Horses, Horses, Horses, Horses!

Horses, horses, horses, horses! [1]

I.

 

Yesterday morning, I was in a central London café sipping a mint tea when, suddenly, from the other end of the street, a commotion was generating ... 

 

I looked at my companion, who wanted to run. But we stayed sitting as a pair of terrified horses - including a white horse drenched in blood - galloped past, causing chaos as they collided with vehicles and shocked observers [2].

 

And not only did I hear Patti Smith singing from out of the remote past, but I remembered also something D. H. Lawrence once wrote: "While horses thrashed the streets of London, London lived." [3]

 

 

II.

 

Today, still upset at seeing such noble beasts in obvious distress, I ironically went with a friend to the Horse Hospital, to take another look at the artwork of Gee Vaucher, which, to be fair, is better than I first thought (even if the overtly political nature of the work does get a bit tiring).

  

However, the thing that really caught my attention was a nude female mannequin, posing provocatively, wearing a horse's head mask and standing before a large red plastic bin at the top of the ramp that leads to the first floor ... 

 

As my friend, a longtime member of the kink community, who was distinctly unimpressed by Vaucher's work amusingly remarked: I may not know much about art, but I know what I like.

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Fig. 1: Patti Smith photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe on the cover of her album Horses (Arista Records, 1975): click here to listen to the three-part track 'Land' (part one: "Horses" / part two: "Land of a Thousand Dances" / part three: "La Mer(de)"). 

      Fig. 2: A mannequin with a horse's head was one I took at the Horse Hospital earlier today.

      Fig. 3: Quaker (the dark horse in the foreground) and Vida (the white horse bleeding profusely), taken in central London yesterday.  

 

[2] This sounds as if I'm recounting a nightmare, but it actually happened. Apparently, five military horses were spooked and bolted when building materials were dropped from height at a construction site in Belgravia, next to where they were on a training exercise. For a BBC news report, click here.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 102. 

 

 

The Goddess, the Whore, and the Policewoman (Notes on D. H. Lawrence's Apocalypse)

Hans Burgkmair the Elder's depiction of Babylon the Great;
Mother of Prostitutes and Earthly Abominations, etc.
One of a series of woodcuts for Martin Luther's translation of the New Testament (1523)

Coloured and uploaded to Wikipedia by Shakko (2008)

According to D. H. Lawrence, if the ancient Jews hated pagan gods on the one hand, then, on the other, they "more than hated the great pagan goddesses" [120]. Which is why the author of the Book of Revelation found it tricky trying to reconcile the overtly pagan figure of the woman clothed with the sun with his own religious misogyny.

This wonder-woman, writes Lawrence, "was too splendidly suggestive of the great goddess of the east, the Great Mother" [120], for John of Patmos. So, whilst he reluctantly allows her into the Bible, he makes sure she is soon chased off into the wilderness by a dragon and presents us with the alternative figure of the Scarlet Woman, whom we are encouraged to curse and call vile names, rather than revere. 

As Lawrence notes, this marks a real turning point in the text:

"There is a great change. We leave the old cosmic and elemental world, and come to the late Jewish world of angels like policemen and postmen. It is a world essentialy uninteresting, save for the great vision of the Scarlet Woman, which [...] is, of course, the reversal of the great woman clothed in the sun". [120]

He continues:

"Only the great whore of Babylon rises rather splendid, sitting in her purple and scarlet upon her scarlet beast. She is the Magna Mater in malefic aspect, clothed in the colours of the angry sun, and throned upon the great red dragon of the angry cosmic power. Splendid she sits, and splendid is her Babylon." [121]

Alas, the exiling of the goddess, with her feet upon the moon and crowned with the stars of heaven, and her replacement with the Scarlet Woman - magnificent as she may be holding her golden cup filled with the wine of sensual pleasure - has had negative consequences for us all - but particularly women.  

