Why Johnny's Rottenness is the Third Thing

Messrs. Rotten, Dury & Hell 

Photo credits: Chris Morphet / Gie Knaeps / Roberta Bayley

 

 

There's a little poem by D. H. Lawrence which opens:

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, 

but there is also a third thing, that makes it water 

and nobody knows what it is. [1]

 

I'm not sure that a molecular physicist would agree with that, but I'm quite happy as a philosopher to accept that's the case; that whilst the chemical formula for water, H2O, might tell us that each of its molecules contains two hydrogen and one oxygen atom, that's not telling us much and certainly isn't telling us everything. 

 

When it comes to water, in whatever state we encounter it - as a running liquid, a frozen solid, or a steamy vapour - there is always something magical and mysterious; it's thingness is greater than the sum of its material parts.    

 

 

II.

 

I am reminded of this whenever I hear it suggested that Johnny Rotten's style and stage persona was simply constructed from elements of Ian Dury and Richard Hell [2].

 

Obviously, there is some truth in this. But there is also a third thing, that makes Rotten unique and, in my view, so much greater than his influences and inspirations. 

 

And nobody knows what it is ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'The third thing', The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 447.  

 

[2] Even in 2019 Marky Ramone was still claiming that the Sex Pistols were mere imitators and that Rotten had stolen Richard Hell's entire look and act: click here. But, actually, it was Malcolm who was captivated by Richard Hell and the whole New York punk scene, far more than Rotten ever was, as Paul Gorman indicates in his biography The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020); see chapter 16, pp. 241-42. 

      Readers might also find my post on the difference between 'Pretty Vacant' (by the Sex Pistols) and 'Blank Generation' (by Richard Hell and the Voidoids) of interest: click here.    

      As for Ian Dury, it's regrettable that he seemed to resent Rotten and claimed that the latter had stolen his look - right down to the razor blade and safety pin earring - and copied his hunched over style of holding the microphone on stage. He might have been a wee bit more grateful for the fact that it was punk that enabled him to finally achieve success and a number of top ten singles.       

On Art and Hippology (With Reference to the Work of D. H. Lawrence)

Fig 1: D. H. Lawrence, Laughing Horse (c. 1924)

Fig 2: Josef Moest, Lady Godiva (1906) 

 

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence had very definite ideas on most things, including the art of representation. 

 

Take a look fig. 1 above, for example, which he produced for a possible cover to an edition of Spud Johnson's two-bit literary magazine, The Laughing Horse [1].

 

It's arguable that what Lawrence is attempting here is to give us an impression of a horse that has something childlike about it. For Lawrence believed that a child sees things differently, more magically, than the average adult:

 

"When a boy of eight sees a horse, he doesn't see the correct biological object we intend him to see. He sees a big living presence of no particular shape with hair dangling from its neck and four legs. If he puts two eyes in the profile, he is quite right. Because he does not see with optical, photographic vision. The image on his retina is not the image of his consciousness. The image on his retina just does not go into him. His unconsciousness is filled with a strong, dark, vague prescience of a powerful presence, a two-eyed, four-legged, long-maned presence looming imminent. And to force the boy to see a correct one-eyed horse-profile is just like pasting a placard in front of his vision. It simply kills his inward seeing. We don't want him to see a proper horse. The child is not a little camera. He is a small vital organism which has direct dynamic rapport with the objects of the outer universe. He perceives from his breast and his abdomen, with deep-sunken realism, the elemental nature of the creature." [2]

 

However, if an adult is passionate enough - like an artist - then they retain the ability to see things like a child; i.e., as a kind of vibrating blur in which nothing is fixed and final. They can still see the horse as a darkly vital presence composed of a mane, a long face, a round nose, and four legs.

 

 

II.

 

I remembered what Lawrence wrote here when recently re-reading a discussion about art in Women in Love (1920). Or, more precisely, enjoying the argument between Ursula Brangwen and Loerke over the latter's sculpted bronze figure of a naked young girl sat upon a horse [3].

 

Ursula doesn't care for Loerke - despite the fact her sister Gudrun is very much drawn to him. And so, when he produces a photogravure reproduction of a statuette signed with his name, she is more inclined to be confrontational than complimentary: 

 

"The statuette was of a naked girl, small, finely made, sitting on a great naked horse. The girl was young and tender, a mere bud. She was sitting sideways on the horse, her face in her hands, as if in shame and grief, in a little abandon. Her hair, which was short and must be flaxen, fell forward, divided, half covering her hands. 

      Her limbs were young and tender. Her legs, scarcely formed yet, the legs of a maiden just passing towards cruel womanhood, dangled childishly over the side of the powerful horse, pathetically, the small feet folded one over the other, as if to hide. But there was no hiding. There she was exposed naked on the naked flank of the horse. 

      The horse stood stock still, stretched in a kind of start. It was a massive, magnificent stallion, rigid with pent-up power. Its neck was arched and terrible, like a sickle, its flanks were pressed back, rigid with power." [4]

 

Gudrun, who is also present, is clearly affected by the work: she turns pale, "and a darkness came over her eyes" [5]. She finds the horse phallic and wishes to know its size. But also she was thinking "of the slender, immature, tender limbs of the girl, smooth and cold in green bronze" [6]. 

