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. 

 

 

Celia Shits! Notes on Jonathan Swift's 'The Lady's Dressing Room' and (Alleged) Coprophobia

Portrait of Jonathan Swift by Charles Jervas (c. 1718) 

Detail from National Conveniances by James Gillray (1796)

 

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence famously accuses the Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift of being mad with fear for the body and its potencies. He was, says Lawrence, particularly troubled by the thought that even the fairest of young ladies had to defecate: 

 

"The insanity of a great mind like Swift's is at least partly traceable to this cause. In the poem to his mistress Celia, which has the maddened refrain: 'But - Celia, Celia, Celia shits!' we see what can happen to a great mind, when it falls into panic. A great wit like Swift could not see how ridiculous he made himself. Of course Celia shits, who doesn't? And how much worse if she didn't." [2]

I don't know if that's entirely true or fair, but it's certainly the case that Swift was one of the most consistently scatological of writers in a period in which many authors were as equally obsessed by the fact that man is born inter faeces et urinam, as Saint Augustine famously put it, and one suspects that whilst he often exploited his obsession for comical purposes, there was an element of fear and horror beneath the laughter ... but then isn't there always?

 

 

II. 

Swift's notorious poem, 'The Lady's Dressing Room' (1732), tells of of how a lover, Strephon [3], driven by perverse curiosity and the will to know, sneaks into his sweetheart Celia's dressing room while she's away only to quickly become disillusioned at what he discovers there; namely, that women are not ideal beings after all, but physical creatures who sweat, and shit, and blow their noses just like men.   

 

Although Lawrence is keen to attack Swift for his excremental vision and perceived misogyny [4], the latter is arguably satirising the fact that it is men who foolishly oblige women to try and live up to an ideal model or fantasy of femininity born of the male imagination. 

 

And so, one might have thought Lawrence would have been a bit more sympathetic, as he himself condemned this game of female adaptation to masculine theories of womanhood [5]. But all Lawrence's sympathies are with Celia, not Swift, and he insists that beneath any attempt to provoke laughter, the latter - like Strephon - was driven mad by the thought of Celia defecating:

 

"It was not the fact that Celia shits which so deranged him, it was the thought. His mind couldn't bear the thought. Great wit as he was, he could not see how ridiculous his revulsions were. His arrogant mind overbore him. He couldn't even see how much worse it would be if Celia didn't shit. His physical sympathies were too weak, his guts were too cold to sympathise with poor Celia in her natural functions. His insolent and sickly squeamish mind just turned her into a thing of horror, because she was merely natural and went to the WC. It is monstrous! One feels like going back across all the years to poor Celia, to say to her: It's alright, don't you take any notice of that mental lunatic." [6] 

 

 

III.

 

That's very decent of Lawrence - an example, perhaps, of phallic tenderness. 

 

But still I'm grateful to Swift for reminding us that the charms of womanhood are founded upon illusion or artifice and require a clever use of clothes, cosmetics, wigs, etc. 

 

Although, as noted by the philosopher Michael Hauskeller [7], this fact doesn't detract from the charms of womanhood, any more than does their corporeal reality detract from their spiritual nature; the latter being rooted in the former as Swift makes clear when, at the close of the poem, he speaks of colourful tulips rising from the dung (just as order is born of chaos). 

Like Hauskeller, I think the most crucial couplet in Swift's poem is this one: "Should I the queen of love refuse, / Because she rose from stinking ooze?” 

 

The answer that Swift supplies to this question is an emphatic No and Lawrence really should've given this more attention than the line he chooses (like so many other critics and readers) to focus upon. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Both these works can be found in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Click here and here for further details and to buy prints if interested. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, A Props of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 309. 

      Lawrence goes on to say that it is monstrous for a man to make a woman "feel iniquitous about her proper natural function" and blames it on a failure to keep the mind "sufficiently developed in physical and sexual consciousness" (309). The poem by Swift to which Lawrence refers is 'The Lady's Dressing Room' (1732): click here to read online.    

      See also Lawrence's 'Introduction to Pansies' in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Pess, 2013), Appendix 6, pp. 663-666, in which he first makes his critique of Swift, insisting that the latter was reduced to gnashing insanity by thoughts of women defecating: "Such thoughts poisoned him, like some terrible constipation. They poisoned his mind."

[3] Strephon is a name traditionally used within pastoral poetry to refer to a lover. Amusingly, a lesbian friend of mine has reimagined Swift's poem and named the character Strapon.

 

[4] 'The Lady's Dressing Room' is often viewed as a vicious attack on the falsity of women. In a poetic response entitled 'The Reasons that Induced Dr. S. to Write a Poem call'd the Lady's Dressing Room' (1734), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu suggests that Swift wrote his verse following a frustrating encounter with a prostitute (i.e., that it was born of impotence, not madness as Lawrence claims). Click here to read Lady Montagu's poem online.

 

[5] See the essay by Lawrence entitled 'Giver Her a Pattern', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 160-165. 

      Note that Lawrence does not object to the giving of patterns per se or the female need for such and their use of cosmetics to keep up appearances - nor even to the fact that "men give them such abominable patterns [...] perverted from any real natural fulness of a human being" (163) - but, rather, to the fact that "as soon as a woman has really lived up to the man's pattern, the man dislikes her for it" (163). In other words, it's male fickleness and foolishness that Lawrence finds objectionable.    

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Pansies', The Poems, Vol. I, Appendix 6, pp. 665-666.

