures range in size from small to life-size and are sometimes adorned with feathers.

Nails (or blades) were driven into the figure in order to affirm an oath or curse - or perhaps to activate the spirit within. Controversially, some scholars believe that the native peoples were influenced in this practice by images that Portuguese missionaries carried with them from Europe of Christ nailed to the cross and Saint Sebastian pierced with arrows. 

Fascinating as all this is, I have to confess that when it comes to nail fetishes, I'm more interested in the long, sharp fingernails of beautiful young women, than rusty bits of iron banged into a wooden figure for the purposes of witchcraft ...

II.

Whilst fingernail fetish is often framed and discussed within the wider category of hand partialism, I think that it deserves critical attention in its own right. For the nails are not like any other part of the hand in that they are not composed of living material; they are made, rather, of a tough protective protein called alpha-keratin.

D. H. Lawrence describes his fingernails as "ten little weapons between me and an inanimate universe, they cross the mysterious Rubicon between me alive and things [...] which are not alive, in my own sense".

Thus, I think there's something in the claim that what nail (and hair) fetishists are ultimately aroused by is death; that they are, essentially, soft-core necrophiles.* Having said that, the human nail as a keratin structure (known as an unguis) is closely related to the claws and hooves of other animals, so I suppose one could just as legitimately suggest a zoosexual origin to the love of fingernails.

Whilst some readers will best like fingernails in their natural state - i.e., unvarnished and unadorned - I have to express a preference for added colour; preferably red or black. I know there's a wide variety of other colours and shades available, but they don't excite my interest so much. Nor do I care for overly decorative designs and fancy finishes.

Finally, whilst clearly having something in common, I think that amychophilia is quite disinct from onychophilia; the latter is a love of fingernails as things in themselves; the former a love of the pain they can inflict, when grown long and sharp.

In other words, the amorous subject who desires to be violently scratched is a kind of masochist; whilst an onychophile, in the purest sense, would be more aroused by simply observing the following scene, described in fetishistic detail by Daphne du Maurier:

"The Marquise lay on her chaise-longue on the balcony of the hotel. She wore only a wrapper, and her sleek gold hair, newly set in pins, was bound close to her head in a turquoise bandeau that matched her eyes. Beside her chair stood a little table, and on it were three bottles of nail varnish all of a different shade.
      She had dabbed a touch of colour on to three separate finger-nails, and now she held her hand in front of her to see the effect. No, the varnish on the thumb was too red, too vivid, giving a heated look to her slim olive hand, almost as if a spot of blood had fallen there from a fresh-cut wound.
      In contrast, her fore-finger was a striking pink, and this too seemed to her false, not true to her present mood. It was the elegant rich pink of drawing-rooms, of ball-gowns, of herself standing at some reception, slowly moving to and fro her ostrich feather fan, and in the distance the sound of violins.
      The middle finger was touched with a sheen of silk neither crimson nor vermilion, but somehow softer, subtler; the sheen of a peony in bud, not yet opened to the heat of the day but with the dew of the morning upon it still. [...]
      Yes, that was the colour. She reached for cotton-wool and wiped away the offending varnish from her other finger-nails, and then slowly, carefully, she dipped the little brush into the chosen varnish and, like an artist, worked with swift, deft strokes.
      When she had finished she leant back in her chaise-longue, exhausted, waving her hands before her in the air to let the varnish harden - a strange gesture, like that of a priestess." 


Notes

* There has been at least one recorded case in which an illicit lover derived pleasure from eating the nail trimmings of corpses (necro-onychophagia), thereby lending support to the theory that nail fetishism has a far darker and more ghoulish undercurrent. See R. E. L. Masters and Eduard Lea, Perverse Crimes in History: Evolving concepts of sadism, lust-murder, and necrophilia - from ancient to modern times (Julian Press, 1963). 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Why the Novel Matters', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 193.

Daphne du Maurier, 'The Little Photographer', in The Birds and Other Stories, (Virago Press, 2004), p. 160.