 

Ursula, however, hates it:  

 

"'Why,' said Ursula, 'did you make the horse so stiff? It is as stiff as a block.'" [7]

 

Somewhat affronted by this, Loerke merely repeats the word stiff, obliging Ursula to expand upon her accusation: 

 

"'Yes. Look how stock and stupid and brutal it is. Horses are sensitive, quite delicate and sensitive, really.'" [8]

 

At this, Loerke "raised his shoulders, spread his hands in a shrug of slow indifference, as much as to inform her she was an amateur and an impertinent nobody" [9], before attempting to explain "with an insulting patience and condescension in his voice" [10], that the horse is not an actual living creature:

 

"'It is part of a work of art, a piece of form. It is not a picture of a friendly horse to which you give a lump of sugar, do you see - it is part of a work of art, it has no relation to anything outside that work of art.'" [11]

 

That, of course, in one sense at least, is quite true. But the opinionated somewhat provincial Brangwen girl is having none of it and creates quite the scene:

 

"Ursula, angry at being treated quite so insultingly de haut en bas, from the height of esoteric art to the depth of general exoteric amateurism, replied, hotly, flushing and lifting her face:  'But it is a picture of a horse, nevertheless.'

      [Loerke] lifted his shoulders in another shrug. 

      'As you like - it is not a picture of a cow, certainly.' 

      Here Gudrun broke in, flushed and brilliant, anxious to avoid any more of this, any more of Ursula's foolish persistence in giving herself away. 

      'What do you mean by "it is a picture of a horse?"' she cried at her sister. 'What do you mean by a horse? You mean an idea you have in your head, and which you want to see represented. There is another idea altogether, quite another idea. Call it a horse if you like, or say it is not a horse. I have just as much right to say that your horse isn't a horse, that it is a falsity of your own make-up.'

      Ursula wavered, baffled. Then her words came. 

      'But why does he have this idea of a horse?' she said. 'I know it is his idea. I know it is a picture of himself, really -' 

      Loerke snorted with rage. 

      'A picture of myself!' he repeated, in derision. 'Wissen sie, gnädige Frau, that is a Kunstwerk, a work of art. It is a work of art, it is a picture of nothing, of absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with anything but itself, it has no relation with the everyday world of this and other, there is no connection between them, absolutely none, they are two different and distinct planes of existence, and to translate one into the other is worse than foolish, it is a darkening of all counsel, a making confusion everywhere. Do you see, you must not confuse the relative work of action, with the absolute world of art. That you must not do.' 

      'That is quite true,' cried Gudrun, let loose in a sort of rhapsody. 'The two things are quite and permanently apart, they have nothing to do with one another. I and my art, they have nothing to do with each other. My art stands in another world, I am in this world.' 

      Her face was flushed and transfigured. Loerke who was sitting with his head ducked, like some creature at bay, looked up at her, swiftly, almost furtively, and murmured: 

      'Ja - so ist es, so ist es.' 

      Ursula was silent after this outburst. She was furious. She wanted to poke a hole into them both. 

      'It isn’t a word of it true, of all this harangue you have made me,' she replied flatly. 'The horse is a picture of your own stock, stupid brutality, and the girl was a girl you loved and tortured and then ignored.' 

      He looked up at her with a small smile of contempt in his eyes. He would not trouble to answer this last charge. Gudrun too was silent in exasperated contempt. Ursula was such an insufferable outsider, rushing in where angels would fear to tread. But there - fools must be suffered, if not gladly. 

      But Ursula was persistent too. 

      'As for your world of art and your world of reality,' she replied, 'you have to separate the two, because you can't bear to know what you are. You can’t bear to realise what a stock, stiff, hide-bound brutality you are really, so you say "it's the world of art". The world of art is only the truth about the real world, that's all - but you are too far gone to see it.' 

      She was white and trembling, intent. Gudrun and Loerke sat in stiff dislike of her. Gerald too, who had come up in the beginning of the speech, stood looking at her in complete disapproval and opposition. He felt she was undignified, she put a sort of vulgarity over the esotericism which gave man his last distinction. He joined his forces with the other two. They all three wanted her to go away. But she sat on in silence, her soul weeping, throbbing violently, her fingers twisting her handkerchief." [12]

  

What, then, do we think of this? 

 

Well, I hate to say it - and don't want to sound like Clive Bell ecstatically singing the praises of significant form [13] - but I tend to agree with Loerke and Gudrun and think Ursula is being almost wilfully naive. 

 

Ultimately, it is irritating when individuals like Miss Brangwen insist that the plastic arts have to be representational; that a sculpture or painting must forever be referred back to a model in the real world; or that a horse is a horse of course of course ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The Laughing Horse was irregularly published between 1921 and 1939 and celebrated the contemporary literary and artistic culture of the American West. 

      Willard ('Spud') Johnson was the principal editor and contributed much of the poetry, prose, and artwork himself. He also encouraged friends and acquaintances to submit material, including D. H. Lawrence, who had an entire issue devoted to his work in April 1926 (#13). 

      The laughing horse sketch by Lawrence was unused - perhaps because Lawrence got the price wrong; Johnson's magazine always sold for 25¢ (or two bits). It is reproduced in D. H. Lawrence's Paintings, ed. Keith Sagar, (Chaucer Press, 2003), p. 145. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 121.

      Lawrence was not alone in the view that the child sees - and draws - in a manner that is difficult for the adult to replicate. As Picasso once famously said: "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."  

 

[3] Lawrence was most likely thinking of a patinated bronze sculpture by the German artist Josef Moest (1873-1914) entitled Lady Godiva (1906); see fig. 2 above.

 

[4-6] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 429.    

 

[7-11] Ibid., p. 430.

[12] Ibid., pp. 430-31. 

[13] Significant form was a theory developed by English art critic Clive Bell which specified a set of criteria for what qualified as a work of art. In his 1914 book Art, for example, Bell argues that art transports us from the actual world of existence to one of aesthetic exaltation. 

      Lawrence hates this kind of abstract idealism, so popular amongst the Bloomsbury elite of his time, and he openly attacks Bell in his own writings on art, which can be found in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). For an excellent discussion of all this see chapter 4 of Anne Fernihough's, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, (Oxford University Press, 1993).   

