A Warning from Cinematic History: The Tragic Case of James Xavier - The Man with the X-Ray Eyes

"He stripped souls as bare as bodies!"

 Ray Milland as Dr James Xavier in

The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

 

I. 

 

People who subscribe to the myth of Genesis [1] believe that darkness is simply a lack of illumination, or the absence of visible light. 

 

In other words, they think of it as a purely negative quality in binary opposition to divine radiance; that truth, goodness, and wisdom all shine brightly, whilst darkness is the home of secrets, lies, and a shameful form of ignorance that leads to sin. 

 

Such metaphysical dualism is, of course, just a convenient way of ordering the world for simple-minded folk who fear complexity (and, indeed, fear the darkness and those things that go bump in the night).

 

Artists and philosophers, on the other hand, understand that not only is darkness vital - that human life needs a little shadow to add depth and mystery - but light and darkness are coeval. That is to say, they are intimately connected and bring each other forth; not absolutely distinct and separate. 

 

Thus, when I say that I love the darkness, I am not implying I hate the light. 

 

Indeed, my concern, as a philosopher, is not to critique those who wish to see the world clearly by the light of reason, but take issue with those who subscribe to an ideal of total transparency, driven as they are by an insane desire to see through everything in a profoundly dangerous (and nihilistic) manner as if they had x-ray vision like the man who best exemplifies our Transparenzgesellschaft [2], James Xavier. 

II.

 

The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) is an American science fiction film directed by Roger Corman, from a script by Ray Russell and Robert Dillon, and starring Ray Milland as Dr James Xavier, a scientist who develops eye drops that allow him to see beyond the visible spectrum into the ultraviolet and x-ray wavelengths. 

 

What starts out as fun - seeing through a pretty girl's clothing - soon ends in tragedy. For eventually Xavier can see the world only in forms of light and texture that his brain is unable to fully comprehend and - having lost the darkness - he loses his mind and his life. 

 

The film was a huge hit at the time, but it is only now that it's warning about the dangers of total transparency and of no longer being able to close one's eyes and dream in revitalising darkness, takes on cultural pertinence.

 

As Xavier's self-induced condition worsens, he begins to wear thick protective goggles, that uncannily anticipate the headsets that we are encouraged to put on in order to explore a digital metaverse in which reality is dissolved in an acid of virtual light.     

 

One fears that eventually the only thing that will save us from madness will be to gouge out our own eyes, as Xavier does his.  

 

   

 

If thine eyes offend thee ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm referring here to the famous opening lines of Genesis 1, which detail how light was created by God and separated off from the primal darkness that was upon the face of the deep when the Earth was without form and void.

 

[2] This concept is explored by Byung-Chul Han in his book The Transparency Society, trans. Erik Butler, (Stanford University Press, 2015). I have discussed this book in a three-part post on Torpedo the Ark: click here for part 1; here for part 2; here for part 3. 

Excessive Brightness Drove the Poet into Darkness

Damien Hirst: Black Sun (2004) 

Flies and resin on canvas (144" diameter)

Photograph: Prudence Cuming Associates 

© Damien Hirst and Science Ltd.

 

 

I. 

 

For D. H. Lawrence, darkness is not thought negatively as a total lack or absence of visible light. 

 

In fact, for Lawrence - as for Heidegger - the dark is the secret of the light [1]; an idea that reminds one of the esoteric teachings of Count Dionys on the concealed reality of the sun and the invisibility of fire.

 

According to the latter, the brightness of sunshine is epiphenomenal and there would be no light at all were it not for refraction, due to bits of dust and stuff, making the dark fire visible: 

 

"'And that being so, even the sun is dark [...] And the true sunbeams coming towards us flow darkly, a moving darkness of the genuine fire. The sun is dark, the sunshine flowing to us is dark. And light is only the inside-out of it all, the lining, and the yellow beams are only the turning away of the sun's directness.'" [2]

 

Thus our luminous daytime world is really just a surface effect; the underlying reality is of a powerfully throbbing darkness, as great thinkers have always understood and which is recognised within various religious mythologies [3].

 

 

II. 

 

Some of Lawrence's loveliest poetry is written, therefore, beneath the dark light of a black sun [4]. But he also acknowledges the chthonic reality of darkness and likes to write of the hellish aspect of flowers, insisting, for example, that they are a gift of Hades, not Heaven [5]. 

 

This is clear in these lines from his famous poem 'Bavarian Gentians':    

 

"Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark

darkening the day-time, torch-like, with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom" [6]     

 

In 'Gladness of Death', meanwhile, Lawrence dreams of actually becoming what some might term a fleur du mal:

 

"I have always wanted to be as the flowers are

so unhampered in their living and dying,

and in death I believe I shall be as the flowers are.