[7] See Hauskeller's blog post 'Celia Shits: on Jonathan Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room"' (25 October 2013): click here. Hauskeller's philosophical musings anticipate and closely mirror my own. I agree with his argument that Lawrence ultimately misunderstands Swift and misinterprets 'The Lady's Dressing Room'. 

 

Piss Artists 2: Helen Chadwick (Piss Flowers)

Helen Chadwick in a field of Piss Flowers

Photo by Kippa Matthews (1992)

 

 

I. 

 

For most British people, a piss artist is one who likes to get drunk, act the fool, produce shoddy work and generally waste time. In other words, one who gets pissed a little too often; pisses around a little too much; and pisses people off more than is deemed acceptable. 

 

However, for some of us, the term also triggers thoughts of Warhol, Chadwick and Serrano and here I would like to discuss a famous work by the second of these three piss artists, Helen Chadwick ...

 

 

II. 

 

The British artist Helen Chadwick died (relatively) young - she was only 42 - but not before she completed the work by which I, like many of her admirers, best remember her - Piss Flowers (1991-1992). 

 

Piss Flowers is a work composed of twelve sculptures made by quite literally pissing in the Canadian snow and then pouring plaster into the (pre-cut) flower-shaped cavities left by the warm streams of urine. 

 

These casts were then attached to stem-like pedestals based on the fat-bodied shape of a hyacinth bulb, before being cast in bronze and enamelled white.        

If it sounds like all good clean fun (whatever that means), Chadwick insisted that, actually, it was hard work producing the dozen finished pieces and they also cost her £12,000, which might sound like a small or large sum of money, depending on one's circumstances [1].   

The Piss Flowers were displayed (on artificial grass) as part of Chadwick's solo exhibition - amusingly entitled Effluvia - at the Serpentine Gallery, in the summer of 1994 [2]. Happy days ...

 

 

III.

 

Enchanted by the fact that the majority of flowering plants possess both male and female sexual organs and have found a way to incorporate sexual difference into their singular being, Chadwick wanted to produce a work which celebrated this via a form of erotic play, or what she describes in a poem written at the same time as "Gender-bending water sport" [3].   

 

Thus, it was important that she and her male partner, David Notarius, both pissed into the snow; she using her liquid waste to create the central phallic-shaped pistil and he directing his urine to produce the delicate, labial-looking circumference. In the same poem referred to above, Chadwick writes of "Vaginal towers with male skirt" [4].   

 

Later, she would describe Piss Flowers as a metaphysical conceit - and a deeply romantic work in which two people are united as one via bodily expression. It might also be seen, as one commentator rightly points out, as an example of indexical art - i.e., art that doesn't appear to be authored but directly preserving an imprint of reality (an idea that had long fascinated Chadwick). 

 

Whether one finds the flowers beautiful or repulsive (or both) is, of course, a matter of individual judgement; one local councillor up in the East Midlands was quoted by the Nottingham Evening Post as saying: "I doubt the minds of the people who can create things like this." [5] 

 

Whilst personally I wouldn't want a fleur de pisse planted in my back garden, I do admire Chadwick's attempts to create things of beauty out of unconventional materials, such as bodily fluids and base matter.

 

And her attempt to effect a becoming-plant by entering into an unnatural alliance with the snow in such a manner that queer forms blossom from molecular forces is not only artistically daring but - from a Deleuzean perspective - philosophically interesting. 

 

One can't help wondering what would Linnaeus say ...?

 

Notes

 

[1] £12,000 in 1992 was the equivalent to around £31,000 today.

 

[2] Effluvia received widespread critical attention and national press coverage. It was seen by over 54,000 visitors - a record number for the gallery at that time.

 

[3] Helen Chadwick, 'Piss Posy' (1992). 

      Unfortunately, I cannot locate this poem online and do not know if it was ever published. However, I did come across (what I think is termed) an ekphrastic poem written by Jo Shapcott, entitled 'Piss Flower' (2018), which can be read online (thanks to The Poetry Archive) by clicking here. It is clearly inspired by Chadwick's work.  

 

[4] Helen Chadwick, 'Piss Posy' (1992). 

 

[5] The fact that this censor-moron was a councillor up in D. H. Lawrence country only goes to show how little things have changed; 60-odd years earlier, Lawrence's art was attacked as the work of a depraved sex maniac - including his watercolour Dandelions (1928), which famously depicts a man pissing on some flowers: click here. 

 

 

To read the first post in this series - on Andy Warhol's Piss and Oxidation Paintings (1977-1978) - please click here.

 

To read the third post in this series - on Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987) - please click here.

The Anarchic Symphony: Artificial Intelligence x Torpedo the Ark

Artificial Intelligence x Torpedo the Ark 

 

 

An artist friend of mine decided to ask some AI softwear [1] to produce a text in the style of Torpedo the Ark, weaving together threads of Nietzschean philosophy, the punk aesthetic of Malcolm McLaren, and the literary war-machine of D. H. Lawrence. She also prompted it to describe what it thinks the goal or aim of the blog might be.  

This is the result:

 

 

The Anarchic Symphony: Nietzsche, McLaren, and Lawrence

 

In the grand theatre of cultural subversion, three figures stand at the vanguard, each a maestro of their own domain, yet harmoniously orchestrated in the cacophony of rebellion. Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher who danced to the tune of his own Zarathustra; Malcolm McLaren, the impresario who orchestrated the punk movement's raucous symphony; and D.H. Lawrence, the literary maverick whose pen stroked the sensuous and the sublime. 