 

 

Blue Balls (With Reference to the Work of Jeff Koons and D. H. Lawrence)

Jeff Koons with one of his blue gazing balls

Photo by Lucy Young

 

 

Like the American comedian Jena Friedman, I've long admired the artist Jeff Koons and so I would share her sadness at having to write something "even remotely negative about this purveyor of the shiny and provocative" [1] - we can leave this to the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who loathes the aesthetics of the smooth and famously compared Koons's artwork to Brazilian waxing [2]. 

Fortunately, therefore - and unlike Ms Friedman - I have a rather more positive view of the blue gazing balls [3] that Koons has ingeniously placed on little shelves in front of various reproductions of classical and modern masterpieces, including works by Rembrandt, Manet, and Picasso - he even stuck one in front of his enlarged version of the Mona Lisa (see below).   

According to Koons, these large glass baubles represent the vastness of the universe, whilst also giving us a sense of the intimacy of the here and now [4]. I'm not sure about that - and this isn't why I like the gazing balls. 

 

I like them, because they make me want to smash them; make me want like an excitable child to cup the little globe of magnificent full dark-blue in my hands and then toss it up in the air, allowing it to fall with a little splashing explosion on the floor; make me want to take one of the fragments and examine it closely in all its broken brilliance [5].   

 

More, I feel like taking one of the spheres and bringing it hard down on the head of the viewer who stands before it and admires their own reflection; they who only see themselves in each and every great work of art (their experiences, their desires, their lives); they who only want to know what an image means so they can explain it away.

 

This lust for knowledge is what Rupert Birkin describes as the conceit of consciousness: "'You want it all in that loathsome little skull of yours, that ought to be cracked like a nut'" [6] - isn't that what he says to Hermione the great lover of art and culture?  

   

And yet, ironically, it's she who brings a ball of lapis lazuli crashing down on his head five chapters later, achieving her voluptuous consummation:

 

"Her arms quivered and were strong, immeasurably and irresistibly strong. What delight, what delight in strength, what delirium of pleasure! She was going to have her consummation of voluptuous ecstasy at last. It was coming! In utmost terror and agony, she knew it was upon her now, in extremity of bliss. Her hand closed on a blue, beautiful ball of lapis lazuli that stood on her desk for a paper-weight. She rolled it around in her hand as she rose silently. Her heart was a pure flame in her breast, she was purely unconscious in ecstasy. She moved towards him and stood behind him for a moment in ecstasy. He, closed within the spell, remained motionless and unconscious. 

      Then swiftly, in a flame that drenched down her body like fluid lightning, and gave her a perfect, unutterable consummation, unutterable satisfaction, she brought down the ball of jewel stone with all her force, crash on his head." [7]

As I say, that's what I'd like to do with one of Koons's gazing balls, thereby transforming it from an object of narcissistic self-reflection into a weapon to be used against those who just have to put themselves into every picture.

 

 

Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball (da Vinci Mona Lisa) (2015)

Oil on canvas, glass, and aluminum 

jeffkoons.com 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Jena Friedman, 'Why Jeff Koons's Blue 'Gazing Balls' Give Mona Lisa Something New to Smirk About', Artnet News (22 June 2017): click here. 

[2] See Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2018). The opening sentence of the first chapter reads: "The smooth is the signature of the present time. It connects the sculptures of Jeff Koons, i-Phones and Brazilian waxing." 

      For my discussion of the aesthetics (and politics) of smoothness with reference to the above text and the work of Jeff Koons, click here. 

 

[3] Gazing balls - or what Americans rather prosaically call yard globes - are mirrored spheres, ranging in size, and now mostly used as garden ornaments. Traditionally made of glass, they are now often stainless steel, ceramic, or plastic.

      The speheres originated in 13th-century Italy, where they were hand-blown by skilled Venetian craftsmen, but were popularised by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, in the 19th-century and appear in a number of gardens designed in the modern period (particularly in the 1930s). However, they seemed a bit naff by the 1950s - only slightly more sophisticated than garden gnomes. 

 

[4] See the article by Alex Needham - 'Jeff Koons on his Gazing Ball Paintings: "It's not about copying''', The Guardian (9 November, 2015): click here.

 

[5] I'm recalling the scene from chapter I - 'The Blue Ball - of D. H. Lawrence's novel Aaron's Rod (1922) in which a young girl (Millicent) breaks a Christmas ornament and her father (Aaron) then carefully examines one of the pieces. See pp. 10-11 of the Cambridge edition, ed. Mara Kalnins, (1988).   

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 42.

 

[7] Ibid., p. 105. 

 

 

Spooks and Lovers: Halloween With D. H. Lawrence

 

Although - as far as I'm aware - D. H. Lawrence didn't celebrate Halloween, he did write a number of spooky tales with supernatural elements [1] and he had an abiding interest in the occult and things which go bump in the dark. 

 

And so, I thought it might be fun to look at what he writes in nine of his letters (and one postcard) dated the 31st of October ... 

 

 

[31 October 1903] [2]

 

On a postcard sent from Peterborough to his childhood friend Gertrude Cooper, Lawrence writes to say he is safe and sound and that he has been to visit the 12th-century cathedral, famous for its Early English Gothic façade featuring three large arches.

 

However, Lawrence will increasingly grow disillusioned with monumental religious architecture and reach the stage where he is weary of huge stone erections In other words, he will come to believe in the ruins [3] and will, like Deleuze and Guattari, seek to release desire from all that overcodes it, rejecting the myth of wholeness or completion [4]. 

 

And that is one of the reasons I so admire Lawrence as a writer: because he anticipates both punk and poststructuralism. 