For women are not only obliged to deal with the virgin/whore dichotomy that these myths help to entrench within our thinking, but they are also the ones who remain most bitterly trapped, according to Lawrence, in the folds of the Christian Logos:

"Today, the best part of womanhood is wrapped tight and tense in the folds of the Logos, she is bodiless, abstract, and driven by a self-determination terrible to behold. A strange 'spritual' creature is woman today, driven on and on by the evil demon of the old Logos, never for a moment allowed to escape ..." [126]

Worse, she has lost her nakedness and is condemned to wear a police-woman's uniform: "Let her dress up fluffy as she likes, or white and virginal, still underneath it all you can see the stiff folds of the modern police-woman's uniform ..."* [127]

I'm not sure if that's true, or fair, or even if I quite know what Lawrence is driving at here, but on that note I'll say evening all and close the post ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. 

* Of course, some readers might find that thought to their liking: click here for a post on the fetishistic appeal of women in uniforms

On Lunacy

The Moon: lovely to look at but ineffective

Still, today - even in Parliament - there are people who subscribe in all seriousness to the so-called lunar effect. In other words, they believe there's a magical correlation between the Moon and human biology and behaviour. As above - so below, as those with a Hermetic leaning like to say ...

However, a considerable number of scientific studies have found no evidence to support this belief. Thus, despite the insistence of poets, occultists, filmmakers, and various lunatics, it seems that the light of the silvery Moon does not make some individuals go crazy and others become excessively hairy.

Nor does the Moon control menstruation in the same way it controls the tides and Camille Paglia's claim that a woman's body is "a sea acted upon by the month's lunar wave-motion", is laughable. For whilst it's true that women's bodies are (like men's bodies) mostly water, so is it also true the Moon only affects open bodies of water - not water contained in bodies (and even if this weren't the case, there'd be an issue of scale to consider).

So, sorry Camille, but moon, month and menses are not synonymous and do not refer to one and the same phenomenon. It's simply coincidental that the menstrual cycle in women and the lunar cycle are both 28-days in length - and, in fact, even that's not quite the case; for often the length of the former varies from woman to woman and month to month, whilst the length of a synodic period is actually a consistent 29.5 days.

If it's surprising to find Ms. Paglia perpetuating lunar mythology in relation to female sexuality having built her model of feminism upon biology and constantly stressing the importance of hormones, it's no surprise to discover D. H. Lawrence was a great exponent of such baloney, believing as he did that the Moon is "the mistress and mother of our watery bodies".

Lawrence also upheld the popular belief that the Moon is somehow intimately related to questions of madness and suicide, particularly with reference to modern individuals who have, he says, lost the Moon. For it is the Moon which governs our nervous consciousness and soothes us into serenity when we are mentally agitated or disturbed:

"Oh, the moon could soothe us and heal us like a cool great Artemis between her arms. But we have lost her, in our stupidity we ignore her, and angry she stares down on us and whips us with nervous whips."

Thus, according to Lawrence, it's the the angry Moon which is responsible for young lovers committing suicide; "they are driven mad by the poisoned arrows of Artemis: the Moon is against them: the Moon is fiercely against them. And oh, if the Moon is against you, oh, beware of the bitter night, especially the night of intoxication."

To be fair, even Lawrence knows that this sounds like nonsense. He insists, however, that's because we're idiots. If only we opened ourselves up once more to the cosmos, then we'd understand that the Moon is a not just a dead lump of rock with an iron core, but a "globe of dynamic substance, like radium or phosphorus, coagulated upon a vivid pole of energy" and that there exists "an eternal vital correspondence between our nerves and the Moon".

Break this relationship, says Lawrence - though I'm not sure how one might do so, anymore than one might counteract the pull of gravity simply by refusing to acknowledge its reality - and the Moon will have her revenge, like a cruel mistress.

The problem is that whilst Lawrence's lunacy sounds harmless enough, Quentin Meillassoux has shown how such correlationism has crept into and corrupted all post-Kantian philosophy making objects conform to mind - something, ironically, that Lawrence loathes and fights against elsewhere in his work.

Ultimately, it's not a question of wanting to disconnect or come out of touch with the universe; rather, it's about acknowledging the latter exists without us ...


See: 

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

D. H. Lawrence Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980).

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2008).

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990).