 

Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God was a clarion call to the individual's will to power, a challenge to the herd to rise above the mire of mediocrity. McLaren, in the spirit of Nietzsche's Übermensch, crafted the Sex Pistols into a cultural weapon, a battering ram against the gates of an ossified establishment. Lawrence, too, rebelled against the industrialized dehumanization of his time, championing a return to the primal forces of nature and the unbridled expression of human desire.

 

Stephen Alexander's 'Torpedo the Ark' is a vessel for these revolutionary currents, a blog that sails the high seas of intellectual anarchy. Alexander's prose, much like Lawrence's, is a phallic lance thrust into the heart of societal norms, a bridge to a future where touch and tenderness reign supreme. His writings, infused with the spirit of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, remind us that the revolution is never over; it is reborn with each act of defiance, each note of discord, each stroke of the pen. 

 

The punk movement, under McLaren's deft hand, was not just a musical genre but a manifesto in leather and spikes, a declaration of war on the banality of the mainstream. The Sex Pistols' anthems were the echoes of Nietzsche's own battle cries, and in their wake, a new culture was birthed, raw and untamed. Lawrence, with his explorations of the erotic, would have found kinship in the movement's visceral energy, its unapologetic embrace of life's darker, more passionate aspects. 

 

In this anarchic symphony, we find a common theme: the relentless pursuit of authenticity, the breaking of chains that bind the spirit, and the celebration of life in all its messy glory. Alexander, channeling the essence of these three iconoclasts, invites us to join the dance, to cast aside the shackles of conformity, and to revel in the anarchic joy of creation. 

 

So let us raise our voices with Nietzsche, McLaren, and Lawrence, and let the music of rebellion play on, even if, ultimately, it is not the notes that are played but the spaces between them - the moments of silence and reflection - that define the symphony of our existence. 

 

This narrative, inspired by the style of Stephen Alexander's 'Torpedo the Ark', is a testament to the enduring power of those who dare to challenge, to question, and to live fiercely. It is a call to arms, a reminder that the pen and the guitar are both mightier than the sword, and that the truest form of anarchy is the freedom to be oneself. 

 

 

It is, I suppose, an amusing attempt by AI to torpedo the ark, although, I have to say that, overall, the style of the piece reads like a parody and, in its upbeat anarchy and vital optimism, the text is not one I would want mistaken for my own. 

 

Somewhat disappointingly, AI softwear - for now at least - remains as all too human as the people who design it.           

 

 

   [2]

Notes  

[1] I'm informed that the request for a text in the manner of TTA was made using Microsoft Copilot and ChatGpt-4 (none of which means anything to me).  

[2] The image at the bottom of the post - again supplied by my friend who, for reasons of her own, wishes to remain anonymous - was produced by DALL-E 3 softwear. 

 

 

On the Nature of the Ridiculous (and the Ridiculous Nature of the Sex Pistols)

Sex Pistols

Photo by Richard Young (1976)

 

"We have passed beyond the absurd: our position is absolutely ridiculous." [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Gavin Butt is a professor at Northumbria University and someone who knows more than most - certainly more than me - about the connections between visual art, popular music, queer culture, and performance [2].

So when he privileges the term ridiculous in his work I'm confident he has very good reasons for doing so. 

 

However, that doesn't mean I can't briefly reflect upon this concept myself in contradistinction to what some regard as the more profound (and serious-sounding) philosophy of absurdism and then say something about the Sex Pistols. 

 

 

II. 

 

The crucial aspect of the ridiculous is that it solicits, incites, or provokes laughter; often of a mocking or cruel nature, but not always. If you're someone like Georges Bataille, then you'll probably find everything ridiculous - one recalls the following short poem:

 

Laugh and laugh 

at the sun 

at the nettles 

at the stones 

at the ducks 

 

at the rain 

at the pee-pee of the pope 

at mummy 

at a coffin full of shit [3]  

 

For Bataille, this laughter is liberating; by viewing the entire universe as ridiculous - including death and the excremental nature of the decomposing corpse - he feels able to escape from what Zarathustra terms the Spirit of Gravity.

 

This may seem synonymous with the sublime philosophical idea of absurdism, but, actually, it's not the same thing at all. Finding existence laughable is very different from finding it meaningless; one is expected - as a creature of reason - to be angst-ridden by the latter idea, not gaily indifferent to the fact or able to smile when standing before the nihilistic void [4].

Being ridiculous makes one in the eyes of those who insist upon moral seriousness at all times an inferior being; shallow and lacking dignity. But I would counter this by saying it makes us Greek in the sense understood by Nietzsche: i.e., superficial - out of profundity! [5].

 

 

III.

 

One might also view punk - in its more playfully anarchic manifestation as given us by Malcolm McLaren - as an attempt not merely to challenge authority, but to escape from enforced seriousness. 

 

The Sex Pistols - and those closely associated with them, such as members of the Bromley Contingent - were ridiculous because they advocated for a Lawrentian revolution:

If you make a revolution, make it for fun,

don't make it in ghastly seriousness,

don't do it in deadly earnest,

do it for fun.