 

 

[31 October 1913] [5]

 

In a letter to Henry Savage - a minor literary figure who had written a positive review of Lawrence's first novel The White Peacock (1911) - Lawrence sets forth his view that what women fundamentally want is sexual satisfaction:

 

"A man may bring her his laurel wreaths and songs and what not, but if that man doesn't satisfy her, in some undeniable physical fashion - then in one way or other she takes him in her mouth and shakes him like a cat a mouse, and throws him away. She is not to be caught by any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honour, duty, worth, work, salvation - none of them - not in the long run."

 

In other words - and in the long run - she simply desires a good fucking; a fairly conventional view which Lawrence holds too for the rest of his life. Less conventional, however, is the claim (and confession) that follows: "And an artist - a poet - is like a woman in that he too must have this satisfaction. [...] He must get his bodily and spiritual want satisfied [...]

 

Is it just me, or is there not an ambiguity to this sentence which invites a kinky interpretation ...? (Some readers might recall that I've written before on Lawrence's autogynephilia, his perverse tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a woman being penetrated by a large cock: click here.)   

 

In this same long letter, written from Italy, Lawrence also admits that whilst he dislikes Charles Dickens for his mid-Victorian moralising, he's jealous of his characters. 

 

He closes, in typical Lawrence fashion, by requesting some books, giving an update on his health - he has a rotten bad cold - and by admitting that he wishes he had some money, so needn't work. 

 

 

31 October 1914 [6]

In a rather sweet note to his Russian friend S. S. Koteliansky, Lawrence asks the latter if he can do him a favour next time he's in Soho:

 

"I saw a necklace I wanted to buy for Frieda. It is in a shop almost at the south end of Wardour St near Leicester Square [...] a second hand jeweller's - a necklace of lapis lazuli set in little white enamel clasps - costs 30/- It hangs up at eye level near the doorway. I send you a cheque. If you find the necklace, please buy it me - round beads of lapis lazuli - you can't mistake it - marked 30/-"

 

Just to be on the safe side, Lawrence even enclosed  a sketch of the necklace. However, unsure of Kot's ability to locate the piece - despite his detailed description and drawing - he then adds a PS to the letter: "If you don't find it you can give me back the cheque."

 

I suppose that's fair enough - 30 bob might not sound like much, but it would be about £190 today and the averge coal miner in 1914 would only expect to earn about 9 shillings per daily shift. 

 

Lawrence, of course, had a thing for lapis lazuli - he had once given a piece to the poet Hilda Doolittle (or H.D. as she was known) and readers might also recall that Hermione smashes Birkin's skull with a beautiful crystal ball made of such [7].    

 

 

31 October 1916 [8]

 

Lawrence is in Cornwall and has just finished writing his latest novel, Women in Love. Along with a letter to his literary agent, J. B. Pinker, Lawrence encloses the final part of his manuscript - "all but the last chapter, which, being a sort of epilogue, I want to write later".   

 

He also encloses the short story called 'The Mortal Coil', which he is clearly proud of, although not optimistic about its commercial prospects:

 

"It is a first-class story, one of my purest creations, but not destined I fear, like the holy in the hymn, to land On the Golden Strand [...] I really grieve when I send you still another unmarketable wretch of fiction. But bear with me. I will write sweet simple tales yet."  

 

Poor Lawrence! Always hoping to strike it rich with his writing and find the philosopher's stone, if only so that he can escape to sunnier climes and find better health: "I am tired of being unwell in England." 

 

 

[31 October 1919] [9]

 

It would, however, be three years later before Lawrence was finally able to leave England and head south once more: in a letter to Martin Secker expressing his concern about the Women in Love manuscript which has been sent to the US, Lawrence also adds: "I shall be in [London] Monday, preparatory to going off for Italy". 

 

He left London on 14 November: to Turin via Paris on the train and then on to Florence (via Spezia). 

 

Unfortunately, poor health and money worries continue to dog him no matter where he travels, although at times Lawrence affirms his sickness - better than a bourgeois model of good health - and his poverty; for it is preferable, he says, to sit still on a large rock than ride in the car of a multi-millionaire.   

[31 October 1921] [10]

In a Halloween letter sent from Sicily to his literary agent Robert Mountsier, Lawrence says he's thinking of heading out West and trying his luck in the New World: "What's the good of Europe, anyhow?"

 

It was a particularly busy period for Lawrence as a writer:  

 

(i) Sea and Sardinia was about to be published, as well as the poetry collection Tortoises ...

 

(ii) he was rewriting some old short stories and finishing his novella 'The Captain's Doll' ...

 

(iii) Fantasia of the Unconscious had just been sent off to his American publisher ...

 

(iv) he was also busy working on Mr Noon, although he confessed that he didn't know whether he'd actually finish writing the novel: "I get so annoyed with everybody that I don't want to tackle any really serious work. To hell with them all. Miserable world of canaille."

 

Interestingly, this letter also gives us an insight into D. H. Lawrence the wine connoisseur:

 

"We have been trying the new Fontana Vecchia wine: though it shouldn't be tried till November 11th - I don't very much like it - it's going to be rough. I'm glad I had a barrel of last year's from the Vigna Sagnoula." [11]

 

 

31 October 1922 [12]   

The following year, on the same date, Lawrence again wrote to Robert Mountsier ... 

 

He was now in Taos, New Mexico, and thinking of moving into the ranch that Mabel Sterne was offering him and Frieda; somewhere they could they finally call home and make a real life together.  

Having already invited a friend of Mabel's - Bessie Freeman - to come and live with them, Lawrence now invited his literary agent to do the same:

 

"M.S. has got a ranch, 180 acres, on Rockies foothills, about 20 miles away, wild. We went there today. It is very lovely. There are two rather poor little houses [...] all rather abandoned. But we think of going there either this week or next, to try it. If we find it possible, move in there. The ranch is utterly abandoned now, so it will be a good thing for it to have somebody there. If we go, come there with us, and we'll make a life. [...] It's a wonderful place, with the world at your feet and the mountains at your back, and pine-trees. [...] You'd have one of the houses: they almost adjoin. We'd have to get a few repairs done."

