Paradise is in the Palm of Your Hand: Notes on Wank Clubs

Illustration by Simon Abranowicz 
 GQ (Feb 26, 2019)

I wrote - jokingly - in a recent post that if they ever open an academy of masturbation then the following line from D. H. Lawrence (in Latin) would make an excellent motto above the main entrance and on the school crest: Paradise is in the palm of your hand.

Now someone writes to tell me that whilst they don't know of any such academies, there are, in fact, a growing number of wank clubs springing up in cities here in the UK and in the US. And to provide textual support for his claim, he has kindly provided the following link to a recent article in GQ magazine on why heterosexual males are increasingly forming and/or joining circle jerk societies or masturbation networks: click here. 

Unsurprisingly, the article is framed within all the usual touchy-feely language; group wanking is said to be powerfully liberating; transforming a traditionally solitary and shameful vice into an affirmative expression of masculinity and a communal bonding experience that allows men to explore their sexual orientation and identity in a safe and supportive space. 

Maybe it is: maybe it does. Or maybe that's over-egging the pudding somewhat and the simple fact is that perversions give pleasure. Whatever the case, one wonders why the individuals who join such clubs can't simply take up some other hobby, sport, or pastime in the company of other men - like fishing, for example (and no, that's not a typing error).

For homosociality needn't involve getting your cock out and masturbating, watching others masturbate, or engaging in mutual masturbation with strangers - although, note, I'm not saying it shouldn't and nor am I judging anyone who likes to engage in sexual games involving exhibitionism, voyeurism, onanistic fantasy, and/or bi-curiosity.

If you like that kind of thing - or even enjoy giving brojobs - then that's fine with me; but please, cut the crap surrounding such activities; wanking doesn't empower, set free, or provide a transgressive and healing form of transcendental fulfilment. These are as much myths as the stories that Victorians liked to tell themselves about masturbation causing madness, blindness, or hairy palms.      

That said, wank clubs do, I suppose, accelerate the queering of culture, counter homophobia, and increase the sale of lube ...

On D. H. Lawrence's Objection to Pirated Books and Counterfeit Emotions

I. 

As Michael Squires reminds us, A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" originally consisted of a brief expository essay in which Lawrence takes on the pirates who had moved quickly to produce various counterfeit editions of his controversial novel, which had been published privately, in July 1928.   

Later, Lawrence radically expanded the essay in order to defend the work from critics and censors - whom he despised more than the pirates - and offer a "final, eloquent statement of his belief" [1] in an authentic model of sexuality and the importance of what he termed phallic marriage.

I'll comment on these ideas shortly, but I'd like to begin by discussing Lawrence's skirmish with Jolly Roger ... 

II. 

Towards the end of 1928, Lawrence became aware that Lady C. had been pirated, as unauthorised versions of the work began appearing in New York, London, and Paris, much to his irritation. 

He decided the best thing to do as a countermeasure would be to bring out a new, inexpensive paperbound edition of his own. This French edition, which came with the original short introduction mentioned above ('My Skirmish with Jolly Roger') - appeared in May 1929 and quickly sold out. 

But what, we might ask - apart from the loss of royalties (and Lawrence wasn't indifferent to this issue) - was his problem with the pirate books? 

 

In A Propos, he objects at first purely on aesthetic grounds; they are either cheap and inferior or gloomy and depressing looking. But that's rather unconvincing coming from someone who, just five years earlier, had written of his contempt for the "actual corpus and substance" of the book as an actual object; i.e., as a published volume that is marketed and put on sale:

"Books to me are incorporate things [...] What do I care for first or last editions? I have never read one of my own published works. To me, no book has a date, no book has a binding.

      What do I care if 'e' is somewhere upside down, or 'g' comes from the wrong fount? I really don't." [2]  

So there's obviously something else going on ... And that something else is to do with the question of authenticity: In brief, Lawrence hates the pirate books because they're forgeries and facsimiles. In other words, they're not the real deal as authorised (and signed) by him; they're counterfeit copies, or replicas as he calls them. 

And that's what troubles him: just as, later in A Propos, it becomes clear what troubles him most of all about modern expressions of sexuality and human emotion is that they are, in his view, fake and fraudulent. Lawrence contrasts emotions as (false) mental representations with real feelings that belong to the body: 

"Today, many people live and die without having had any real feelings - though they have had a 'rich emotional life' apparently, having showed strong mental feeling. But it is all counterfeit." [3]

Above all else, it's love that is a counterfeit feeling today and reduced to a stereotyped set of behaviours. Which means, says Lawrence, that there is no real sex - it's been killed, or, at the very least, perverted into a thing that is cold and bloodless. And that's a catastrophe because, for Lawrence, sex is an impersonal, cosmic principle that not only keeps men and women in balance, but holds the very heavens in place.    

III.

What, as readers in 2019, are we to make of this?

Personally, I can only echo Michel Foucault who ends the first volume of his History of Sexuality with a quotation from Lawrence's A Propos calling for the "full conscious realisation of sex" (i.e. sex thought completely, honestly and cleanly). [3]

Foucault responds to this passage, in which Lawrence would have us believe our ontological future is at stake, with amused irony:

"Perhaps one day people will wonder at this. They will not be able to understand how a civilization [...] found the time and the infinite patience to inquire so anxiously concerning the actual state of sex; people will smile perhaps when they recall that here were men - meaning ourselves - who believed that therein resided a truth every bit as precious as the one they had already demanded from the earth, the stars, and the pure forms of their thought ..." [4]

Notes

[1] Michael Squires, Introduction to A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press,1993), p. lv.

