Reflections on the Verb to Be

To stamp Becoming with the character of Being - 

that is the supreme will to power ... Nietzsche

 

 

I've seen it said that fascism begins with the verb to be. And, in fact, I may even have used the phrase myself in order to conclude a past post with a polemical punch line [1]. Whether it's true or not is, of course, debatable.  

 

However, it's certainly the case that false (and often pernicious) beliefs derive from mistaken values that are rooted in language rather than any underlying reality; something that Nietzsche demonstrates in his writings on metaphor and grammar (the latter defined as the presence of God within language) [2].   

 

Thus it is that I'm extremely wary of anyone who in wishing to declare their existence or express their identity asserts: I am (X,Y, or Z) in an ontologically sincere manner (i.e., unaware of the game they're playing). 

 

And I really loathe that Broadway musical number composed by Jerry Herman and famously recorded by Gloria Gaynor - I Am What I Am [3] - and which has since become a global gay anthem, regrettably reinforcing (the paradox and irony of) queer essentialism and the even more regrettable consequences that follow from the belief that sexual identities are innate and come with certain immutable characteristics or necessary attributes.

 

I can't help thinking that such idealism gives rise to all kinds of reductive, reified, discriminatory, and extremist ideologies - which returns us to where we began: fascism begins with the verb to be. Which is unfortunate, particularly if D. H. Lawrence is right and Hamlet's question is still the one that preoccupies us and the ache for being remains the ultimate hunger [4].  

 

Still, as every good ascetic will tell you, there's no need to heed every ache and pain and surrender to every yearning; I seem to recall that Aleister Crowley once adopted the admirable practice of cutting his arm with a razor every time he said 'I' and took false pride in this word [5]. 

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] Actually, it was the recently published post of 1 August 2022 - 'Dead Dreams Fly Flags' - click here. 

 

[2] See Twilight of the Idols, where Nietzsche writes: "I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar." Walter Kaufmann's translation of this text can be found in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Penguin, 1982), p. 483. 

 

[3] 'I Am What I Am' was a song featured in Jerry Herman's Broadway musical La Cage aux Folles (1983). It was recorded by disco queen Gloria Gaynor and released as single in the same year, quickly becoming one of her biggest hits. The song also appears on the 1984 album I Am Gloria Gaynor (Silver Blue Records). Click here to watch Ms Gaynor perform a live version of the song at an awards ceremony in Germany in December 1984.

 

[4] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Manifesto', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 218. 

[5] In 1920, Crowley and followers moved to Sicily and founded a community that would operate on the principles set out in The Book of the Law. The Abbey of Thelema, as it was known, was basically a restored farmhouse, not far from the beach and next to the ruins of an ancient Roman temple. Here, daily rituals were performed and all social conventions abandoned. Any one who used the word 'I' was obliged, like the Great Beast himself, to self-administer a cut on their forearm with a razor blade. It's possible that this practice was inspired by Crowley's reading of Nietzsche and that his hope was that Thelemites might resurrect the greater intelligence of the body, which does not speak its selfhood, but, rather, physically enacts or performs it. 

      See 'Of the Despisers of the Body', in Part One of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  

I Shall Speak of Geist, of Flame, and of Glimpses

Glimpse of a goddess (2017) by Syd Mills (Vetyr)

See: V's art on tumblr.com 

Buy: on inprnt.com

 

 

I. 

 

One of my favourite English words of German origin is glimpse.

 

Whilst most people understand it simply to mean a brief or partial view - to catch a quick look, perhaps in passing, of something or someone - it has a more poetic and philosophical resonance for those with ears to hear ...

 

 

II. 

 

D. H. Lawrence, for example, was fascinated by the word glimpse and often used it in the verses found in The Nettles Notebook, suggesting that aspects of divinity are revealed in the faces and forms of people when they are momentarily unaware of themselves:

 

When men and women, when lads and girls are not thinking,

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

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

you may see glimpses of the gods in them. [1]

  

It's this glimmer of godhood which gives human beings their more-than-human beauty; which makes the flesh gleam with a kind of radiance or the bright flame of being:

 

O, if a flame is in you, be it so!

When your flame flickers up, and you flicker forth in sheer purity

for a moment pure from all conceit of yourself, and all after-thought

you are for that moment one of the gods [...] [2]

 

Without this flamy element, we cannot become who we are, says Lawrence.   

 

 

III.