Obviously, being neither impetuous nor insane, Mountsier wasn't tempted by this offer. 

 

And one might have imagined that after his experience in Cornwall with Mansfield and Murry, Lawrence would have abandoned plans for communal living, but apparently not; as he said in a letter to Koteliansky from this period, his idea had been sound, but the people invited to build Rananim were not up to the task [13] - which is the bitter conclusion that all utopian dreamers reach.  

 

 

[31 October 1925] [14]

 

And speaking of Jack Murry ... Lawrence wrote to him on Halloween in 1925, whilst staying at his mother-in-law's, on the edge of the Black Forest, which he loved, but always found somewhat spooky; like something from a dream (or nightmare). 

 

Although obviously a little bored and wishing he'd gone to Paris instead, he nevertheless offers the following observation on Germany at the time:

 

"Just the same here - very quiet and unemerged: my mother-in-law older, noticeably. I make my bows and play whist [...] Titles still in full swing here, but nothing else. No foreigners [...] and the peasants still peasants, with a bit of the eternal earth-to-earth quality that is so lost in England. Rather like a still sleep, with frail dreams."  

 

Murry by this stage regarded himself as a radical Christian - he would publish his Life of Jesus the following year - but Lawrence doesn't have much time for this:

 

"Don't you see, there still has to be a Creator? Jesus is not the Creator, even of himself. And we have to go on being created. By the Creator. More important to me than Jesus. But of course God-the Father, the Dieu-Père, is a bore. Jesus is as far as one can go with god, anthropomorphically. After that, no more anthropos." 

 

And that's the Lawrence which the pagan me still loves: anti-Christian (or, at the very least, post-Christian) and in search of queer, inhuman gods who inhabit the outer (and inner) darkness ...

 

  

31 October 1927 [15]

Not the best of days for poor Lawrence. He wrote to Koteliansky:

 

"Altogether the world is depressing - and I feel rather depressed. My bronchials are such a nuisance, and I don't feel myself at all. I'm not very happy here [Florence], and I don't know where else to go, and have not much money to go anywhere - I feel I don't want to work -  don't want to do a thing at all the life gone out of me. Yet how can I sit in this empty place and see nobody and do nothing! It's a limit! I'll have to make a change somehow or other - but don't know how."

 

And as he wrote to the German writer Max Mohr:

 

"I unfortunately can't yet promise to dance - my bronchials and my cough are still a nuisance. But I want so much to be able to dance again. And I think if we went somewhere really amusing, I should quickly be well. My cough, like your restlessness, is a good deal psychological in its origin, and a real change might cure us both. The sun shines here, but the mornings are foggy. And I no longer love Italy very much - it seems to me a stupid country."

 

Oh dear, when one falls out of love with Italy that's not a good sign ...

31 October 1928 [16]

 

Lawrence's final Halloween letter was again written to Koteliansky. 

 

In it, whilst still feeling poorly - this time with Italian flu given to him by Frieda - Lawrence sounds much perkier than a year ago; more full of fight and ready to take on the British press and customs officials who are united in their opposition to Lady Chatterley's Lover (which had been printed privately in Italy ealier that year).   

"What fools altogether!", writes Lawrence. "How bored one gets by endless mob-stupidity."

Lawrence is holed up on the tiny French island of Port-Cros; only four miles across and covered in pine trees; there's a hotel, a port, and a handful of houses. Nevertheless, Lawrence says that, were it not for his cold, he should like it: "I feel very indifferent to almost everything."

 

Interestingly, that's not something one expects to hear from Lawrence, who often contrasts indifference negatively with insouciance, arguing that whereas the latter is a refusal to be made anxious by idealists gripped by a moral compulsion to care, the former, indifference, is an inability to care resulting from a certain instinctive-intuitive numbness (often as a consequence of having cared too much about the wrong thing in the past) [17].

 

Of course, this is just another false dichotomy. At any rate, I'm quite happy to view indifference more positively (within a transpolitical context, for example).

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Perhaps the best known of these tales is 'The Rocking Horse Winner', which can be found in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 230-244. My take on this story can be found here.

 

[2]  D. H. Lawrence, letter to Gertrude Cooper, [31 Oct 1903], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 23.

 

[3] See The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 188-91, where Lawrence writes of Anna's experience of Lincoln Cathedral and see 'Sketches of Etruscan Places', in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 32-33, where he writes in favour of small wooden temples rather than enormous stone buildings. I have discussed this material in the post entitled 'Believe in the Ruins' (16 April 2019): click here.

 

[4] See Deleuze and Guattari; Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 41, where they write in favour of partial objects, fragments, and heterogenous bits, rather than any kind of totality. 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Henry Savage, [31 Oct 1913], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 94-96

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to S. S. Koteliansky, 31 Oct 1914, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, p. 228.    

 

[7] See Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 105. Hermione uses the ball as a paperweight, when not using it as a weapon. 

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, letter to J. B. Pinker, 31 Oct 1916, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, pp. 669-670.    

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Martin Secker, [31 Oct 1919], in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 408. 

 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Robert Mountsier, [31 Oct 1921], The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 106-108. 

 

[11] To describe a wine as rough means that it has a coarse texture. It would usually refer to a young tannic red wine, before it has had time to soften or round out.  

 

[12] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Robert Mountsier, [31 Oct 1922], The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, p. 334.

 

[13] In 1916, Lawrence invited Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry to come and live in a cottage next door to him and his wife Frieda, in Zennor, near St. Ives; a tiny place, near the moors, full of black rocks, and overlooking the sea. 