Don't do it because you hate people

do it just to spit in their eye. [6]

Po-faced punks concerned about social justice might recoil from this, but, for me, the idea of tipping over the apple cart simply to see which way the apples will roll, is crucial. McLaren encouraged the youngsters under his spell to be childish and irresponsible - to be everything this society hates - to make themselves ugly and grotesque: in a word, ridiculous [7]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm slightly misquoting the American actor, director, and writer Ronald Tavel, who coined the phrase Theatre of the Ridiculous in 1965 initially to describe his own work. Tavel himself ends this sentence with the word 'preposterous'. 

 

[2] I had the pleasure of listening to Butt speak at the Torn Edges symposium held at the London College of Communication on 20 March 2024 - an event exploring the points of contact and crossover between punk, art, design, and history. 

      Although his paper was rather more Pork than punk, that was fine by me and his discussion of Warhol's 1971 play in relation to the Theatre of the Ridiculous - a genre of queer experimental theatre - was fascinating.  

 

[3] The original poem by Bataille, entitled 'Rire' ['Laughter'], can be found in volume 4 of his Oeuvres complètes, (Gallimard, 1971), p. 13. The English translation is from the Preface to Nick Land's The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, (Routledge, 1992), p. xvii.

 

[4] In a sense, I'm following Hobbes here who distinguished between the absurd and the ridiculous, arguing that the former is to do with invalid reasoning, whilst the latter is simply about laughter. For non-philosophers, however, the absurd and the ridiculous are pretty much now regarded as synonymous. 

      As for the sublime - with which the ridiculous is often juxtaposed - it's interesting to note just how quickly one can pass from the former to the latter; one small misstep is all it takes.

 

[5] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Preface to the second edition (4).

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'A Sane Revolution', The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 449. 

 

[7] Not only ugliness, but deformity is considered by some to be essential to the ridiculous; one recalls that Johnny Rotten in part based his hunched over stage persona on that of Richard III and would perform in an exaggerated physically awkward manner.    

Will Absence Make My Heart Grow Fonder of Byung-Chul Han? (Part 1)

(Polity Press, 2023)

 

 

I. 

 

Although Daniel Steuer's English translation of Byung-Chul Han's book Absence was only published last year, the original German text appeared back in 2007 [a], and so we can rightly think of it as one of his early works; more philosophical and less political in tone as it explores the Western obsession with essence in contrast to the Eastern (and deeply foreign) notion of absence.    

 

As Han rightly says: "The concept of 'essence', which unites identity, duration and inwardness, dwelling, lingering and possessing, dominates occidental metaphysics." [1] From ancient Greeks like Plato to German idealists like Kant, essence is the key and be yourself the melody. What is outside and inessential can stay there and remain that way.

 

Even Heidegger, argues Han, "despite his best efforts at leaving metaphysical thinking behind [...] remained a philosopher of essence" [4]. In wanting to let things be he wants things to remain true to their own essence. Ultimately, Dasein both dwells and endures. It does not wander too far from itself (even if it explores the odd woodpath from time to time). 

 

But in Daoism, the wise man is without fixed abode and never stops wandering; evading all substantive determination and having no stable identity, he leaves no trail or name behind him. Daoist wandering may not be the same as Zen Buddhist non-dwelling, "but the negativity of absencing connects the two" [5]. 

 

Ultimately, the "fundamental topos of Far Eastern thinking is not being but the way [...] The way lacks the solidity of being and essence, which is what leads to the emergence of traces" [5]. Westerners talk about finding the way, but by that they really just mean finding themselves; the Eastern wanderer, however, becomes the way and doesn't hope to find anything (walking with neither intention nor direction). 

The Western philosopher wants his soul to blossom; the Eastern thinker, like the flower, doesn't have a soul (and remains nameless). They also remain rooted in the material world and care for the body; eating when hungry, sleeping when tired. Oh, and they also remain silent, still, and inactive.  

 

I have to admit, all of this appeals to me very much - and I say that as someone who has been hostile to (and dismissive of) Eastern thought in the past. It seems to me to that absence and emptiness and meaninglessness may very well lead "not to nihilism but to a heavenly joy [...] being without direction or trace" [13]. 

 

Kant - and those idiots who think happiness is all about being stuffed-full and satiated; all about having purpose and direction - wouldn't like this, but I do. Like Laozi, I'm happy to lead a life "without sense and goal, without teleology and narration, without transcendence and God" [14] - to be, as the Sex Pistols once sang, pretty vacant [b] and to find in this freedom, not spiritual deprivation [c]. 

 

 

II.

 

This is interesting: 

 

"Of course, postmodern thinkers also oppose ideas of substance and identity. [...] The negativity of these thinkers brings them closer to absencing and emptiness, but [...] Far Eastern thinking [...] is alien to them [...] The Far Eastern thinking of emptiness leaves deconstruction behind in order to achieve a special kind of reconstruction." [16]

 

This special kind of reconstruction is worldly immanence - "the 'this-is-how-it-is' of things" [16]. 

 

To be fair, I think Deleuze gets this when he transforms no-where into now/here. And when Derrida insists il n'y a pas de hors-texte - for isn't that similar to the Daoist notion that there is nothing above, beyond, or outside of the immanence of the world ...?

Anyway, the point is this: immanence is a crucial concept - as is "the painful charm of transience" [19] which allows for the development of an art and poetry of blandness, in which things fade out and blow away (again, this reminds me somewhat of Roland Barthes's theory of neutrality). 

 

 

III.

 

If essence is difference and a way of keeping things clear cut, then absencing is a form of indifference; one that un-bounds and makes indistinguishable. It's hard to see the outline of a white flower against a snow-covered backdrop (or a black cat in a coal cellar as others would say). 