The photo on the left at the top of the post is of a 19th-century nkondi figure belonging to the Arts of Africa Collection of the Brooklyn Museum, NY. The photo on the right, is an advertising poster for a nail bar, available to buy on eBay: click here.

Uterine Philosophy: Notes on the Woman of Isis

Victoria Vives as a Priestess of Isis

 Photo by Robert Domondon (2017) 

victoriavives.com

I.

As readers of Lawrence, we are intimately familiar with Ursula Brangwen and Constance Chatterley. Indeed, we know the latter not only from top to bottom, but inside and out in pornographic detail.

Arguably, however, the most intriguing woman in the Lawrentian universe is the unnamed and rarely discussed priestess of Isis, who performs such a crucial role in Part II of The Escaped Cock (1929). And so I thought it important to say something of her here ...

II.

The woman of Isis is twenty-seven years of age. Educated and intelligent, she's also very beautiful, with wondering blue eyes, dusky-blonde hair, and white-gold breasts. But she remains a virgin, however, for the "bud of her womb had never stirred" [145].

This is despite the fact that she grew up in a world of powerful and fascinating men. The only child of a Roman commander who served with Mark Anthony, the latter had "sat with her many a half-hour, in the splendour of his great limbs and glowing manhood". His attempts to seduce her were in vain, however, for whilst she had felt "the lovely glow of his male beauty and amorousness bathe all her limbs and her body [...] the very flower of her womb was cool, was almost cold, like a bud in shadow of frost" [144].

The woman of Isis had also known Julius Caesar, but, again, had "shrunk from his eagle-like rapacity" and much preferred older men who were happy just to talk with her and had no expectation that she would "open like a flower to the sun of their maleness" [144].

Remote, dreamy, and sexually unresponsive, the woman of Isis awaits a special type of man; one who has died and risen and is full of that other kind of beauty; "the sheer stillness of the deeper life"; a man who could touch her "on the yearning quick of her womb" [147].

Thus, retiring with her widowed mother to Sidon - an ancient city on the Mediterrranean coast of Lebanon - the woman of Isis built a pink and white temple dedicated to the goddess at her own expense. Here she has served as a priestess for seven years, dressed in a saffron-yellow mantle worn over a white linen tunic, with a pair of gilded sandals upon her ivory-white feet.

Her mother, meanwhile, took care of the day-to-day business of the small estate on which the temple and a villa, set amongst the olive trees, was built. She also oversaw the slaves, which is just as well, as the woman of Isis professes no interest in their activities, finding them invariably repellent as a class: "They were so imbedded in the lesser life, and their appetites and their small consciousness were a little disgusting" [148] to her. 

On one occasion, she watches with noble indifference as one of her young male slaves beats and rapes a half-naked slave girl. Nevertheless, despite her coldness, her cruelty and contempt for inferiors, she can give an excellent (erotic) massage, as the man who died discovers to his great joy:

"Having chafed all his lower body with oil, his belly, his buttocks, even the slain penis and the sad stones, having worked with her slow intensity of a priestess [...] suddenly she put her breast against the wound in his left side, and her arms round him [...] and she pressed him to her, in a power of living warmth, like the folds of a river." [159]


II.

In an early manuscript version of Part II of The Escaped Cock, Lawrence provides a few more details about the woman of Isis, some of which contradict the final published version, though not in any significant manner (for example, her age is given here as twenty-six, not twenty-seven). 

What is emphasised above all, is the extent of her learning: she was tutored as a child and young woman by a Greek philosopher, and whilst she often spoke Syrian or Latin, she always thought in Greek:

"Her Greek had taught her logic and history, and also poetry, and since she was small, she had liked to speak with men" about these things. But she found these men too worldly for her tastes and they "cared little for the gods" [216]. Thus she did not wish to be touched by any of them (much to her father's irritation). Indeed, the girl who would become the woman of Isis was not keen on any physical contact:

"True, her slave women bathed and annointed her. But their touch was dumb and voiceless, like the touch of linen, or the touch of polished wood. It came no further than the skin. But the touch of men would go much deeper, and would soil her subtlest privacy." [217]

