A Tale of Two Ears and Notes on Aural Regeneration

This ear? 

Yes, that there.

 

 

I. 

 

For Síomón Solomon, the human ear "is not merely a passive cavity or vacuous opening but a transfigurative chamber of auditory fantasy" [1]. If this makes it for some the most poetic organ, so too does it help to explain why for ear fetishists aural sex is the only game in town.

 

One famous lughole lover is the American filmmaker David Lynch, who not only assigns the severed, decomposing ear crawling with ants discovered in a field at the start of his cult movie Blue Velvet (1986) symbolic importance, but gives it something of a lead role [2]. 

 

For as Solomon goes on to note, Lynch became so fixated with the prosthetic ear, that he and his make-up supervisor Jeff Goodwin referred to it as a character in its own right - 'Mr Ear' - and designed it out of silicone rather than latex, "even embellishing it, in a superbly disquieting fetishistic signature, with locks of Lynch's own scissored hair" [3]. 

 

Lynch's ear serves much the same function for Jeffrey Beaumont as the rabbit hole does for Alice; it is what leads him (and us) into a troubling and dangerous underworld. It is only when he finally comes through his ordeal that he (and we as viewers) exit the ear.

 

Of course, not all detached ears found lying on the ground have such a serious symbolic role to play. In Carry On Screaming! (dir. Gerald Thomas,1966), for example, Oddbod's ear has a strictly comic function, allowing for a couple of predictable (but still amusing) gags. 

 

Whether the ear possesses the same remarkable regenerative capacity as the repulsive-looking finger which Oddbod also loses, wasn't made clear in the film, but the possibility of regrowing lost tissues or organs is an intriguing one worth looking at in a bit more detail ...

 

 

II.

 

Salamanders are well-known for their ability to regenerate complex body parts and this has long fascinated scientists keen to discover if people too may one day be able to regrow lost limbs, etc. 

 

Whether this would involve genetically engineering human-salamander hybrids or simply transplanting blastema tissue from these loveable amphibians, I don't know. But, either way, it would be remarkable if doctors found a way to induce regeneration (and tumor regression) in animals such as ourselves with a limited ability to repair our own bodies and a penchant for the quick-fix of forming scar tissue. 

 

Having said that, it might prove easier simply to 3D print new bits and bobs in the lab, as in the recent case of a young Mexican woman who had her external ear reconstructed using this technique to create a living tissue transplant. 

 

According to press reports [4], the transplant procedure was successfully carried out at a US hospital in March 2022 and such newly developed technology promises to transform the lives of people born with microtia; a rare congenital condition in which one or both outer ears are absent or incompletely formed.

 

The company behind this groundbreaking work  - 3DBio Therapeutics - said the new ear was composed of a 3D-printed collagen hydrogel scaffold using the patient's own cartilage cells. Clinical trials involving several other patients are ongoing, but fingers crossed the organ won't be rejected so that what's ear today won't be gone tomorrow.    

 

 

 

Photos from the Microtia-Congenital Ear Institute 

and 3DBio Therapeutics

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), p. 101. For further discussion of Solomon's audiopoetics, see the post of 10 May 2021: click here.

 

[2] To watch the scene in Blue Velvet in which Jeffrey Beaumont (played by Kyle MacLachlan) discovers the ear, click here.

 

[3] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, pp. 99-100. 

[4] See for example Roni Caryn Rabin, 'Doctors Transplant Ear of Human Cells, Made by 3-D Printer', The New York Times (2 June 2022), and/or Nicola Davis, 'Woman's ear rebuilt with 3D-printed living tissue implant' The Guardian (2 June 2022).

It's Creepy and It's Kooky, Mysterious and Spooky: Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie (Part 1)

Front cover image from Mark Fisher's 

The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater Books, 2016)

 

 

I. 

 

Let me confess from the outset that one of the main problems I have with Mark Fisher's work is that I'm unfamiliar with many of the books, films, and records that he chooses as points of reference, so often feel unable to comment. Thus, I intend sticking here to his more general remarks on the weird and the eerie, about which I feel better able to discuss.