 

German philosopher Martin Heidegger would surely appreciate what Lawrence writes here. For he too wrote of flame (as the being of spirit) [3] and he also privileged the word Blick, which I would translate as glimpse, but which is given here as glance:

 

"In the glance [im Blick] and as the glance, what is essencing enters into its own illumination. Through the element of its illumination, the glance shelters back in the glancing whatever it catches sight of; at the same time, glancing likewise guards in illumination the hidden darkness of its provenance as what is unilluminated." [4]   

 

A glimpse is thus a kind of lightning flash in which the truth of being is revealed. 

 

In other words, it provides what Heidegger describes as an insight into that which is. And that's important: for as long as we do not experience what is, then "we can never belong to what will be" [5].     

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'All sorts of gods', The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 579. 

      See also the related verses 'Glimpses' [579], 'For a moment' [579-580], and 'Man is more than homo sapiens' [581-82]. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Be it so', ibid., p. 581.   

 

[3] Derrida picks up on the idea that in German Geist ist Flamme (rather than breath, as it is in Greek and Latin); see Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, (University of Chicago Press, 1989). 

      Readers of Nietzsche may also recall at this point his famous closing line to the poem 'Ecce Homo': Flamme bin ich sicherlich! The poem can be found in 'Joke Cunning, and Revenge', Nietzsche's prelude of rhymes to The Gay Science.       

 

[4] Martin Heidegger, 'The Turn', from the 1949 Bremen Lecture series Insight Into That Which Is, see Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, (Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 70.  

[5] Ibid., p. 72. 

Little Hell Flames: On D. H. Lawrence's Poppy Philosophy

Bright Red Poppy (SA/2021)

 

 

This morning, a large bright red poppy has burst into flame at the top of my garden and it naturally triggers thoughts of Sylvia Plath's famous short verse* and, of course, D. H. Lawrence's philosophical remarks on the flower in his Study of Thomas Hardy** ...

 

Whilst for Plath the red poppy is a symbol both of pain and the release from pain (of sleep, of death), for Lawrence, the poppy reminds us that there is more to life than the will to self-preservation; that man - like flower - achieves his consummation or fourth-dimensional splendour by wasting himself, with no thought of the morrow.   

Even an old man, afraid of the coming winter, who warns the young against behaving like a "reckless, shameless scarlet flower" [8], can't resist watching as the poppy unfolds into being. For he knows in his innermost heart, where there is no fear, that the poppy's blaze of colour is what matters most; that even "the latent seeds were secondary" [8] and that without its outrageous redness, it is just another herbaceous plant growing wild by the roadside.  

 

And it is better that we too blossom like the poppy, rather than "linger into inactivity at the vegetable, self-preserving stage [...] like the regulation cabbage, hide-bound, a bunch of leaves that may not go any farther for fear of losing market value" [12]. For if we cannot flower into being, then we will thrash destruction about ourselves until we are rotten at heart. 

Lawrence concludes:

"The final aim of every living thing, creature, or being is the full achievement of itself. This accomplished, it will produce what it will produce, it will bear the fruit of its nature. Not the fruit, however, but the flower is the culmination and climax [...] 

      And I know that the common wild poppy has achieved so far its complete poppy-self, unquestionable. It has uncovered its red. Its light, its self, has risen and shone out, has run on the winds for a moment. It is splendid. The world is a world because of the poppy's red. Otherwise it would be a lump of clay. [...] I tremble at the inchoate infinity of life when I think of that which the poppy has to reveal, and has not as yet had time to bring forth." [12-13]  

 

 

Notes

 

* I'm referring here to 'Poppies in July', rather than 'Poppies in October'. But both poems can be found in Ariel (Faber and Faber, 1965), Plath's second book of verse, published two years after her death and edited (somewhat controversially) by Ted Hughes. (In 2004, a new edition of Ariel was published which for the first time restored Plath's own selection and arrangement of the poems.)  

 

** D. H. Lawrence, 'Study of Thomas Hardy', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press,1985), pp. 1-128. Page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. Note that although I only quote from chapter I, Lawrence it still singing the praises of the red poppy coming into bloom in chapter II: 

 

"His fire breaks out of him, and he lifts his head, slowly, subtly, tense in an ecstasy of fear overwhelmed by joy, submits to the issuing of his flame and his fire, and there it hangs at the brink of the void, scarlet and radiant for a little while, imminent on the unknown, a signal, an out-post, an advance-guard, a forlorn, splendid flag, quivering from the brink of the unfathomed void, into which it flutters silently [...]" [18]    

A Brief Note on the Question of Scale in the Work of D. H. Lawrence

Okay, one last time: these are small, 

but the ones out there are far away.