I shall blossom like a dark pansy, and be delighted

there among the dark sun-rays of death. 

I can feel myself unfolding in the dark sunshine of death

to something flowery and fulfilled, and with a strange sweet perfume." [7]

 

At other times, however, Lawrence's dark musing is less floral in character and takes on a more nihilistic aspect as he longs for complete non-existence:

 

"No, now I wish the sunshine would stop,

and the white shining houses, and the gay red flowers on the balconies

and the bluish mountains beyond, would be crushed out

between two halves of darkness;

the darkness falling, the darkness rising, with muffled sound

obliterating everything. 

 

I wish that whatever props up the walls of light

would fall, and darkness would come hurling heavily down,

and it would be thick black dark forever.

Not sleep, which is grey with dreams,

nor death, which quivers with birth,

but heavy, sealing darkness, silence, all immovable." [8]

 

Now, I know that post-Freudians - even really smart ones like Julia Kristeva [9] - will tend to read a poem like this in terms of dépression et mélancolie, but those of us who know Lawrence will understand the necessity of being made nothing and dipped into oblivion [10].   

 

Notes

 

[1] Martin Heidegger, Basic Principles of Thinking (Freiburg Lectures, 1957), in Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, (Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 88.

      In a poem entitled 'In the Dark', the narrator (whom we can assume to be Lawrence) tells a frightened female figure (whom we can assume to be Frieda) that even when she dances in sunshine, it is dark behind her - as if her shadow were the essential aspect of her being. 

      See D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 170-71. And cf. this stanza from 'Climb down, O lordly mind': "Thou art like the day / but thou art also like the night, / and thy darkness is forever invisible, / for the strongest light throws also the darkest shadow." The Poems, Vol. I, p. 411.     

 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, The Ladybird, in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 180. 

      Lawrence probably got this idea of the black sun from Mme. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine (1888), though it by no means originated in theosophy; the ancient alchemists, for example, also wrote of the sol niger. Today, it's our physicists who talk of dark energy and dark matter; and neo-Nazis who fetishise the symbol of the black sun.       

 

[3] In Greek mythology, for example, Erebos was one of the primordial deities; born of Chaos, he was a personification of darkness.

 

[4] Lawrence's 'Twilight', for example, opens with the line: "Darkness comes out of the earth". See The Poems, Vol. I, p. 12.

 

[5] See 'Purple Anemones', The Poems, Vol. I, pp. 262-64.       

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'Bavarian Gentians' [1], The Poems, Vol. I, p. 610. 

      See also 'Glory of Darkness' [1], The Poems, Vol. I, p. 591, in which Lawrence eulogises the darkness embodied in some Bavarian gentians which make "a magnificent dark-blue gloom" in his sunny room.  

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Gladness of Death' [2], The Poems, Vol. I, p. 584.  

[8] These are the first two stanzas of Lawrence's '"And oh - that the man I am might cease to be -"', The Poems, Vol. I, pp. 165-66. 

      This theme of an annihilating darkness can also be found in 'Our day is over', ibid., p. 369.

[9] See Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, (Columbia University Press, 1989). 

      For Kristeva, depression is a form of discourse with a language to be learned, rather than strictly a pathology to be treated. This depressive discourse often reveals itself in poetry or other creative forms of self-expression. See Garry Drake's M.A. thesis - D. H. Lawrence's Last Poems: 'A Dark Cloud of Sadness', (University of Saskatchewan, 2008) - which reads Lawrence's work in light of Kristeva's theory: click here. 

[10] I'm referring here to one of Lawrence's last poems, 'Phoenix', which can be found in The Poems, Vol. I, pp. 641-42. 

Most of the poems by Lawrence that I refer to in this post can be found online:

 

'In the Dark' - click here.

 

'Twilight' [aka 'Palimpsest of Twilight] - click here. 

 

'Purple Anemones' - click here. 

 

'Bavarian Gentians' - click here. 

 

'Glory of Darkness' - click here.

 

'And oh - that the man I am might cease to be' - click here.

 

'Our day is over' - click here. 

 

 

For a sister post to this one, click here. 

 

 

Hello Darkness My Old Friend ...

Hello darkness, my old friend - by Niranjan Morkar

dribble.com

 

 

I. 

 

The three fundamental laws of logic - (i) the law of non-contradiction; (ii) the law of the excluded middle; and (iii) the principle of identity - are all well and good, but cannot be thought valid for all forms of thinking. 

 

Why? Because - whether our logicians like to admit it or not - some forms of thinking rely upon creative madness and daimonic inspiration and so are not regulated by reason alone. 

