Under the Radiation of New Skies: On the Spirit of Place and the Question of Migration

D. H. Lawrence: Untitled ink sketch (1929)

They walked a new earth, were seized by a new electricity, and laid in line differently. 
Their bones, their nerves, their sinews took on a new molecular disposition in the new vibration.

      They breathed a savage air, and their blood was suffused and burnt. 
A new fierce salt of the earth, in their mouths, penetrated and altered the substance of their bones. 
Their subtlest plasm was changed under the radiation of new skies, 
new influence of light, their first and rarest life-stuff transmuted.

I. Genius Loci

One of the great ironies of Lawrence's savage pilgrimage was that it taught him the importance of a homeland. For it seems that the freedom to wander around the world isn't ultimately as fulfilling as belonging to a people "polarized in some particular locality".

Despite what some ethno-nationalists claim, Lawrence isn't simply subscribing to a völkisch ideology of blood and soil. He is rather affirming the Romantic belief that different places have a different vital effluence and are aligned with different stars.

The British Isles, for example, possess a "wonderful terrestrial magnestism" (over and above "the indisputable facts of climate and geological condition") and it is this which has made the British people what they are. Thus, for Lawrence, race is ultimately more a metaphysical question of spirit, than it is a biological one to be discussed in terms of heredity. 

But the spirit of place doesn't only determine customs, beliefs, behaviours, etc., it also fatally undermines attempts at globalism and the dream of an ideal, homogenised humanity living as one. In this respect it might better be thought of as a kind of malin génie:

"The spirit of place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister spirit of place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens ..." 


II. On the Law of Transubstantiation

What, then, of the millions of migrants from Africa and the Middle East who are driven northwards by invisible winds?* Even if they can be assimilated into European society, can they ever feel comfortable subject to a demonic spirit belonging to an alien continent and beneath the radiation of new skies?

Probably not. There is an unthinkable gulf between them and us and crossing the Mediterranean in a little boat isn't the major problem they face (deadly as this journey can prove to be). And it doesn't really matter how they think and feel about things, or what they do, once here.

Ultimately, however, the malevolent reality of Europe will disintegrate their old way of being. Thus, it's not our values and human rights that will triumph, it's the inhuman spirit of place. Uprooted from their native lands, planted in new soil, they can do nothing but become-other.

Become, that is to say, future Europeans, who will be as different to their present selves as their present selves are to us today. This is Lawrence's law of transubstantiation and it offers the hope that from out of Völkerchaos a new order and a new people will slowly emerge, as "through hundreds of years, new races are made [and] people slowly smelted down and re-cast."

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Spirit of Place', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). I am quoting from both the final version of the essay (1923) and the first version (1918-19); see pp. 13-19 and 167-179. 

D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1997). The paragraph that closes part I of this post is found on p. 57 of this work.

*Although most commentators insist that migrants come in order to escape violence and poverty, Lawrence argues that it is inadequate in times of great crisis and upheaval to accept such a plausible explanation. The desire to improve one's material circumstances is never enough in itself to uproot a people that is strongly attached to its home and way of life. People only migrate en masse when gripped by the vital magnetism of a faraway land, and do so without knowing why or whither: 

"It is our fatal limitation, at the present time, that we can only understand in terms of personal and conscious choice. We cannot see that great motions carry us and bring us to our place before we can even begin to know. We cannot see that invisible great winds carry us unwitting, as they carry the locust swarms, and direct us before our knowledge, as they direct the migrating birds." [SCAL 170]. 

Some readers will almost certainly object to this; seeing it, for example, as a mystical attempt to dehumanise migrants and strip them of their agency. But - with certain reservations - I think there's something in what Lawrence says here and that it behoves us all to make a greater effort at perceiving the inhuman (or daimonic) forces that control us and ultimately shape our fate.  

Becoming-Other (Part 2): Alien Sympathy and the Poetic Imagination (With Reference to the Work of D. H. Lawrence)

Marc-Édouard Nabe: Lawrence sauvage (2009)

marcedouardnabe.com

In an essay entitled 'On Being a Man', Lawrence argues that it's very easy to know and to understand the other person as a person, but not so easy to know and to understand them as an impersonal Other who exists as a force of pure alterity and as an actual being in the world, independently of one's self.

For this requires what he calls a thought-adventure - an instinctive-intuitive process that starts in the blood and not in the mind and involves the taking of a double risk: "First, [one] must go forth and meet life in the body. Then [one] must face the result in [one's] mind."

To illustrate what he means, Lawrence asks us to imagine him sitting on a train. A stranger enters the compartment and is instantly recognizable as a white, middle-class, middle-aged, Englishman. With just a quick glance, says Lawrence, he can tell a great deal. The strangeness of the stranger - and thus the adventure of knowing him - is therefore strictly limited.

But what if the stranger is none of the above; what if, for example, they belong to a different race? Then, says Lawrence, he is unable to proceed quite so confidently with his characterization of the stranger:

"It is not enough for me to glance at a black face and say: He is a negro. As he sits next to me, there is a faint uneasy movement in my blood. A strange vibration comes from him, which causes a slight disturbance in my own vibration. There is a slight odour in my nostrils. And above all, even if I shut my eyes, there is a strange presence in contact with me.

      I now can no longer proceed from what I am and what I know I am, to what I know him to be. I am not a nigger and so I can't quite know a nigger, and I can never fully 'understand' him. 

      What then? It's an impasse.
      Then, I have three courses open. I can just plank down the word Nigger, and having labelled him, finished with him! Or I can try to track him down in terms of my own knowledge. That is, understand him as I understand any other individual. 