 

 

As a mortal being, man is a creature of time and space. That is to say, one bound by certain limits and defined by certain coordinates and measurements. Man, therefore, is not so much the measure of all things, as measured by all things and Lawrence insists on the importance of man knowing his limits; of accepting that he ends where his fingers and toes stop. 

 

Having said that, Lawrence also asserts that man has a transcendent quality and is like a rose; "perfected in the realm of the absolute, the other-world of bliss" [RDP 9]. When we blossom into singular being, we do so off the scale; "absolved from time and space" [RDP 9]. 

 

That’s why Lawrence hates talk of the average man or woman, perfectly cut to size, and rejects ideals of equality and social perfection. The average, he says, is a pure abstraction; "the reduction of the human being to a mathematical unit" [RDP 63]. 

 

However, Lawrence certainly believes in a scale of values and what Nietzsche termed an order of rank. Every man and every woman may be a star, but they exist in relation to one another and must fall into place according to their status: "The small are as perfect as the great, because each is itself and in its own place. But the great are none the less great, the small the small. And the joy of each is that it is so." [RDP 103] 

 

Thus, there’s a very real social scale operating within the Lawrentian universe, only he insists that it’s a natural hierarchy. There must, says Lawrence, be a system of some sort and there must be different classes; "either that, or amorphous nothingness" [RDP 111]. And the individual’s place within this system is determined by the degree of power - or life - that they manifest in the world: "The only thing to do is to realise what is higher, and what is lower, in the cycles of existence." [RDP 352] 

 

This has nothing to do with size or even physical strength, but everything to do with vitality or what Lawrence sometimes calls vividness. A tiny ant, for example, belongs to a higher cycle of existence than a giant redwood because it is more alive and, if it comes to a contest, "the little ant will devour the life of the huge tree" [RDP 357]. 

 

Similarly, this is why Hepburn is right to insist to Hannele – much to her irritation – that, ultimately, he is greater than even the tallest mountain [Fox 137-38].

 

 

See:

D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Lines quoted are from the following four essays: 'Love', 'Democracy', Education of the People', and 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine'.

 

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Captain's Doll', in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 1992). 

 

 

Notes 

 

The image is from an episode of Father Ted entitled 'Hell' [S02/E01], dir. Declan Lowney, written by Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, in which Ted uses some toy cows to try to explain issues of scale and perspective to Dougal whilst on holiday in a caravan. The episode originally aired on 8 March 1996. Click here to watch the iconic scene on YouTube.  

 

This post was inspired by Catherine Brown's presentation - 'D. H. Lawrence and the Sense of Scale' - to the D. H. Lawrence Society (14-10-20).

Reflections on the Typewriter 1: The Case of Martin Heidegger

Heidegger at his desk sans typewriter 

I mentioned in a note to a recent post that Heidegger was no fan of the typewriter; that he believed it tore writing away from the domain of the hand, which, along with the word from which it sprang, is the essential distinction of Dasein.

It is neither coincidental nor accidental, says Heidegger, that modern man - enframed as he is by technology - should sit before a keyboard and write with a machine (first the typewriter, then the computer). Now the word is no longer able to come and go by means of the writing hand; it's processed and passed along by mechanical forces, becoming merely an item of information and communication. This not only endangers thinking, it threatens the destruction of the world. 

Today, says Heidegger, the handwritten text is not only regarded as antiquated, it is undesirable; something which, full of individual character, disturbs the homogeniety of the professional and commercial world and disrupts the ability of the reader to read quickly with the eye alone. The person who still writes by hand today is seen as either a loser, a madman, or a rebel; carrying a pen is almost as suspect as carrying a concealed weapon.

When writing was withdrawn from the origin of its essence, concludes Heidegger, and transferred to the machine, "a transformation occurred in the relation of Being to man" - and this wasn't a change for the better, no matter what advantages or conveniences were gained.

Should we, therefore, abandon the typewriter and the computer and the mobile phone with which we text and tweet and begin again to write by hand? Or is it not already too late; has technology not become so entrenched in our history and evolution - so much part of ourselves - that it is now of little or no importance that a few eccentrics choose to renounce and avoid it?

See: Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 80-81 and 85-86. Click here to read the relevant sections online. 

To read part two of this post on Derrida, click here. 

To read part three of this post on Nietzsche, click here.  