 

According to Mark Fisher, the weird and the eerie are closely related (but distinct) modes of strangeness, each with their own properties. The former draws our attention to that which does not belong and instills a sense of wrongness; the latter troubles the notion of agency (human and non-human) and makes us question existence and non-existence. 

 

Neither terrifies or deeply distresses, so much as make us feel vaguely apprehensive or uneasy.    

 

And neither has much to do with with Freud's concept of the unheimlich and should not be equated to the latter. The attempt to do so, says Fisher, is "symptomatic of a secular retreat from the outside" [a]; i.e., returning to the safety of a long familiar (if hugely influential) idea that ultimately serves to domesticate and contain the outside "in terms of a modernist family drama" [10]. 

 

 

II.

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, Fisher begins his study of the weird by turning to H. P. Lovecraft - a writer whom Graham Harman predicts will one day displace Hölderlin as the philosopher's favourite [b] and someone who intuitively grasped that nothing is weirder than reality (i.e., the natural-material cosmos).

 

As Fisher rightly says, when you really stop to think about it, a black hole is weirder than a vampire or werewolf. 

 

Lovecraft is the daddy of weird fiction; the man who long before George Michael encouraged characters and readers alike to venture outside - even if doing so "often ends in breakdown and psychosis" [16] for the former and fascination "mixed with a certain trepidation" [17] for the latter.

 

There is nothing surprising or suspensful or even truly terrible in Lovecraft's weird tales. And yet they compel our attention, even as they repel us at the same time with their inhuman quality; i.e., their insistence that "human concerns, perspectives and concepts have only a local reference" [18].    

Fisher is spot-on to insist that Lovecraft is neither a horror writer nor a fantasy author; that his weird realism is something very different from either of these genres and that his tales "depend for their power on the difference between the terrestrial-empirical and the outside" [20][c] and on their sheer originality.

 

 

III.

 

Like Lovecraft, H. G. Wells also understood something of the weird, even if his work is, in many respects, very different from the former's. 

 

One thing both writers shared is a concern with thresholds and the fatal possibility of "contact between incommensurable worlds" [28], an idea best illustrated in an episode of Seinfeld when George's independence (and sanity) are threatened by the transcendental shock of worlds colliding [d].   

 

It's probably always best (if not always possible) to keep worlds apart, although the weird, as a phenomenon, is that which unfolds in the space between them. 

 

 

IV.  

 

Moving on, Fisher introduces a notion of the grotesque, which, like the weird, "evokes something which is out of place" [32] - although unlike the latter it often evokes laughter (the only humour in Lovecraft, says Fisher, is accidental).

 

And the "confluence of the weird and the grotesque is no better exemplified than in the work of the post-punk group The Fall" [33], particularly in the period 1980-82. 

Unfortunately, my knowledge of Mark E. Smith's combo is limited. In fact, I can only name one of their songs; the 1980 single 'How I Wrote Elastic Man' (and that's only because I often heard it on John Peel, not because I went out and bought it). 

 

So I'll just have to take Fisher's word for it when he insists The Fall "are remarkabe for the way in which they draw out a cultural politics of the weird and the grotesque" [33] and produced "what could be called a popular modernist weird [...] with all the difficulties and compulsions of post-punk sound" [33] [e].

 

In the same period Fisher was getting worked up over The Fall, I was listening to Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow and had more interest in post-punk piracy than the weird and grotesque; indeed, I seem to remember finding groups like The Fall too depressing (perhaps even too Northern) for my tastes; even their laughter issues "from a psychotic outside" [35] and that didn't sound very funny to me at the time.           

 

However, if what Fisher says is true, I would probably find The Fall more amusing now (although I suspect I would still find them a band more interesting to read about, than fun to listen to).   

 

 

V.

 

Is there not an intrinsically weird dimension to the time travel story? 

Mark Fisher thinks so:

 

"By its very nature, the time travel story [...] combines entities and objects that do not belong together. Here the threshold between worlds is the apparatus that allows travel between different time periods [...] and the weird effect typically manifests as a sense of achronism." [40]

 

Again, that's one of those true-but-kind-of-obvious statements that Fisher seems to specialise in. Here's another: time-paradoxes also trigger a feeling weirdness. Indeed - who would argue with that?  