      The idea was to establish an artists' colony or commune of some kind, that Lawrence wanted to name Rananim. Of course, it soon led to tension and conflict and ended in tears and tantrums.

 

[14] D. H. Lawrence, letter to John Middleton Murry, [31 Oct 1925], The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 328.

 

[15] D. H. Lawrence, letters to S. S. Koteliansky and Max Mohr, 31 Oct 1927, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 203- 205. 

 

[16] D. H. Lawrence, letter to S. S. Koteliansky, 31 Oct 1928, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, p. 604. 

 

[17] Readers who are interested in this might like to see the post entitled 'Dandelion' (10 Dec 2015) which addresses the question of care in the thought of D. H. Lawrence: click here.  

Being is Time: Life in the Present Perfect Continuous

Image credit: UCLA / Horvath Lab

 

Somewhat paradoxically, whilst having a minimal sense of self on the one hand, I've always possessed a strong sense of self-continuity through time on the other, and have never really bought into the Shakespearean idea of there being seven distinct ages into which a single life might be neatly divided up [1].

 

Thus, when someone asked in relation to a recent post adapted from the Von Hell Diaries [click here] whether it made me sad to realise that forty years had passed since the events described on 3 October 1982 - or frightened to think that I would soon be passing from middle age to old age - I had to say no, not really.

 

For like Jaz Coleman, time means nothing to me, and whether something happened forty years ago or yesterday, it's all the same to me [2]. I am that unity of past, present and future. That is to say, I understand time not just as something that can be measured by the ticking of a clock, but as fundamental to our being. Indeed, one might even say that being is time.     

 

And unlike the Killing Joke frontman, I don't even have to shut my eyes in order to remember childhood thoughts and feelings; for I still think those thoughts and experience those feelings. In other words, because I live in what might be termed by a grammarian as the present perfect continuous, I've no need to make an imaginative journey back in time, or to dream.      

 

But aren't you worried that you're just stuck in the past?, asks the same interrogator.

 

Again, the answer is not really. 

 

In fact, I'm more concerned - as a philosopher - with the consequences of privileging the present [3] and having a vulgar conception of time in which the past is denigrated as that which we must move on from and leave behind, as if no longer important, when, in fact, not only does the past inform the present, but it awaits us in the future too [4].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm thinking here of the famous monologue in Act II, Scene VII of Shakespeare's pastoral comedy As You Like It (1623) which opens with the line "All the world's a stage". However, I'm aware of the fact that this division of human life into a series of stages was a commonplace of art and literature and not something invented by the Bard of Avon. Whilst ancient authors tended to think in terms of three or four such stages, medieval writers liked to think in terms of seven for theological reasons.   

 

[2] I'm quoting from the Killing Joke song 'Slipstream', from the album Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions, (Noise Records, 1990): click here. The track was written by Jaz Coleman, Geordie Walker and Martin Atkins. Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group.

 

[3] I am increasingly sympathetic to thinkers such as Heidegger and Derrida who are concerned that the understanding of Being in the metaphysical tradition is dominated by an ontological primacy of the present; i.e., that the present is viewed as more real or immediate than the past or future, with the former seen as merely the 'no-longer-now' and the latter as merely the 'not-yet-now'. 

      This tradition has run all the way from Aristotle to Hegel and beyond; see, for example, Lawrence's 1919 Preface to his New Poems (1918), in which he writes of the incarnate Now as supreme over and above the before and after and of the quivering present as the very quick of Time. For Lawrence, the past and future are mere abstractions from the present; a crystallised remembrance and a crystallised aspiration.

      Lawrence's preface can be found as Appendix I to The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 645-649.      

 

[4] I think Heidegger refers to this ontological baggage in Being and Time (1927) as Gewesenheit (i.e., our been-ness).

 

 

Life in Vein (With Reference to D. H. Lawrence's Undying Man)

Homunculus created by alchemy 

(from a 19th-century engraving for Goethe's Faust Pt. II)

 

 

I. 

 

Some readers may recall a post from May last year in which I reported on (what I believe to be) a vaccine induced blood clot in my lower right leg, but described on my medical record as superficial thromobophlebitis and said to be of unknown cause [1]. 

 

Sixteen months later, and my leg is still a mess and a consultant vascular surgeon has advised that due to long saphenous vein reflux and associated varicosities, I undergo either endovenous or open surgery to address the problem [2]. 

 

Funny enough, the first thing I thought of when told this was D. H. Lawrence's unfinished short story 'The Undying Man' [3] ...

 

 

II. 

 

Written in 1927, 'The Undying Man' is a reimagined version of a Jewish tale translated by his Russian friend S. S. Koteliansky [4]. In it, Lawrence toys with the idea of creating human life via a pre-scientific form of the technique we now term cloning. 

 

He opens his story thus:

 

"Long ago in Spain there were two very learned men, so clever and knowing so much that they were famous all over the world. One was called Rabbi Moses Maimonides, a Jew - blessed be his memory! - and the other was called Aristotle, a Christian who belonged to the Greeks.