D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Cioran on Sex Appeal and the Beauty of Flames

Image: Desktop Nexus

I. Sex on Fire 

Just as for Lawrence sex and beauty are one and the same thing, so too is being something he always conceives in terms of fire, or what he calls the god-flame, burning in all things. Indeed, Lawrence ultimately conflates terms so that his erotico-aesthetic and ontological speculations form a unified metaphysics.

Thus it is, for example, that Mellors characterises his illicit relationship with Connie in terms of a little forked flame that they fucked into being.

And thus it is that Lawrence asserts in a late article that whilst he doesn't quite know what sex is, he's certain that it must be some sort of fire: "For it always communicates a sense of warmth, of glow. And when the glow becomes a pure shine, then we feel the sense of beauty."

This communicating of warmth and beauty is what Lawrence understands by the term sex appeal, something which he believes to be a universal human quality and not just something belonging to the young and conventionally attractive. In a typically Lawrentian passage, he writes:

"We all have the fire of sex slumbering or burning inside us. If we live to be ninety, it is still there. Or, if it dies, we become one of those ghastly living corpses which are unfortunately becoming more numerous in the world.

      Nothing is more ugly than a human being in whom the fire of sex had gone out. You get a nasty clayey creature whom everybody wants to avoid.

      But while we are fully alive, the fire of sex smoulders or burns in us. In youth it flickers and shines; in age it glows softer and stiller, but there it is." 

I quite like this (re)definition of a golem as a human being in whom the fire of sex has been extinguished and who communicates only a cold, ugly deadness (unfair and as meaningless as it may be). 

And I like the idea of fire calling to fire and of sex appeal kindling a sense of joyful warmth and optimism. Lawrence is right, the loveliness of a really lovely woman in whom the sex fire burns pure and fine not only lights up her whole being, but transforms the entire universe. Such a woman - extremely rare even in a world of numerous good-looking girls and cosmetic enhancement - is an experience.  

Lawrence concludes:

"If only our civilization had taught us how to let sex appeal flow properly and subtly, how to keep the fire of sex clear and alive, flickering or flowing or blazing in all its varying degrees of strength and communication, we might, all of us, have lived all our lives in love, which means we should be kindled and full of zest in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of things …

      Whereas, what a lot of dead ash there is in life now."

II. Light My Fire

I don't know if Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran read Lawrence when young - his obsessions led him towards German and French thinkers, rather than English novelists - but there are certainly quasi-Lawrentian resonances in his early work for those of us familiar with the writings of Lawrence.

Thus, like Lawrence, Cioran was interested in love in all its forms, particularly the concrete and monogamous love between man and woman which he took to be the quintessential form; not only in its sexual aspect, but as a "rich network of affective states". Love, born not of suffering, but of sincere generosity, is what Cioran most cherishes.

And, like Lawrence, Cioran ties his idea of love to beauty, being, and to fire. Man's sensitivity to beauty, he writes, intensifies as he approaches the joy that love brings. And in beauty "all things find their justification, their raison d'être".

Further, beauty allows us to conceive of things as things and to accept existence as is: "To place the world under the sign of beauty is to assert that it is as it should be [...] even the negative aspects of existence do nothing but increase its glory and its charm." This, of course, is a profoundly Nietzschean as well as a Lawrentian idea.

Beauty, concludes Cioran, may not bring salvation, "but it will bring us closer to happiness" and to the point where we can make a total affirmation of life. And what is more beautiful than the nakedness of flames, dancing in darkness:

"Their diaphanous flare symbolizes at once grace and tragedy, innocence and despair, sadness and voluptuousness. [...] The beauty of flames creates the illusion of a pure, sublime death similar to the light of dawn."

It's not only moths, it appears, that are transfixed by candlelight and dream of a fiery climax to their lives ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). See the famous letter from Mellors to Connie with which Lawrence closes the novel.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Sex Appeal', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Often known as 'Sex Versus Loveliness', this article can be read online by clicking here. 

E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (the University of Chicago Press, 1992). See: 'Enthusiasm as a Form of Love' (75), 'The Beauty of Flames' (88), and 'Beauty's Magic Tricks' (119). All lines quoted above from Cioran are taken from these three sections.

Readers interested in earlier posts that compare and contrast Lawrence's work with that of Cioran on questions to do with becoming-animal and becoming-ash, can click here and here.

Musical bonus #1: click here. Musical bonus #2: click here. I must admit that I don't much care for either of these (hugely overrated) songs, but readers of a more hippie-persuasion will doubtless enjoy listening to them once more.