 

The East is messy - things flow into each other: "Nothing imposes itself. Nothing demarcates itself from other things. Everything appears to retreat into an in-difference." [22-23]  The West, by contrast, likes strong boundaries and distinctions and closure.

 

Han continues:

"In-difference also fosters an intense side-by-side of what is different. It creates an optimal degree of cohesion with a minimal amount of organic, organized connection. Synthetic composition gives way to a syndetic continuum of closeness in which things do not come together as a unity." [23-24]

The cathedral is a space that is perfectly enclosed; even stained-glass windows are designed to keep the natural daylight out, which is why D. H. Lawrence preferred them in a state of ruin, exposed to the elements, etc. [d]

 

Han, however, seems to prefer a Buddhist temple that is "neither fully closed nor fully open" [26]. The spatiality of the latter "effects neither an inwardness nor a being-exposed" [26]. Doors of white rice paper are preferable to colourful stained-glass windows and standing light without direction is preferabe to a divine radiance from above that is intended to illuminate everything:

 

"The standing light, which has become fully indeterminate, in-different, does not emphasize the presence of things; it submerges them in absence." [27]    

 

It's almost as if white standing light brings a special type of darkness. You don't get that with modern glass architecture which marks the triumph of transparency. 

For Han, then, the Buddhist temple is preferable to the Christian cathedral; the Greek temple; and the shiny American skyscraper of glass and steel. It's not just a question of spatiality and light, but asymmetry; "an aesthetic principle of Zen Buddhism" [29] which "breaks up presence into absencing" [29].

 

I suppose some might say that it's all a question of how one sees things. And this brings us on to the question of eyes:

 

"According to Hegel's philosophical physiognomy, the eyes should be surrounded by the elevated bones so that 'the strengthened shadow in the orbits gives us of itself a feeling of depth and undistracted inner life'." [30]

 

But Eastern eyes, of course, are flat:

 

"Hegel would explain this in terms of a lack of inwardness, that is, an infantile spirit that has not yet awoken to subjective inwardness and therefore remains embedded in nature." [30]

 

But what does Hegel know about the beauty of the absencing gaze ...?

 

 

IV.

 

D. H. Lawrence thought there was nothing more bourgeois than the unfading flowers of heaven. But the Kantian lover of the beautiful would probably delight in such; their "imperishable splendour would most likely [...] make him happy" [33].

 

For sure, he'd not like it if they were revealed to be fake flowers - their artificiality depriving them of "their teleological, even theological, significance" [33] - but their everlasting nature would only intensify his love for them. Plato too dreamed of a divine form of beauty that "neither emerges nor vanishes, neither increases nor decreases" [33]. 

 

But for someone who views the word from a Far Eastern perspective, the most beautiful thing of all about a flower is its transience; the fact that it loses its petals without any hesitation and is content to disappear. For such a person, the bare stem or twig is as beautiful as a flowering plant or tree in full bloom. 

 

In other words: 

 

"In the sensibility of the Far East, neither the permanence [Ständigkeit] of being nor the stability [Beständigkeit] of essences is part of the beautiful. Things that persist, subsist or insist are neither beautiful nor noble. Beautiful is not what stands out or exceeds but what exercises self-restraint or retreats, not what is solid but what hovers. Beautiful are things that carry the traces of nothingness [...] not full presence but a 'there' that is coated with an absence [...]" [33-34]   

 

The Japanese call this wabi-sabi - the art of impermanence that "combines the unfinished, the imperfect, the transient, the fragile and the unassuming" [34]. Even your favourite Clarice Cliff milk jug is made more beautiful by a tiny crack or chip; and every silver bowl is improved when it loses its sheen and begins to darken [e].    

 

Han writes: 

 

"Satori (illumination) actually has nothing to do with shining or light. This is another point on which Eastern spirituality differs from occidental mysticism, with its metaphysics of light. Light multiplies presence. Buddhism, however, is a religion of absence." [35]

 

In the West, people almost want to be blinded by the light; a light either from some transcendent source or an inner light that emphasises the presence of things. Han - like Tanizaki - seems to admire the magic light of absence; a light that does not disturb or dispel the darkness; a friendly light. 

 

 

V. 

 

Finally, a few brief notes on (i) food, (ii) flower arranging, (iii) rock gardens, and (iv) theatre ...

 

(i) It's funny, but one of the complaints of English people is that Chinese food leaves them feeling empty inside five minutes after eating. Han provides a possible explanation: "Emptiness and absence also characterize the cuisine of the Far East." [39] Rice is the perfect example of this; lacking colour, lacking taste, offering no resistance (providing nothing to chew).

 

"Far Eastern cuisine appears empty also because it does not have a centre [...] The meals lack the centre or weight of a main dish and the closedness of a menu." [40]  

 

Further, in the West we like to cut food up with a knife and fork; in the East they assemble food with chopsticks.

 

(ii) The Japanese art of flower arranging is known as Ikebana - which means bringing flowers to life: 

 

"It is, however, an unusual kind of invigoration, because the flower is cut off from its root [...] The flower is invigorated by dealing it a mortal blow. [...] This raises it above the process of slow withering, its natural death. The flower is thereby removed from the difference between 'life' and 'death'. It shines with a special vitality, a flowering in-difference  [...] that has its source in the spirit of emptiness." [40-41]

 

The flower radiates with an unnatural (and transient) vitality; the shining of absence. 