She is defiantly chaste and even at twenty-six has the "same delicate virgin belly" [217] as the goddess whom she serves. And she knows herself - not in a philosophical sense, so much as in a gynaecological manner; she's womb-conscious in the same way that male protagonists in Lawrence's fiction are often said to be phallically conscious:

"She never confused an outside thrill or a suffusion of surface excitement with the other, the soft expanding joy of the womb [...] She was a woman of the old world, skilled in her own sensations. [...]
      The woman, skilled in Isis and the lore of Isis, knew her womb in lotus-bud, knew it deep, deep under the waters, knew its mystery, its curved, down-bent head, its uncoloured virgin petals, its thick, strong, softly-massive heart of golden adhesive fecundity. Dark-green like a water-snake, submerged like a root, obscure and even fearsome, the deep lotus-bud of the shadowy womb." [219]

I don't quite know what to make of a passage like this - and it seems that Lawrence doesn't expect most (if any) of his readers to understand it either: "This is Isis lore, which Isis women forever will understand, and only they." [220]

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Escaped Cock', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Part II, pp, 141-63. See also Appendix I (c) Part II: early manuscript version, pp. 216-30. 

Readers interested in an earlier post inspired by the woman of Isis should click here. 

Are You Pervin on Me? (Notes on The Blind Man, by D. H. Lawrence)

Tito Victoriano: Blind Man
redbubble.com

I.

There's something creepy and disturbing about Maurice Pervin. As his name suggests, he's a man born beneath a black star and full of the potential for violence; "like an ominous thunder-cloud".

So at home is Maurice within the invisible world of touch, that whilst his loss of sight during the war is something of an inconvenience, it doesn't profoundly affect him: "Life was still very full and strangely serene for the blind man, peaceful with the almost incomprehensible peace of immediate contact in darkness."

Indeed, so content is Maurice to live in connubial intimacy with his wife Isabel and perform menial farm work - milking the cows, attending to the pigs and horses - that he "did not even regret the loss of his sight".

His fits of depression and dark moods were rooted, therefore, in something else; in his hypersensitivity, perhaps; or his resentment of those individuals such as his wife's old friend Bertie Reid, who were less passionate but more quick-witted than he; "a resentment which deepened sometimes into stupid hatred".

II.

Bertie was a barrister and a man of letters; "a Scotchman of the intellectual type" - ironical, sentimental, and - one suspects - a repressed homosexual. For whilst he is extremely fond of his close female companions, he has no desire to marry any of them:

"He was a bachelor, three or four years older than Isabel. He lived in beautiful rooms overlooking the river, guarded by a faithful Scottish man-servant. And he had his friends among the fair sex - not lovers, friends. So long as he could avoid any danger of courtship or marriage, he adored a few good women with constant and unfailing homage, and he was chivalrously fond of quite a number. But if they seemed to encroach on him, he withdrew and detested them. 
      Isabel knew him very well, knew his beautiful constancy, and kindness, also his incurable weakness, which made him unable to ever enter into close contact of any sort. He was ashamed of himself, because he could not marry, could not approach women physically. He wanted to do so. But he could not. At the centre of him he was afraid, helplessly and even brutally afraid. He had given up hope, had ceased to expect any more that he could escape his own weakness." 

As noted, Maurice hates him: hates his Scottish accent; hates the other man's complacency. But perhaps his hatred wasn't born of homophobia, but, rather, his own homosexual desire: "He hated Bertie Reid, and at the same time he knew the hatred was [...] the outcome of his own weakness."


III.

To cut a short story even shorter, Bertie has come to visit the Pervins ...

After an uncomfortable meal and some small talk by the fire over drinks, Maurice excuses himself, taking his leave of Isabel and her friend in order to attend to some farm business. Several hours pass and, worried that it was getting late, Isabel asks Bertie to go find her absent husband:

"Bertie put on an old overcoat and took a lantern. [...] He shrank from the wet and roaring night. Such weather had a nervous effect on him [...] He peered in all the buildings. At last, as he opened the upper door of a sort of intermediate barn, he heard a grinding noise, and looking in, holding up his lantern, saw Maurice, in his shirt-sleeves [...] holding the handle of a turnip-pulper. He had been pulping sweet roots, a pile of which lay dimly heaped in a corner behind him."