 

Our very greatest poets, for example, playfully affirm paradox, ambiguity, and what Barthes terms the pleasure of the text; they are unafraid of appearing inconsistent or irrational and are proud to proclaim that if, like Whitman, they contradict themselves that's fine with them (for they contain multitudes) [1].        

 

II. 

 

Similarly, our great poet-philosophers, like Heidegger, argue that even the most enlightened thinking requires darkness: 

 

"This darkness is perhaps in play for all thinking at all times. Humans cannot set it aside. Rather they must learn to acknowledge the dark as something unavoidable and to keep at bay those prejudices that would destroy the lofty reign of the dark. Thus the dark remains distinct from the pitch black as the mere and utter absence of light. The dark however is the secret of the light. The dark keeps the light to itself. The latter belongs to the former. Thus the dark has its own limpidity." [2] 

 

This dark limpidity of thinking, is something that must always be protected. However, it's hard to do so when everything is now lit up with electric lights and we aspire to an ideal of excessive brightness that is brighter than a thousand suns.

 

As Heidegger says:   

 

"The light is no longer an illuminated clearing, when the light diffuses into a mere brightness [...] It remains difficult [...] to keep at bay the admixture of the brightness that does not belong and to find the brightness that is alone fitting to the dark. [...] Mortal thinking must let itself down into the dark depths of the well if it is to see the stars by day. It remains more difficult to guard the limpidity of the dark than to procure a brightness that only wants to shine as such. What only wants to shine, does not illuminate. [3]

 

In sum: whenever you start to think about thinking, you are instantly transported into darkness ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 51: click here to read on poets.org.  

 

[2] Martin Heidegger, Basic Principles of Thinking (Freiburg Lectures, 1957), in Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, (Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 88.

 

[3] Ibid., pp. 88-89. 

 

 

This post (as promised) is for Jenina Bas Pendry. 

 

For a sister post to this one, click here.

Are You Pervin on Me? (Notes on The Blind Man, by D. H. Lawrence)

Tito Victoriano: Blind Man
redbubble.com

I.

There's something creepy and disturbing about Maurice Pervin. As his name suggests, he's a man born beneath a black star and full of the potential for violence; "like an ominous thunder-cloud".

So at home is Maurice within the invisible world of touch, that whilst his loss of sight during the war is something of an inconvenience, it doesn't profoundly affect him: "Life was still very full and strangely serene for the blind man, peaceful with the almost incomprehensible peace of immediate contact in darkness."

Indeed, so content is Maurice to live in connubial intimacy with his wife Isabel and perform menial farm work - milking the cows, attending to the pigs and horses - that he "did not even regret the loss of his sight".

His fits of depression and dark moods were rooted, therefore, in something else; in his hypersensitivity, perhaps; or his resentment of those individuals such as his wife's old friend Bertie Reid, who were less passionate but more quick-witted than he; "a resentment which deepened sometimes into stupid hatred".

II.

Bertie was a barrister and a man of letters; "a Scotchman of the intellectual type" - ironical, sentimental, and - one suspects - a repressed homosexual. For whilst he is extremely fond of his close female companions, he has no desire to marry any of them:

"He was a bachelor, three or four years older than Isabel. He lived in beautiful rooms overlooking the river, guarded by a faithful Scottish man-servant. And he had his friends among the fair sex - not lovers, friends. So long as he could avoid any danger of courtship or marriage, he adored a few good women with constant and unfailing homage, and he was chivalrously fond of quite a number. But if they seemed to encroach on him, he withdrew and detested them. 
      Isabel knew him very well, knew his beautiful constancy, and kindness, also his incurable weakness, which made him unable to ever enter into close contact of any sort. He was ashamed of himself, because he could not marry, could not approach women physically. He wanted to do so. But he could not. At the centre of him he was afraid, helplessly and even brutally afraid. He had given up hope, had ceased to expect any more that he could escape his own weakness." 

As noted, Maurice hates him: hates his Scottish accent; hates the other man's complacency. But perhaps his hatred wasn't born of homophobia, but, rather, his own homosexual desire: "He hated Bertie Reid, and at the same time he knew the hatred was [...] the outcome of his own weakness."


III.

To cut a short story even shorter, Bertie has come to visit the Pervins ...

After an uncomfortable meal and some small talk by the fire over drinks, Maurice excuses himself, taking his leave of Isabel and her friend in order to attend to some farm business. Several hours pass and, worried that it was getting late, Isabel asks Bertie to go find her absent husband:

"Bertie put on an old overcoat and took a lantern. [...] He shrank from the wet and roaring night. Such weather had a nervous effect on him [...] He peered in all the buildings. At last, as he opened the upper door of a sort of intermediate barn, he heard a grinding noise, and looking in, holding up his lantern, saw Maurice, in his shirt-sleeves [...] holding the handle of a turnip-pulper. He had been pulping sweet roots, a pile of which lay dimly heaped in a corner behind him."