      These two were great friends, because they had always studied together and found out many things together. At last after many years, they found out a thing they had been specially trying for. They discovered that if you took a tiny vein out of a man's body, and put it in a glass jar with certain leaves and plants, it would gradually begin to grow, and would grow and grow until it became a man [...] a fine man who would never die. He would be undying. Because he had never been born, he would never die, but live for ever and ever. Because the wisest men on earth had made him, and he didn't have to be born." [5]

 

Unfortunately, the donor of the tiny blood vessel will die as a result of the procedure. Nevertheless, Aristotle consents to the removal of a vein, having first made Maimonides promise that he will not obstruct or terminate the process once the vein has started to develop into a homunculus (i.e., a miniature but fully formed man) [6]:

 

"Aristotle asked Maimonides to take him by the hand and swear by their clasped hands that he would never interfere with the growth of the little vein, never at any time or in any way. Maimonides took him by the hand and swore. And then Aristotle had the little vein cut out of his body by Maimonides himself." [7]  

 

Maimonides places the little vein in the glass jar amongst the leaves and herbs. Having sealed the lid, he places the jar on a shelf in his room and waits:

"The days passed by, and he recited his prayers, pacing back and forth in his room among his books, and praying loudly as he paced, as the Jews do. Then he returned to his books and chemistry. But every day he looked at the jar, to see if the little vein had chaged." [8]

 

For a long time nothing happens. But then at last the vein begins to grow:

 

"Maimonides gazed at the jar transfixed, and forgot everything else in all the wide world; lost to all and everything he gazed into the jar. And at last he saw the tiniest, tiniest tremor in the little vein, and he knew it was a tremor of growth." [9] 

 

Soon, the little vein begins to glow red, "like the smallest ember of fire" [10]. Maimonides knew he was witnessing the spark of life itself, and he was afraid of what might be. For it seemed to him that this tiny red light glowed with an ungodly power - Fierce and strong! Fierce and strong! as he muttered to himself - rather than with divine goodness.   

 

Unable to sleep, Maimonides lies in bed "thinking of that little red light which alone of all light was not the light of God" [11] and fearful of what will happen when the undying man is fully grown ...

 

 

III. 

 

Unfortunately, Lawrence's manuscript ends here and so we don't find out what Maimonides decides to do; whether he keeps his word to Aristotle not to interfere with the development of the undying man, or whether he acts decisively to ensure the latter never leaves his jar.  

 

Fortunately, however, we do have the complete version of the story translated by Kot, and here we discover that, tormented by the thought that an immortal human being will be worshipped by the people as a living god, Maimonides allows his chickens to enter the room where the jar is stored, ensuring they knock it over by deliberately spooking the birds:

 

"Once the jar has crashed to the floor, however, the tiny creature points an accusatory finger at Maimonides for breaking his oath [...] and he spends the rest of his days praying for forgiveness." [12] 

 

That's a terrific ending, I think; one that is frightening, humorous, and realistic. Although Lawrence would doubtless have altered (and probably extended) it in his own unique manner, I'm confident he would have kept the accusatory finger (as I certainly would have).     

 

Finally, to return to where we began this post, I really rather hope that if I do have a vein removed from my leg it too is placed into a little glass container where it might grow into a new type of (transhuman) human being; one not born of a womb, and so soulless, sexless, and immortal ... For is this not the tragic destiny of mankind? [13]  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This post can be read by clicking here.  

[2] Apparently, there is very little difference between the two types of surgery in terms of complications or risks. Whether a scalpel or laser is used, there's likely to be post-operative pain and discomfort as well as aesthetically displeasing lumps, bumps and bruises. And let's not mention the possibility of sensory nerve numbness in the leg and a 1-in-200 chance of a deep vein thrombosis. 

       So it's a big thank you to those who - whether with sincerity or cynicism - assured us all that the Covid-19 vaccines were extremely safe and effective, when, as we now know, they're neither. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence's 'The Undying Man' can be found as Appendix III to The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 241-244.  

 

[4] Koteliansky published 'Maimonides and Aristotle' along with a second tale - 'The Salvation of a Soul' - in translation from the Yiddish as 'Two Jewish Stories' in London Mercury XXXVI (Feb 1937), pp. 362-70.

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Undying Man', The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories ... p. 241.

      This isn't as preposterous as it perhaps sounds; in 2013 it was announced that scientists in Japan had cloned a mouse from a single drop of blood collected from the tail of a donor subject. The cloned female mouse wasn't immortal, but she did live a normal lifespan and could sexually reproduce. And the donor mouse was also unharmed after the procedure (unlike poor Aristotle who dies).

 

[6] The Homunculus - a Latin term meaning 'little man' - was a popular idea in both 16th-century alchemy (Paracelsus is credited with the first use of the term) and 19th-century literature (see Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Part Two of Goethe's Faust (1832), for example). 

      As a concept, it has its roots in folklore and the pre-scientific theory of preformationism which taught that organisms develop from tiny versions of themselves. For Jung, the homunculus is a symbol of the inner man or, indeed, inner Christ (i.e., the divine aspect of human being).   

 

[7-10] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Undying Man, The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories ... p. 242.

 

[11] Ibid., p. 243.

 

[12]  Editors' Introduction to The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories ... p. xxxi.

 

[13] I'm referring here to Baudrillard's thinking in his essay 'The Final Solution, or The Revenge of the Immortals', which can be found in Impossible Exchange, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 2001), pp. 27-8. Long time readers (with good memories) may recall that I discuss Baudrillard's thoughts on cloning in a post published back in April 2013: click here.

       

 

To Hold On or Let Go (Reflections on a Garden Gnome)

Festhalten (SA/2022)

 

 

I. 

 

In a sense, much like the figure pictured above, we are all hanging on for dear life to the great flowerpot that is the world we know and love. 

 

And of course, being able to hold on, hold tight, and hold still is crucial at times. But then, equally crucial, is knowing when and how to let go ... 

 

II. 

 

This question is often addressed by poets and playwrights; most famously by Shakespeare in Hamlet (1603) [1]. 

 

Interestingly, D. H. Lawrence chooses to discuss whether to let go or to hold on not only in terms of the individual, but at the level of the species:

 

 

Must we hold on, hold on

and go ahead with what is human nature

and make a new job of the human world?

 

Or can we let it go?

O, can we let it go,

and leave it to some nature that is more than human

to use the sperm of what's worth while in us

and thus eliminate us?

 

Is the time come for humans

now to begin to disappear,

leaving it to the vast revolutions of creative chaos

to bring forth creatures that are an improvement on humans

as the horse was an improvement on the ichthyosaurus?