The blind man is stroking a sinister-looking half-wild grey cat, as if it were some kind of familiar. He asks Bertie about the nature of the scar upon his face: "'Sometimes I feel I am horrible,' said Maurice, in a low voice, talking as if to himself. And Bertie actually felt a quiver of horror."

What happens after this isn't quite clear: one suspects that Lawrence wants us to read between the lines. Maurice asks Bertie if he might touch him and the latter, although a man who instinctively shrinks from physical contact, gives consent in a small, submissive voice: "But he suffered as the blind man stretched out a strong, naked hand to him."

Maurice lays his hands on Bertie's head:

"closing the dome of the skull in a soft, firm grasp [...] then, shifting his grasp and softly closing again, with a fine, close pressure, till he had covered the skull and the face of the smaller man, tracing the brows, and touching the full, closed eyes, touching the small nose and the nostrils, the rough, short moustache, the mouth, the rather strong chin."

Maurice also allows his hands to wander south; he grasps the shoulders, the arms, the hands of the other man - and who knows what else? "He seemed to take him, in the soft, travelling grasp." Lawrence could have chosen to stop here, but, instead, he intensifies this scene of queer eroticism; Maurice asking Bertie to touch his eyes, with his young and tender hands:

"Now Bertie quivered with revulsion. Yet he was under the power of the blind man [...] He lifted his hand, and laid the fingers on the [...] scarred eyes. Maurice suddenly covered them with his own hand, pressed the fingers of the other man upon his disfigured eye-sockets, trembling in every fibre, and rocking slightly, slowly, from side to side. He remained thus for a minute or more, whilst Bertie stood as if in a swoon, unconscious, imprisoned."

The scene culminates thusly:

"Maurice  removed the hand of the other man from his brow, and stood holding it in his own.
      'Oh my God,' he said, 'we shall know each other now, shan't we?  We shall know each other now.'
      Bertie could not answer. He gazed mute and terror-struck, overcome by his own weakness. He knew he could not answer. He had an unreasonable fear, lest the other man should suddenly destroy him. Whereas Maurice was actually filled with hot, poignant love [...] Perhaps it was this very passion [...] which Bertie shrank from most."


IV.

Whether the knowledge that fills Maurice with delicate fulfilment is carnal in nature is debatable, making the question of whether this is or is not a scene of sexual abuse impossible to answer with certainty. But it's certainly a traumatic and shattering experience for poor Bertie who is desperate to escape throughout, and who returns to the house in silence looking haggard and with eyes that were glazed over with misery:

"He could not bear it that he had been touched by the blind man, his insane reserve broken in. He was like a mollusc whose shell is broken."
  
Maurice, meanwhile, is elated - and, curiously, so is Isabel who takes her husband's hand in both hers and whispers to him "'You'll be happier now, dear.'"

One almost wonders if she hasn't set the whole thing up; knowing the cause of her husband's depression to be frustrated homosexual desire; inviting her vulnerable friend to visit - a man whom she secretly despised and felt contemptuous of; sending Bertie out to the barn in the dark of night like a lamb to the slaughter, so that her husband might find some degree of (momentary) satisfaction.    

What this tale illustrates is that Lawrence's notion of touch or phallic tenderness isn't always loving and consensual; it can involve submission, it can involve violence, it can involve all manner of perversity and fetishistic behaviour, and it can even include rape (be it of middle-aged women by Mexican bullfighters, or physically reserved young men by powerful figures like Maurice Pervin who exist as towers of darkness upon the face of the earth).


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Blind Man', in England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 46-63. All lines quoted here are from this edition, but note that an online version of the story can be read by clicking here. Readers who are interested can also find an earlier version of the tale, from 1918, in The Vicar's Garden and Other Stories, ed. N. H. Reeve, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 175-91. 