      Or I can do a third thing. I can admit that my blood is disturbed, that something comes from him and interferes with my normal vibration. Admitting so much, I can either put up a resistance, and insulate myself. Or I can allow the disturbance to continue, because, after all, there is some peculiar alien sympathy between us."

When it comes to the question of race relations, this, I think, is an absolutely crucial passage. If we wish to overcome common prejudice and the urge to stereotype, then, like Lawrence, we must allow our sense of self to be disrupted by the otherness of the Other and admit the peculiar alien sympathy between us.

This doesn't mean cultural appropriation, wearing black face, and pretending we are all one and the same under the skin, as idealists such as Boglarka Balogh pretend when they posit an ahistorical model of Humanity. It means, rather, exercising our poetic sensibility - as Lawrence exercises in an extraordinary verse found in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), in which he effects a becoming-negroid beneath the radiation of a dark, tropical sun:


Behold my hair twisting and going black.
Behold my eyes turn tawny yellow
Negroid;
See the milk of northern spume
Coagulating in my veins
Aromatic as frankincense.


The mistake that Balogh makes is that instead of peculiar alien sympathy, she substitutes an ideal form of moral sympathy that is rooted in her own ego. In other words, whilst she genuinely feels very sorry for people who are less privileged than herself, she lacks the ability to feel with them or be radically altered by the otherness of others. She can only see her own smiling face reflected in everyone and everything.

Ultimately, black people don't want white people to love them; for it's not a question of eros. And they don't care if white people fail to understand them; for neither is it a question of logos. They simply want a little respect and to be accorded what's proper to them as men and women; in other words, racial ethics is a question of thymos. 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'On Being a Man', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 214-15. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Tropic', Birds, Beasts and Flowers, (1923). This poem can be read in full online by clicking here.

Those interested in Lawrence's important concept of sympathy might like to see the essay on Walt Whitman in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), in which he critiques the idea of merging into One Identity and exposes the danger of confusing sympathy with the Christian ideals of love and charity. The passage concerning the right conduct of a white poet with regard to a negro slave, obviously has particular relevance to our discussion above. Click here to read online.

To read part one of this post on the case of Boglarka Balogh, click here.

In Praise of Stalking (The Case of Sophie Calle)

Stalking - be it of an actual kind in what remains of and passes for the real world, or a virtual activity conducted online - doesn't have a great reputation. Doubtless this is due to the fact that stalking is often related to harassment and intimidation and because it can be not only predatory but creepy in character; no one, it seems, likes to be followed and spied on by strangers (even in a world of Facebook and CCTV).

And yet, is it not possible that we might understand stalking not in terms of physical and psychological abuse, but rather as a fascinating instance of neo-courtly love in an age after the orgy ...?

For it is certainly the case that many stalkers feel a strong and genuine bond of affection for the person they choose to secretly shadow and, in essence, there's a striking similarity between medieval erotico-spiritual practice and this illicit postmodern phenomenon: both are a highly specialized expression of a love that is all too human and yet transcendent; passionate and yet restrained; true and yet founded upon fantasy. 

The stalker, whilst accepting the independence of the object of their desire, nevertheless attempts to bring themselves to the attention of the latter by various means and often goes to extraordinary lengths in order to prove the seriousness of their ardour and commitment. They may or may not be hoping for sexual intimacy, but this hardly seems to be the point and it would be mistaken, I think, to posit this as the ultimate goal; there are certainly easier ways to get a date or get laid, even for the most incompetent or inadequate of would-be lovers. 

        

Indeed, in certain cases of stalking there is no sexual motive involved at all: consider the famous case involving French conceptual artist, Sophie Calle. Here is an example of a woman stalking a man - known as Henri B. - without having any particular interest in him and certainly no erotic aspirations or expectations. It was Calle's indifferent determination to follow Henri B., without motive or any identifiable type of psychoses or neurotic compulsion, that made her story so intriguing to Jean Baudrillard, who - as we shall see - interprets her actions in terms of his theory of seduction (i.e. an ironic and fatal game of hide-and-seek to do with power, appearance, reversibility, loss of will, and being led astray). 

For those of you who don't know this case, the facts are these:

After stalking several strangers through the streets of Paris, Calle met Henri B. at a party. He told her he was travelling to Italy the following day and so Calle decided to go to Venice herself and track him down. After phoning round a large number of hotels, she finally found him. Then, suitably disguised, she spent the next few days following Henri B. around the city; photographing his movements and encounters with others and recording details in a diary alongside her own musings. 

Eventually, Henri B. spotted and confronted his stalker and the game was effectively over - although Calle still contrived to arrive back in Paris at the same time as her object in order to get one last secret picture of him disembarking from the train on which he had made his way home. She eventually published the black-and-white photographs accompanied by a text as Suite vénitienne (1983).

The book also included a typically insightful essay by Baudrillard entitled 'Please Follow Me' which contains the following passage on the seductive joy of becoming-other and becoming-object:

"To stalk the other is to take charge of their itinerary; it is to watch over their life without them knowing it. It is to ... relieve them of that existential burden, the responsibility of their own life. Simultaneously, she who follows is herself relieved of responsibility for her own life as she follows blindly in the footsteps of the other. And thus a wonderful reciprocity exists in the cancellation of each existence, in the cancellation of each subject's tenuous position as a subject. Stalking the other, one replaces them, exchanges lives, passions, wills, transforms oneself in the other's stead. It is perhaps the only way one can finally find fulfilment."


Note: An English edition of the Calle/Baudrillard work, trans. Danny Barash and Danny Hatfield, is available from Bay Press (1988).