 

 

VI.

 

"There is another type of weird effect that is generated by strange loops [...] not just tangles in cause and effect [...] but confusions of ontological level." [45]

 

These confusions particularly play out at the level of simulacra and simulation, putting the nature of being and reality into question - just ask Thomas (Neo) Anderson. Or Baudrillard. Is there anything weirder than living in a world one knows to be a cleverly constructed simulation but which still feels real?      

 

 

VII.

 

If it wasn't in the least surprising that Fisher should open his study of the weird with Lovecraft, it's equally unsurprising that he should close it with the director of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, David Lynch.

 

For in many ways Fisher seems weirdly trapped in the 1980s and '90s; a man still gripped by the same philosophical ideas (and postmodern obsessions) that shaped his thinking when writing his Ph.D. on cybernetic fiction-theory [f]. Indeed, Fisher readily admits that his fascination with the weird and eerie goes back as far as he can remember. 

     

Now, whilst some might suggest he move on and find new interests, I rather admire the manner in which he has stayed true to the authors, singers, and filmmakers, he loves best. But David Lynch isn't a particular favourite of mine, I'm afraid; there are certainly films by the other two Davids - Fisher and Cronenberg - I like more than Mulholland Drive (2001), though they're perhaps not as weird in the sense that Fisher uses the term.   

 

As for Inland Empire (2006), not only have I not seen it, I've not even heard of it - how weird is that?

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, (Repeater Books, 2016), p. 10. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the main text. 

 

[b] See Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Zero Books, 2012).

 

[c] Just to be clear: "The outside is not 'empirically' exterior; it is transcendentally exterior; i.e. it is not just a matter of something being distant in space and time, but of something which is beyond our ordinary experience and conception of space and time itself." - Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, p. 22. 

 

[d] Seinfeld, 'The Pool Guy' [S7/E8], dir. Andy Ackerman, written by David Mandel (1995). Click here to observe the devastating effect it has upon George's mental health when he experiences the colliding of worlds: George is getting upset! Nevertheless, it's interesting to note that this tale unfolds within a weirdly comic universe, rather than a weirdly tragic or melancholic one.

 

[e] Perhaps the only author who writes with such intense conviction about the pop music they love is poet and playwright Síomón Solomon; see his 2020 text Hölderlin's Poltergeists in which he celebrates that other critically-acclaimed post-punk band from Manchester, Joy Division.     

 

[f] Fisher's Ph.D. thesis was entitled: Flatline constructs: Gothic materialism and cybernetic theory-fiction. It was completed in the Philosophy Dept. at the University of Warwick and submitted in July 1999. A PDF of this work is available via the University of Warwick publications service website: click here. The first line opens with the words "Isn't it strange [...]". 

      Fisher was a founding member of the interdisciplinary collective inspired by the work of Nick Land and Sadie Plant known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Although I was also in the Philosophy Dept. at Warwick at this time and initially had Land as my Graduate Progress Committee member overseeing my own doctoral research project, I never crossed paths with Fisher, which, looking back, I now rather regret.  

 

 

Part two of this post - on the eerie - can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

We Are Transmitters: Reflections on Síomón Solomon's Audiopoetics

"As we live, we are transmitters of life. 

And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us." [1]

 

 

Rüdiger Görner describes Síomón Solomon's 'Spills of mire I swallowed inside the tower' as "an inspirational meditation on the poetics of audio drama" [2] and I'm happy to endorse this view and echo the praise. 

 

Consisting of five short movements, the text is pretty much perfect as is and hardly needs commentary; it certainly doesn't deserve to be summarized or stripped to its bare bones (so that these can in turn be ground down into fine dust in the name of analysis) 

 

And so, what follows are mostly just brief reflections of my own, inspired by Solomon's in the first three movements [3] ...

 

 

(i) On dying of imagination (or dancing to the radio till you're dead)

 

What do fictional adultress Lady Chatterley and epileptic post-punk icon Ian Curtis have in common? The answer is that both regarded the act of listening to the radio as a potentially suicidal gesture, as Greil Marcus terms it [4].    