For an alternative reading of the story see Abbie Garrington, 'D. H. Lawrence: Blind Touch in a Visual Culture', Ch. 5 of Haptic Modernism, (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Dr. Garrington argues that Maurice Pervin's disability gives him 'access to other modes of seeing - the potential for spiritual insight, and an ability to attune himself to the tides of his own blood'. She also considers the character in his phallic aspect and as a kind of living sculpture.

Finally, readers might also be interested in a short film adaptation of 'The Blind Man' (dir. Travis Mills, 2011) made by Michael Coleman, Jason Cowan, McKenzie Goodwin, Travis Mills and Jess Weaver (Running Wild Films): click here.

The Biophilia Hypothesis and Notes on Nature-Deficit Disorder

Biophilia: 
Tree-Sky-Horse-Mud-Hay-Child Assemblage 

(SA/2019)

I. Opening Remarks

According to figures, only ten per cent of children in the UK still play regularly in natural areas and green spaces, whilst forty per cent never play outside at all. This not only shapes their attitudes to the environment and to wildlife in later life, but also has serious health implications ...

In the final chapter of her book Wilding (2018), Isabella Tree makes reference to the research evidence showing the links between natural play and wellbeing on the one hand, and between disconnection from nature and numerous physical, psychological and social ills on the other:

"Measurements of blood pressure, pulse rates and cortisol levels of young adults demonstrate a decrease in anger and an increase in positive mood when walking in a nature reserve, while the reverse is true walking in an urban environment. Low levels of self-discipline, impulsive behaviour, aggression, hyperactivity and inattention in young people all improve through contact with nature."

"For Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson the human connection with nature - something he calls 'biophilia', the 'rich, natural pleasure that comes from being surrounded by living organisms' - is rooted in our evolution. [...] The need to relate to the landscape and to other forms of life - whether one considers this urge aesthetic, emotional, intellectual, cognitive or even spiritual - is in our genes. Sever that connection and we are floating in a world where our deepest sense of ourselves is lost."

"Stephen and Rachel Kaplan take the psychological implications of this dislocation further. Their research [...] focuses on the burden that living outside the natural world imposes on the brain. Modern life, loaded with stimuli, multiple forms of communication and information requiring rapid processing and selection, demands what they call 'directed attention' from the right frontal cortex of the brain - the same part of the brain that appears to be affected in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This kind of focused attention is tiring and requires enormous effort to block out distractions, resulting in symptoms of impatience, planning impairment, indecision and irritability. The natural environment, on the other hand, holds our attention indirectly, providing what the Kaplan's call 'soft fascination', a broad absorption that demands little or no effort and provides plenty of space for reflection and mental recovery."


II. Nature-Deficit Disorder

I don't know if all (or any) of the above is true and it's worth pointing out that nature-deficit disorder - a term coined by the American author and journalist Richard Louv in 2005 is not officially recognised by the medical profession (indeed, Louv himself concedes that NDD is merely intended to serve as a convenient fiction via which we can describe certain conditions that we see manifested in contemporary society) - but one suspects that there's at least some truth in it; and certainly enough to justify further research in this area.     

Those who pooh-pooh the idea that it's beneficial for children to spend as much time as possible playing outdoors in a natural environment with grass, trees, insects and dogshit - who think such an environment is too dangerous for children unless accompanied by a supervising adult and are happier seeing little Johnny and Jane safely indoors surrounded by electronic media - seem to be in denial about what might be described as a crisis of childhood in our times; a crisis that includes everything from allergies and eating disorders to knife crime and substance abuse. 

Of course there are other (often very complex) reasons for these things. Arguably, we live in a dysfunctional culture, so a few hours spent playing in the park or fishing in a stream isn't going to provide a panacea. But I do believe that flowers and birdsong (and even just stroking next-door's cat) make happy and that happy children, as a rule, don't self-harm or want to stab other people. 