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Bad Side of Books', Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 75-6.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 311 and 308.

[4] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, (Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 157-58. 

Readers interested in this topic might like to read an earlier post on Lady Chatterley's postmodern lover: click here.

See also: Chris Forster, 'Skirmishing with Jolly Roger: D. H. Lawrence, Obscenity, and Book Piracy', Ch. 3 of Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity, (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 61-88. Forster cleverly - and, in my view, rightly - argues that Lawrence "frames his critique of piracy as one more expression of the corrupt state of [inauthentic] modernity" [71]

Musical bonus: Adam and the Ants, 'Jolly Roger', from the album Kings of the Wild Frontier (CBS, 1980): click here.  

Reflections on the Vulture 1: Lawrence Doesn't Like Them

I.

Vultures are large scavenging birds of prey. Although they rarely attack healthy animals, they may move in for the kill if they chance upon a wounded or sick individual.

Found in both the New and Old World, many think of them as secretly belonging to a dark and disgusting Underworld due to their penchant for feasting on the decaying flesh of corpses until their crops bulge and they vomit like an Ancient Roman. They're able to safely digest putrid carcasses infected with dangerous bacteria thanks to exceptionally corrosive stomach acid.
 
Their looks don't do them any favours either; particularly the bald head, devoid of feathers. And - just to ensure their repulsiveness - nor does their habit of pissing on themselves in order to keep cool and clean (the uric acid kills those bacteria picked up from walking through blood and guts).  

II.

According to D. H. Lawrence, the vulture was once an eagle who decided that it was the high point of evolution and thus no longer in need of any further change; it would henceforth remain as it was for all eternity, in a state of static perfection.

The vulture, in other words, is a perfectly arrested egoist as well as a foul carrion-eater; fixed in form and corrupt of soul. It should be noted that Lawrence says the same of the baboon and the hyaena too, but here I'm only interested in his particular fear and loathing of vultures: shameless birds with "obscene heads gripped hard and small like knots of stone clenched upon themselves for ever".     

His ornithophobic vision is a crescendo of vulture hatred:

"So the ragged, grey-and-black vulture sits hulked, motionless, like a hoary, foul piece of living rock, its naked head and neck sunk in, only the curved beak protruding, the naked eyelids lowered. Motionless, beyond life, it sits on the sterile heights.
      It does not sleep, it stays utterly static. When it spreads its great wings and floats down the air, still it is static [...] a dream-floating. When it rips up carrion and swallows it, it is still the same dream-motion, static, beyond the inglutination. The naked obscene head is always fast locked, like stone.
      It is this naked, obscene head of a bird [...] that I cannot bear to think of. When I think of it, I never live nor die, I am petrified into foulness."

As we'll discover in part two of this post, other poets have a rather less negative view of the vulture - and some even manage to write about the actual animal, without immediately assigning it a symbolic role within their own philosophy.

Lawrence, however, can never resist lapsing into metaphysics. Indeed, the argument has been made that ultimately - for all his sensitivity to the otherness of birds, beasts and flowers - Lawrence only has two great objects of concern: (i) himself and (ii) language.

Amit Chaudhuri is right to suggest that Lawrence never accurately describes creatures at all, nor directly touches on them as things in themselves. Rather, he recreates and imitates them for his own artistic and philosophical amusement, assembling a menagerie of textual mannequins and symbolic beasts.  

See: 

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). 

Amit Chaudhuri, D. H. Lawrence and 'Difference', (Oxford University Press, 2003).


To read part two of this post - on Robinson Jeffers and his poetic vision of the vulture - click here. 

Reflections on the Death of a Rhinoceros

Sudan the rhino (1973 - 2018) 

Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros, is dead [insert sad face emoji here].

The 45-year-old beast, who had lived almost his entire life in captivity, was euthanised by his keepers yesterday after suffering from a number of age-related complications.

Now there are just two females left alive; Najin and Fatu, both his offspring and which, like Sudan, live at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, under 24-hour armed guard in order to protect them from poachers. 

It's pretty much the end of the line, then, for this subspecies of rhino.

Having said that, there are ongoing attempts to bring them back from the very brink of extinction using the latest IVF techniques; i.e. harvesting eggs from Najin and Fatu and fertilizing them with supplies of Sudan's frozen semen. The resulting blastocysts would then be implanted in the wombs of female southern white rhinos.   

One might wonder, however, if there's any real point in the scientific resurrection of a species if the animals are simply going to be studied as specimens and displayed as living fossils ...?

I genuinely wish there were tens of thousands of these magnificent creatures still charging about in the wild. But, sadly, that's no longer a possibility in the world today. And so maybe the next best thing is to let them die with dignity and then rest in peace in the great void of non-being. 

For even if the rhino vanishes forever, the earth will keep on turning. For the rhino is, like man, but one expression of the incomprehensible, as Birkin would say. There will be further utterances and life will continue to evolve in magnificent new ways when they've gone - and when we've gone - just as it did after the death of the dinosaurs.

Perhaps the rhino, like the ichthyosaurus and the dodo, was one of the mistakes of creation - or, rather, let us say, an interesting but ultimately flawed experiment; lacking in the fourth dimensional perfection of the bluebell and the butterfly.

And so, to paraphrase the immortal words of Ogden Nash:

Farewell, farewell, you old rhinoceros,

I'll hope for something less prepoceros.

See: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Birkin discusses his thoughts on the evolution of life with Gerald in Chapter V and, later, with Ursula in Chapter XI.