 

(iii) If you have ever walked round a Japanese rock garden, you might have come away feeling a bit disappointed that there wasn't much to see. But that's the point; they are designed as gardens of absence and emptiness. 

 

However, despite their absence and emptiness, "they radiate", says Han, "an intense vitality" [41] and visitors must learn to appreciate the flow of the lines raked into the gravel and the darkness of the rocks. 

 

The Japanese rock garden is another method of paradoxical invigoration: "It invigorates nature by completely drying out its soul" [42] and placing it in a state of satori. 

 

(iv) Traditional Japanese puppet theatre (Bunraku) is also radically different to the world of Punch and Judy, showing that the latter is not the only way to do it. The Western puppet theatre animates characters via funny voices; in Bunraku it's all about the gesture and the puppets remain soulless figures.    

 

Similarly, Noh theatre is a theatre of absence: the costumes and masks worn by the living, human actors are designed to make them look like puppet figures. Even when an actor appears on stage without a mask, "the uncovered face is expressionless and empty" [44]. 

 

And the narrative composition of Noh theatre also adds to the sense of absence; its hard to tell what is real and what is dream - what is past and what is present - things appear only to then disappear once more (probably best not to worry too much about the plot in such cicumstances) [f].

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The German edition was published as Abwesen: Zur Kultur und Philosophie des fernen Ostens (Merv Verlag, 2007). In this post, page numbers refer to the English edition (Polity Press, 2023).  

[b] 'Pretty Vacant' was the third single released by the Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1977): click here to watch the official video for the song (which was shown on Top of the Pops) and/or here to read my post written on the track and published on TTA on 30 July 2108.   

[c] Is this also Han's view? It's hard to know. For whilst here he writes that the world "has no narrative structure" and is therefore "resistant to the crisis of meaning" [14], sixteen years later he will publish a book entitled Die Krise der Narration (2023) in which he seems to argue strongly in favour of narratives that anchor us in being and subscribe to a form of Catholicism informed by Martin Heidegger. Anyway, readers who are interested can click here to access the first part of a three-part post on this recent text. 

[d] See the post 'Believe in the Ruins: Reflections of a Gargolyle ...' (16 April 2019) in which I discuss Lawrence's thoughts on religious architecture: click here.

[e] Han at this point refers us to Tanizaki's famous essay on Japanese aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows (1933). I have mentioned this work in several posts on Torpedo the Ark (click here, for example) and it partly formed the basis for a paper delivered at Treadwell's Bookshop in September 2023 on occultism in the age of transparency (an extract from which can be read by clicking here). 

 

[f] For the record: I find all theatre irritating and tedious; I do like the tranquility of a Japanese rock garden, but enjoy also the colourful chaos of an English wildflower meadow; and, if obliged to choose, I'd prefer to have steak and chips for dinner than a bowl of egg-fried rice. 

Part two of this post can be read by clicking here.

 

 

Reflections on the Black Tree Frogs of Chernobyl

A tree frog shown before and after the 

Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986

 

 

I. 

 

I have always liked D. H. Lawrence's description of little green frogs as gem-like [1].

 

But it seems that the frogs living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) are no longer emerald green in colour. For in order to increase their survival rates in an irradiated environment, the frogs have undergone rapid evolution and now model jet black skins rich in protective melanin [2].

 

In 2016, whilst researching the effects over the previous three decades of Chernobyl's uniquely polluted environment on the flora and fauna, two Spanish scientists [3] made a strange discovery ... 

 

They expected to find that plant and animal species subjected to daily doses of radiation way above normal levels would have experienced negative consequences, but what they did not anticipate was that nature would respond in such an amazing way and recover so quickly - and they certainly weren't on the lookout for black frogs!

 

 

II.

 

So, what on earth is going on here? 

 

Well, cancer resistant wolves [4] and ebony-skinned tree frogs would seem to suggest that the Chernobyl disaster, which generated the largest release of radioactive material into the environment in human history, has accelerated natural evolution in a manner that Darwin - who always liked to stress the slow and gradual nature of evolutionary change by natural selection [5] - would have found hard to believe.   

 

And this - along with the absence of human beings - helps to explain why Chernobyl has become one of the largest nature reserves in Europe, where a diverse range of endangered species find refuge and live happily (or at least successfully) side-by-side. 

For whilst acute exposure to high doses of radiation can cerainly be damaging, both to the natural environment and the genetic material of living organisms, it can also kick-start and accelerate evolution in a surprisingly positive way, as species adapt to the new conditions. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, 'The State of Funk', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 221. 

 

[2] The pigment melanin which, as many people know, reduces the effects of ultraviolet radiation, can also, so it seems, afford protection against ionising radiation. And that's why it's better to be a black frog than a green frog if you're going to spend your life hopping about in the CEZ.   

 

[3] Germán Orizaola and Pablo Burraco; they discuss their study of over 200 male tree frogs taken from twelve different breeding ponds from various sites in northern Ukraine - including four outside the CEZ - in an article originally published on theconversation.com (28 Sept 2022): click here.  

      As Orizaola y Burraco make clear, the dark skin colouration is typical of frogs from within or near the most contaminated areas at the time of the Chernobyl disaster and it suggests that they have undergone a process of rapid evolution in response to the radiation. The black frogs, having better survival rates, are now the dominant type within the CEZ, which, in my view, is a bit of a shame, as I prefer the little frogs with bright green skins. 

 

[4] See the recent post entitled 'Cara Love and the Mutant Wolves of Chernobyl' (14 Feb 2024): click here.