III. The Biophilia Hypothesis

Finally, I'd like to say a little more about E. O. Wilson's biophilia hypothesis, which, as we noted above, is the idea that human beings possess an innate tendency to seek out connections with nature and affiliate with other forms of life.* Romanticism and vitalism are, if you accept this, not just cultural and philosophical dispositions, but sensibilities encoded in our DNA. 

Again, I'm not entirely convinced of this: no one has yet identified a nature gene as such. Nevertheless, it's true, I suppose, that most people like flora and fauna; otherwise why would they buy indoor plants and voluntarily keep pets? The rich diversity of forms that compose the natural world is universally appreciated by artists, poets, and children who delight in colours, shapes, sounds, and other physical properties. And I suppose the spiritual reverence for animals and other natural phenomena in human cultures worldwide might also be cited as evidence for biophilia. 

However, what's also true is that modern humanity defines itself by its divergence and difference from nature and prides itself on its intimate relationship with machinery and technology and has spent the last 250 years or so (i.e. since the industrial revolution) wilfully exploiting natural resources, destroying habitats and exterminating species. **

Indeed, what is modern nihilism if not this ecocidal drive?  It might be suggested that the only thing more innate than our biophilia is our biophobia. People like to think they are defined by love, but actually it's fear, hate and cruelty that have shaped human history.

Notes:

* The term biophilia wasn't coined by Wilson: it was first used by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in his 1973 work The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Fromm defined it as 'the passionate love of life and of all that is alive'. Whilst I share this love, I also understand (after Nietzsche) that being alive is just a very rare and unusual way of being dead, so don't make such an absolute binary distinction, nor do I disprivilege, disparage, or denigrate the non-living objects that make up the vast majority of things in the universe.  

** It's important to note that biophilia isn't always juxtaposed in opposition to technophilia; that some theorists insist that man's technological drive is itself an extension of human evolution (and is therefore perfectly natural). Heidegger famously writes of a more original revealing outside of technological enframing, that would allow man to experience the call of a more primal truth, but as Keith Ansell-Pearson points out this appears to underestimate "the extent of technology's invention of the human animal and the nature and extent of its investment in mankind". See Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994) and Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life, (Routledge, 1997), p. 153.        

See:

Isabella Tree, Wilding, (Picador, 2018), pp. 295, 297. 

Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Algonquin Books, 2005).

Richard Louv, The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder, (Algonquin Books, 2011)

Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia, (Harvard University Press, 1984).

Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson (eds.), The Biophilia Hypothesis, (Island Press, 1993). 


For a related post to this one on why the language that speaks us as children matters, click here.

On Why the Language That Speaks Us as Children Matters

A young child revealed by nature

I.

The language that we dwell within is of crucial importance. 

For ultimately, such language speaks us, as Heidegger famously noted.* In other words, language mediates the existential unfolding or disclosedness of Dasein. 

Further, in as much as our actions are determined via linguistic categories, language is also in a very real sense world-creating. It certainly does more than merely represent the world, or communicate ideas. Language makes things possible; including the magical space/time of childhood.

II.

One of the most alarming chapters in Isabella Tree's recent book relates not to the destruction of the British countryside and the wildlife thereof over the last fifty years, but to what she refers to as the extinction of childhood experience in terms of the natural world.

Echoing the concerns of Margaret Atwood and Andrew Motion, she reminds us of how the editors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary have set about replacing words including acorn, buttercup, and conker with terms such as attachment, blog and chat room.** Whilst this obviously reflects a "shift in children's perceptions and activities over the past few decades", it might also help explain why so many young people seem so fucked-up today.   

For according to the author, much that is troublesome in their behaviour is rooted in a lack of empathy with (and knowledge of) nature. Not only are they unable to name trees, flowers, birds and insects, but they themselves are no longer spoken by the language of the natural world. Instead, they are enframed by technology and spoken by the language of social media and the digital workplace.

Thus, whilst they have profiles on Facebook and Instagram, they have a void where their souls used to be. And the more they intervene technology between themselves and the Outside, the more they numb and atrophy their own senses, denying themselves the opportunity to enter into a more natural revealing and to experience, as Heidegger would say, "the call of a more primal truth".    