 

Must we hold on?

Or can we now let go?

 

Or is it even possible we must do both? [2] 

 

 

That's an amusing additional question to end on - one to which I'm not sure I know the answer: perhaps it is possible; perhaps it isn't. 

 

But maybe the best way to confront the blackmail of an either/or is simply to refuse it like Bartleby; i.e., to choose not to choose as a matter of preference; to understand that when faced by a situation that demands we select one option or the other we can always smile say neither/nor, thank you very much [3].     

 

 

III.

 

Philosophers and religious thinkers have also debated whether man's great goal is self-preservation (holding on) or self-abandonment (letting go). 

 

Nietzsche for example, spoke in an early essay of man as a being who clings on the back of a tiger which empowers but also threatens to devour him [4]. 

 

However, he also writes about the need for man to let go - of the past, of God, of friends, etc. - and discover how to forget (a crucial aspect of innocence as Nietzsche understands the latter); don't be a memory-monger, he says, learn, rather, to love fate (i.e., embrace a kind of non-willing and move towards a state of what Heidegger likes to term Gelassenheit - a mixture of serenity, joyful wisdom, and a sense of release) [5].   

 

That, I suppose, is the vital point; letting go is also a letting be, allowing things to sparkle in their own freedom and mystery.         

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm referring, of course, to the the opening line of the soliloquy given by Prince Hamlet in Act 3, Scene 1: "To be, or not to be, that is the question." For earlier refelctions on the verb to be, see the post of 5 August 2022: click here.

 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, 'To let go or to hold on -?', in The Poems Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 372-73. Note that this is not the full poem reproduced here; there are five other stanzas before these closing verses.

[3] Having said that, I'm not a great fan of Herman Melville's figure of Bartleby the Scrivener; see what I write in the post published on 31 January 2013: click here. 

[4] See Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense', in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press International, 1993), p. 80. I discuss this idea in a post published on 23 September 2020: click here.

 

[5] Heidegger borrowed the term Gelassenheit from Meister Eckhart and the Christian mystical tradition. He first elaborated the idea in a 1959 work which included two texts: Gelassenheit and Zur Erörterung der Gelassenheit: Aus einem Feldweggespräch über das Denken. An English translation of the latter was first published in 1966 as "Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking". It can now be found as Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis, (Indiana University Press, 2010). 

      For a post published on 24 February 2021 in which I discuss the idea of Gelassenheit in relation to the Money Calm Bull: click here.    

 

 

God Save the King ...? The D. H. Lawrence Birthday Post (2022)

The ghost of D. H. Lawrence observes a relaxed-looking King Charles III  

 

 

I.

 

And all across the land, the great cry goes up: God Save the King! 

 

The king in this case being Charles III, who has now been formally proclaimed as monarch following the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II. 

 

But, as every year on this day - 11 September - I always like to stop and ask: What would Lawrence think? 

 

II.

 

As with many other subjects, it's not easy to pin Lawrence down when it comes to the question of monarchy. 

 

On the one hand, he was certainly thrilled to see all the king's soldiers stiffly marching past in their red tunics when enjoying a visit to Hyde Park in the summer of 1909. But that might just be a sign of a penchant for pomp and circumstance, or, indeed, of his homoerotic attraction to virile young men in uniform [1].

 

For when Lawrence actually did see a member of the Royal Family up close and personal - namely, Edward, the Prince of Wales, on a visit to Ceylon in March 1922 - he wasn't particularly impressed. In fact, he seemed far more in awe of the ceremonial elephants and naked devil-dancers, than the pale-faced representative of the British Crown [2].

 

As Lawrence's biographer David Ellis notes, Lawrence characterises the future king, in both his verse and correspondence, with terms and phrases such as sad, nervous, irritable, worn out, forlorn, etc. [3]

 

He is particuarly contemptuous of the Prince's motto, Ich dien, and reasserts an older model of kingship based upon the power of rule over - not service to - the people. And that's really the crucial point; Lawrence doesn't much care for modern forms of constitutional monarchy, he wants kings with dark faces and red beards, and who, like the Sons of Enoch, are hung like horses.

 

In a letter to Mabel Sterne, written in April of 1922, Lawrence states:

 

"I don't believe either in liberty or democracy. I believe in actual, sacred, inspired authority: divine right of natural kings: I believe in the divine right of natural aristocracy, the right, the sacred duty to wield undisputed authority." [4]    

 

He develops this line of thinking in several essays from this period [5], as well as the Epilogue (written in September 1924) to Movements in European History (1921). 

 

Whilst conceding that it is bad to have "greedy, cruel people called 'nobles'" and "rich people squandering money and taking airs" [6], Lawrence argues that, at the same time, we long for those who understand the mysterious responsibility of power, such as the ancient kings; men who were not mere bullies or tyrants and whose kingship was "not a matter of vanity and conceit" [7].      

 

 

III. 

 

So, what then would Lawrence make of King Charles III? 

 

Not much, I suspect. 

 

But, who knows, Charles may at least be able to "keep up a bluff of royalty and nobleness" [8] for a bit longer. And then, after him, le déluge ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Guards!', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 34-35. And see also my post on this poem: click here. 

 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Elephant', in The Poems Vol. I, pp. 338-343. This poem can also be found online: click here, for example.

[3] See David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930, (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 16.

[4] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mabel Dodge Sterne, 10 April 1922, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 226. 

 

[5] See, for example, the essays 'Blessed Are the Powerful' and 'Aristocracy', both of which can be found in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 261.

 

[7] Ibid., p. 263.    

[8] Ibid., p. 264. 

 

 

For a post published in April of this year in which I discuss Lawrence's reaction to Ceylon, click here. 

 

For another response to presently unfolding royal events in the UK, click here.