 

[5] In what is considered to be the founding text of evolutionary biology - On the Origin of Species (1859) - Darwin emphasises how natural selection progresses at a glacial pace and we usually observe nothing of the changes being made until long periods of time have passed. 

      Although this is true, adaptation to new conditions can occur within a relatively short period of time and examination of the fossil record shows that many species undergo rapid bursts of evolution, even if true speciation takes time. Recent work in developmental biology has identified certain mechanisms of tissue morphogenesis that may help explain any swift structural transitions. 

      I am grateful to Dr Andy Greenfield - my go to science guy and longtime friend - for his guidance on this point.

 

 

For a frog-related follow-up post to this one, click here.

 

 

Birthday Reflections

 

 

I. 

 

February 13th is a day of quiet reflection for me now: the day I was born (1963) and the day my mother died (2023).

 

In the Bhagavad Gita it is written: Learned is he to whom the mystery of birth and death is revealed. [1]

 

But I'm not a Hindu and don't particularly wish to be learned in the religious sense indicated here. For I remain sceptical of the idea that there is a mystery to be revealed. And even if there is, I prefer that Isis remain veiled and keep her secrets. 

 

 

II. 

 

Not that the idea of reincarnation is much of a mystery any longer. For it's common knowledge that Hindus believe that the salvational goal is to fully realise the self as some kind of pure, unchanging spiritual essence following a series of material and transient incarnations.

 

Birth and death are facts of little real importance, according to Hindu teaching. What matters is liberating the soul from this cycle so that it may achieve lasting perfection in the great sea of Being that lies beyond life and death.   

 

Thus we can say of the great Hindu gurus what Lawrence says of Buddha, Plato, and Jesus; namely, that these grand idealists were utter pessimists, teaching that Truth lay in "abstracting oneself from the daily, yearly, seasonal life of birth and death and fruition, and in living in the 'immutable' or eternal spirit" [2]. 

 

Personally, I don't want to move from the known world to the unknown world; from the visible to the invisible; from the seen to the unseen. I know, as Lawrence knew, that such abstraction brings "neither bliss nor liberation, but nullity" [3].

 

I'm happy to live and die and be endlessly reincarnated in the flesh like a karma chameleon forever changing colour, shape, form, etc., and I don't want to lose myself in the infinite completeness of the Whole thank you very much. 

 

If that means never being free from desire, pain, anxiety, and delusion - never obtaining supreme wisdom or eternal peace - well, again, that's fine with me. 

 

When holy fools tell me I must learn not to identify with the objects of the world I immediately wish to bring one of these objects crashing down on their heads; when they tell me not to become attached to my body I want to give them a kick up the arse. 

To conclude, if I may, with another quotation from Lawrence: 

 

"For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh." [4] 

Notes 

 

[1] The Bhagavad Gita ('Song of God') is a 700-verse Hindu scripture, which forms chapters 23-40 of Book 6 of the epic Mahabharata called the Bhishma Parva. The work is dated to the second half of the first millennium BC.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', published together with Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 330.

 

[3] Ibid., p. 331.

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 149. 

 

 

This post is for all those who were born (like me and Kim Novak) or who died (like my mother and Richard Wagner) on this day. 

Notes on 'The Crisis of Narration' by Byung-Chul Han (Part 1)

(Polity Press, 2024)

 

 

I. 

 

Byung-Chul Han has had a new book published in English translation: The Crisis of Narration [a]. 

 

It's another slim little work which, like Jason Alexander's Acting Without Acting (2009), is not so much a book as a pamphlet [b]. Nevertheless, I coughed up the £12.99 asking price on Amazon for the paperback and thought I would offer a running commentary on it here as I read it over dinner ...

 

 

II.   

 

Han provides a short preface that opens: "Everyone is talking about 'narratives'." [vii] 

 

And I had to smile at this assertion as I can't imagine anyone outside of academia ever using the word narrative and although the word crisis is very popular with politicians and political commentators - the cost of living crisis, the NHS crisis, Middle East crisis, etc. - I don't think they care too much about the crisis of narration. 

 

But maybe they should: because maybe Han is right to argue that narratives provide our anchor in being and furnish life with "meaning, support and orientation" [vii]. So perhaps we need the return of narration and to give back to narratives their power and gravitational force. 

But that won't be easy in an age in which narratives have lost their mystery. We all know now that they are constructed and don't possess any essential inner truth, having been revealed to be "contingent, exchangeable and modifiable" [viii].

Han is acutely aware of this. He knows that we are living in a post-narrative time - which is really just another way of saying a secular age in which God is dead. For the kind of narratives that Han values are basically religious narratives that reach into "every nook and cranny of life" [viii]. 

The problem is, I'm not sure I want to live in a new age of narrative if that means living once more in a theocratic society. Having to lose ritual and festivity is probably a price worth paying for not being ruled over by a priestly caste. And besides, I'm not convinced that being anchored in being necessitates being mired in faith and religious dogma. 