A young child enframed by technology

Notes

*Heidegger first formulated the idea that language speaks [Die sprache spricht] in his 1950 lecture 'Language', trans. into English by Albert Hofstadter in Poetry, Language, Thought (Harper and Row, 1971). See also: 'The Question Concerning Technology' and 'The Way to Language', in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994).

**Margaret Atwood and Andrew Motion were among a group of 28 authors so concerned about the removal of words associated with the natural world from the OJD that they wrote to the publishers, calling for the decision to be reversed. Whilst recognising the need to introduce new words, they found it worrying that 'in contrast to those taken out, many are associated with the interior, solitary childhoods of today'. I share this concern and don't believe this is simply a romantic (or nostalgic) desire to project memories of my own childhood onto today's youngsters. I also agree with Motion, the former poet laureate, who argues that by discarding so many landscape words and animal names, the editors of the OJD 'deny children a store of words that is marvellous for its own sake' and that their defence - that lots of children now have zero experience of the natural world - is absurd; for dictionaries 'exist to extend our knowledge, as much (or more) as they do to confirm what we already know'.  

For further details, see Alison Flood, 'Oxford Junior Dictionary's replacement of 'natural' words with 21st-century terms sparks outcry', The Guardian (13 Jan 2015): click here to read online.

Isabella Tree, Wilding, (Picador, 2018), p. 294. 

For a sister post to this one - on biophilia and nature-deficit disorder - please click here.  

Reflections on the Death of a Sparrow (In Memory of Jodie Chesney)

A Trace of Feathers: Derridean Ornithological Absence 
(SA/2019)

I.

Yesterday was witness to an act of savage beauty as a sparrowhawk made a meal of one of the birds that live in the tangle of blackberry, honeysuckle and rose bush in the back garden, leaving nothing behind but a trace of feathers that gave rise to philosophical thoughts of presence and absence ... 

II.

The ontological terms presence and absence have a long history within Western philosophy, usually with the former being privileged over the latter, referring as it does to being in a positive sense; i.e., that which is directly at hand in a non-mediated manner and therefore linked to reality and to truth (the ultimate form of presence for Plato).

Derrida, however, famously deconstructs such thinking and shows how absense is not merely parasitic upon presence - is not merely a form of non-being there - and how presence is in fact always mediated and, indeed, reliant upon absence (i.e., being rests upon non-being, not vice versa).    

In so doing, Derrida is developing Heidegger's work on the metaphysics of presence, as set out in Being and Time (1927); attacking notions of origin, for example, and showing how the relationship between presence and absence is much more subtle - and much more playful - than many thinkers have realised.

For Derrida, representational absence is itself a form of presence; thus traces of feather, for example, speak not merely of a poor sparrow's death and absence, but also of their life and continued presence-as-absence. 

And, in a similar manner, we might suggest that the purple ribbons presently tied all over Harold Hill - on trees, fences, lamp posts, etc. - speak of Jodie Chesney's continued presence-as-absence ...    

III.

Nothing makes sense of the death of a sparrow - nor of a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl murdered as she sat in a park with her boyfriend, listening to music. But, thanks to the work of writers such as Derrida, it's at least possible to think beyond a dreary binary distinction that assigned value exclusively to presence and made of absence something inferior, something false. 

Feathers and ribbons don't do away with or disguise the fact of death. But such traces provide poignant reminders of lives once lived and allow us to know that the dead are with us still ...

Thanks to Símón Solomon for suggesting a Derridean perspective on the subject matter of this post.

Oostvaardersplassen: Animal Utopia or Animal Concentration Camp?

Rewilding means ... reacquainting ourselves with death

I.

Even Isabella Tree has to admit that the experimental nature reserve established by Dutch ecologist Frans Vera - which inspired her and her husband's own Knepp Wildland Project - is controversial as well as extraordinary and may very well determine whether rewilding is taken seriously as an idea or written off as a green fantasy.  