The blind man is stroking a sinister-looking half-wild grey cat, as if it were some kind of familiar. He asks Bertie about the nature of the scar upon his face: "'Sometimes I feel I am horrible,' said Maurice, in a low voice, talking as if to himself. And Bertie actually felt a quiver of horror."

What happens after this isn't quite clear: one suspects that Lawrence wants us to read between the lines. Maurice asks Bertie if he might touch him and the latter, although a man who instinctively shrinks from physical contact, gives consent in a small, submissive voice: "But he suffered as the blind man stretched out a strong, naked hand to him."

Maurice lays his hands on Bertie's head:

"closing the dome of the skull in a soft, firm grasp [...] then, shifting his grasp and softly closing again, with a fine, close pressure, till he had covered the skull and the face of the smaller man, tracing the brows, and touching the full, closed eyes, touching the small nose and the nostrils, the rough, short moustache, the mouth, the rather strong chin."

Maurice also allows his hands to wander south; he grasps the shoulders, the arms, the hands of the other man - and who knows what else? "He seemed to take him, in the soft, travelling grasp." Lawrence could have chosen to stop here, but, instead, he intensifies this scene of queer eroticism; Maurice asking Bertie to touch his eyes, with his young and tender hands:

"Now Bertie quivered with revulsion. Yet he was under the power of the blind man [...] He lifted his hand, and laid the fingers on the [...] scarred eyes. Maurice suddenly covered them with his own hand, pressed the fingers of the other man upon his disfigured eye-sockets, trembling in every fibre, and rocking slightly, slowly, from side to side. He remained thus for a minute or more, whilst Bertie stood as if in a swoon, unconscious, imprisoned."

The scene culminates thusly:

"Maurice  removed the hand of the other man from his brow, and stood holding it in his own.
      'Oh my God,' he said, 'we shall know each other now, shan't we?  We shall know each other now.'
      Bertie could not answer. He gazed mute and terror-struck, overcome by his own weakness. He knew he could not answer. He had an unreasonable fear, lest the other man should suddenly destroy him. Whereas Maurice was actually filled with hot, poignant love [...] Perhaps it was this very passion [...] which Bertie shrank from most."


IV.

Whether the knowledge that fills Maurice with delicate fulfilment is carnal in nature is debatable, making the question of whether this is or is not a scene of sexual abuse impossible to answer with certainty. But it's certainly a traumatic and shattering experience for poor Bertie who is desperate to escape throughout, and who returns to the house in silence looking haggard and with eyes that were glazed over with misery:

"He could not bear it that he had been touched by the blind man, his insane reserve broken in. He was like a mollusc whose shell is broken."
  
Maurice, meanwhile, is elated - and, curiously, so is Isabel who takes her husband's hand in both hers and whispers to him "'You'll be happier now, dear.'"

One almost wonders if she hasn't set the whole thing up; knowing the cause of her husband's depression to be frustrated homosexual desire; inviting her vulnerable friend to visit - a man whom she secretly despised and felt contemptuous of; sending Bertie out to the barn in the dark of night like a lamb to the slaughter, so that her husband might find some degree of (momentary) satisfaction.    

What this tale illustrates is that Lawrence's notion of touch or phallic tenderness isn't always loving and consensual; it can involve submission, it can involve violence, it can involve all manner of perversity and fetishistic behaviour, and it can even include rape (be it of middle-aged women by Mexican bullfighters, or physically reserved young men by powerful figures like Maurice Pervin who exist as towers of darkness upon the face of the earth).


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Blind Man', in England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 46-63. All lines quoted here are from this edition, but note that an online version of the story can be read by clicking here. Readers who are interested can also find an earlier version of the tale, from 1918, in The Vicar's Garden and Other Stories, ed. N. H. Reeve, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 175-91. 

For an alternative reading of the story see Abbie Garrington, 'D. H. Lawrence: Blind Touch in a Visual Culture', Ch. 5 of Haptic Modernism, (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Dr. Garrington argues that Maurice Pervin's disability gives him 'access to other modes of seeing - the potential for spiritual insight, and an ability to attune himself to the tides of his own blood'. She also considers the character in his phallic aspect and as a kind of living sculpture.

Finally, readers might also be interested in a short film adaptation of 'The Blind Man' (dir. Travis Mills, 2011) made by Michael Coleman, Jason Cowan, McKenzie Goodwin, Travis Mills and Jess Weaver (Running Wild Films): click here.