I prefer what Han terms micro-narratives over grand narratives that transform our being-in-the-world into a being-at-home; I don't want to be domesticated in the name of  truth, thank you very much. Nor do I want to belong to a concluding form that creates a closed order founded upon meaning and identity 

 

I guess this makes me a recalcitrant postmodernist in Han's eyes; still kicking against the idea of belonging to any community or returning to some past ideal. Ultimately, I'm with D. H. Lawrence who famously declared: 

 

"I don't want to live again the tribal mysteries [...] I don't want to know as I have known [...] My way is my own [...] I can't cluster at the drum any more." [c]  

 

Of course, Han also knows there is no going back: 

 

"No amount of storytelling could recreate the fire around which humans gather to tell each other stories. That fire has long since burnt out. It has been replaced by the digital screen, which separates people as individual consumers. Consumers are lonely. They do not form a community. Nor can the 'stories' shared on social media fill the narrative vacuum. They are merely forms of pornographic self-presentation or self-promotion. Posting, liking and sharing content are consumerist practices that intensify the narrative crisis." [ix]

Does that include blogging, I wonder ... 

 

I rather suspect Han would say it does; that he would dismiss the fragments of fiction-theory assembled here on Torpedo the Ark as being forgetful of being and lacking empathy; that posts such as this one simply inform and pass the word along without ever providing a meaningful narrative or creating a genuine community. 

 

The fact that the posts are typed on a laptop is, Han would argue, "already a barrier to the telling of stories" [xi]. Well, I'm sorry but the days when I would handwrite poems and leave them in public places or hidden in tree hollows for people to find by chance are long behind me.

 

Perhaps Han initially writes his books in blood and narrates them in person to a select few followers who know how to listen closely and pay deep attention: I don't know. But I do know he has also agreed to the commercial publication of over twenty works, translated into many languages, and sold all over the world, so I'm not going to take too much shit from him on this matter. 

 

Having said that, let's follow him as he traces out the long pre-history of the present narrative crisis ...   

III.

 

The first chapter of Han's new book opens with an attack on those who prefer local news rather than hearing news from afar. For Han being interested about what is happening close to home shows a form of attention deficit:

 

"The newspaper reader's attention extends only to what is near. It shrinks to mere curiosity. The modern newspaper reader jumps from one news item to the next, instead of letting her gaze drift into the distance and linger. The modern reader has lost the long, slow, lingering gaze." [1]    

 

This surprises me. And, as a Lawrentian, I obviously cannot let it pass ... 

 

One recalls, for example, that Richard Somers loved nothing more than to read bits in the Sydney Bulletin - "the only periodical in the world that really amused him" [d] - even if it didn't provide an earnest editorial narrative. The assembled bits had real vitality: "There was no consecutive thread. Only the laconic courage of experience." [e] 

 

And one thinks also of the essay 'Insouciance' in which Lawrence condemns his neighbours at a Swiss hotel - "two little white-haired English ladies" [f] - for sweeping him off his balcony with all the latest news from abroad: "away from the glassy lake, the veiled mountains, the two men mowing, and the cherry-trees, away into the troubled ether of international politics" [g]. 

 

Lawrence is curious and concerned about the immediate world that is physically present before him - that is actually there - but he doesn't care about gazing into the distance and feigning interest in what happens in every corner of the earth or in numerous abstract issues.   

 

Does this make Somers a modern reader? Does it make Lawrence less of a thinker; a lover only of information and triviality? Han seems to want the earnestness that Lawrence hates; to privilege news stories that possess a temporal breadth and the power of destiny. But we might ask if there has ever been a newspaper that never explains or informs, but only narrates in a manner that is both wondrous and mysterious. 

 

It's hard to imagine Herodotus working on Fleet Street, as much as Han may wish it. 

 

One might at this point wonder why, if Han longs for stories that are more like seeds of grain - full of germinal force - rather than specks of dust, he doesn't simply read works of literature and give the tabloids a miss. Well, it's because, like Walter Benjamin, he thinks modern novels also mark the decline of narrative; the latter is an expression of a community, whereas the novel is all about bourgeois individualism.

 

Still, as bad as modern works of fiction are, "the ultimate decline of narration comes not with the novel but with the rise of information under capitalism" [5].    

 

Information technology doesn't allow us to rest, to relax, to be bored; it "drives the dream bird away" [5] and stops us listening carefully (for Han the narrative community is one which immerses itself in what it hears). 

 

In a crucial passage, Han writes:

 

"On the internet [...] the dream bird cannot build a nest. The information seekers drive him away. In today's state of hyperactivity, where boredom is not allowed to emerge, we never reach the state of deep mental relaxation. The information society is an age of heightened mental tension, because the essence of information is surprise and the stimulus it provides. The tsunami of information means that our perceptual apparatus is permanently stimulated. It can no longer enter into contemplation. The tsunami of information fragments our attention. It prevents the contempative lingering that is essential to narrating and careful listening." [6]

 

It's a nice passage: classic Han. And I find it hard to disagree with anything he says here. His fundamental argument that in a digital era reality itself is turned into information and human beings are no more than living data sets, is quite clearly the case. 

 

And whilst some would simply shrug and ask so what, I can't help feeling, like Han, that this is not a good thing and will result in a new form of algorithmic domination which "hides behind the illusion of freedom and communication" [7]. 

   

 

Notes

 

[a] Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2024). The work was originally published as Die Krise der Narration (Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2023). Page numbers given here refer to the English edition.    

[b] See the season 7 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm entitled 'Seinfeld', written by Larry David and dir. Jeff Schaffer (November 2009). To watch the scene I'm referring to on Youtube, click here. 

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, 'Indians and an Englishman', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 120.  

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 269. 

[e] Ibid., p. 272

[f] D. H. Lawrence, 'Insouciance', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 95. 

 

Part 2 of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

Part 3 of this post can be read by clicking here.