Covering an area of 23 square miles, the Oostvaardersplassen is established on land that was only recently reclaimed from a huge freshwater lake. Part wetland and part a dry area, the former, with its large reedbeds, is home to a great many waterbirds as well as other animals that thrive in an aquatic environment. 

It's the dry zone, however, with its starving four-legged inmates, that attracts the controversy ...


II.

Before the establishment of the reserve, the dry area was a nursery for willow trees and there were soon hundreds of seedlings sprouting up all over. This led to concern that a dense woodland would quickly develop, significantly reducing the value of the habitat for wildlife that requires open space.

And so, excited by Vera's theories to do with forest history and the role played by grazing animals in habitat creation, the park introduced a number of large herbivores, including primeval-looking Konik ponies, magnificent red deer, and dark-coated Heck cattle with their sharp, curved horns (and Nazi associations). 

These animals, it was hoped, would encourage the development of an ecosystem and flat, grassy landscape thought to resemble those that existed on European river banks and deltas before human influence, allowing biodiversity to flourish.  The plan was to keep the beasts out in the open all year round, living as close to an authentic life in the wild as possible. For minimal intervention was the name of the game at Oostvaarderspassen.

Initially, the numbers introduced to the reserve were modest; 32 Heck cattle in 1983; 20 Konik ponies in 1984; and 37 red deer in 1992. Again, the idea was to allow populations to grow naturally and, with no predators present, that's exactly what they did. Indeed, the animals multiplied faster than anticipated; soon there were hundreds of ponies and cattle and thousands of deer. 

And then, of course, during the first severe winter, they started to die-off just as rapidly - and in full view of the public. Unfortunately, the sight of starving animals and decomposing bodies being fed on by carrion, isn't one which modern Europeans are emotionally prepared for. Inevitably, there were angry protests from animal lovers concerned about cruelty and Vera received hate mail and death threats. Some compared Oostvaardersplassen to Auschwitz ...      

III.

To be fair, there are legitimate criticisms to be made of this project; perhaps it was irresponsible to adopt such a laissez-faire approach to animal welfare in what is, ultimately, an enclosed reserve, limited in size, built upon flat, exposed land with very little natural shelter, in a part of the world where winters can be extremely harsh.

Ultimately, Oostvaarderspassen is not the Serengeti or the Okavango Delta in Botswana! It's too small and impoversished a space to simply allow large animals to breed willy-nilly and without the possibility of being able to migrate and seek out new food sources.   

Having said that, I'm glad to know that Frans Vera is unrepentant (and addresses many of the criticisms and concerns directly):

"'Yet again, our view of nature is being dictated by the conventions of human control. The baseline for the welfare of farm animals is being applied to animals living in the wild [...] The fact that animals live in the Oostvaardersplassen have a free life in a natural environment - they are not cooped up in some factory farm; they aren't pushed around by humans every day; they have normal sex rather than artificial insemination; they have a natural herd structure allowing calves to stay with their mothers; they can graze and browse what they are designed to eat, not what is artificially concocted for them by the farming industry - none of this seems to matter. The fixation is solely on their death not the quality of their lives.
      In particular, people believe these deaths are numerous and "unnatural" because there is a fence around the reserve preventing the animals from migrating in search of food - but cyclical die-offs happen even in the migrating populations of Africa. And in places where animals cannot migrate [...] the dynamic is the same. Starvation is the determining factor. It is a fundamental process of nature.'" 

As a thanatologist, I think that's true: that all life rests upon death. Nevertheless, public outcry in the Netherlands and elsewhere has forced a change of policy at the Oostvaardersplassen. Now animals deemed to be on their last legs or suffering too much, are shot and the bodies of the ponies and cows taken away to be cleanly incinerated.

Only the deer - since they are categorised as fully wild animals - are left to rot and be eaten by the foxes, rats, crows, beetles, and bacteria in a picnic of life and death ...

See: Isabella Tree, Wilding, (Picador, 2018), p. 69.

For a related post to this one - in praise of the Knepp Farm Project - click here.