 

Lawrence provides a short but rather terrifying description of Sir Clifford Chatterley turning on and tuning in to his newly installed radio and becoming queer in the process, much to Connie's amazement and horror:

 

"And he would sit alone for hours listening [...] with a blank, entranced expression on his face, like a person losing his mind, and listen, or seem to listen, to the unspeakable thing." [5]
 

As for Curtis, the radio, says Solomon, functioned in his imagination not merely as  device to dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to, but as "an acoustic accelerant of auto-destruction, a transmission machine for self-slaughter" [6], that leads to an everlasting silence that might be construed as the ultimate example of dead air; i.e., the void that exists "in the dark heart of hearing" [7].

 

 

(ii) 'Sometimes a wind blows': A quick wor(l)d in David Lynch's ear

 

For some, the ear is the most poetic organ. For others, it's the most open and obliging organ. And for ear fetishists all around the lobe - which, if Solomon's account is true, includes filmmaker David Lynch - aural sex is the only game in town [8].

 

For D. H. Lawrence, hearing is "perhaps the deepest of the senses" [9] and the one we have no choice about; i.e., we can't close our ears in the same manner we can shut our eyes, although we can of course block our ears with beeswax, like Odysseus, should we wish to do so.

Responding to this latter point, Lawrence writes:

"We may voluntarily quicken our hearing, or make it dull. But we have really no choice of what we hear. Our will is eliminated. Sound acts direct, almost automatically, upon the affective centres. And we have no power of going forth from the ear. We are always and only recipient." [10]  

 

One suspects that Solomon would challenge Lawrence's thinking here, particularly the latter claim, believing as he does that "the physical ear is not merely a passive cavity or vacuous opening but a transfigurative chamber of auditory fantasy" [11]. 

However, Solomon might be rather more sympathetic to (or at least more intrigued by) what Lawrence says here about music:

 

"The singing of birds acts almost entirely upon the centres of the breast. [...] 

      So does almost all our music, which is all Christian in tendency. But modern music is analytical, critical, and it has discovered the power of ugliness. Like our martial music, it is of the upper plane [... acting] direct upon the thoracic ganglian. Time was, however, when music acted upon the sensual centres direct. We hear it still in savage music, and in the roll of drums, and in the roaring of lions, and in the howling of cats. And in some voices still we hear the deeper resonance of the sensual mode of consciouness." [12]      

 

 

(iii) 'The Ether Will Now Oblige'

 

I'm pleased that Solomon brings the Italian Futurists into his discussion of audiopoetics. 

 

I'm particularly pleased to see Luigi Russolo, author of The Art of Noise (1916), given a shout out, as he anticipated Lawrence's thinking in Fantasia concerning the relationship between sound and the material unconscious - just as he anticipated everything that was to unfold in music-as-technology in the twentieth-century. 

 

In another memorable passage, Solomon writes:

"As a culture transforms, the aesthetic spectrum of listening, its scale of aural tolerances and refusals, is continuously recalibrated. Accoring to Russolo's epistolary argument, the ear of the Classical age in music could never have borne the modern orchestra's arduous dissonances. The introduction of nineteeth-century machine technology decisively ushered in the advent of noise - which immediately claimed, it is asserted, an absolute sovereignty over human sensibility. As for us multi-layered, late and lonely moderns [...] while we may still be shaken by Wagner and Beethoven, are we any longer stirred?" [13]

 

If it's true, on the one hand, that noise annoys, so do we moderns love - and seem to need - a constant stream of machine-produced sound as a "stimulant whose manufactured proliferation [...] has become perversely anaesthetizing and/or a form of consensual ambient pollution" [14] 

 

The one thing we do not want - and seem to fear - is silence. For that, we no longer have ears, even though it is the silence - that great bride of all creation - from which we are born and to which we must return [15]. 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'We are transmitters', in The Poems,  Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 389.

 

[2] Síomón Solomon, 'Spills of mire I swallowed inside the tower (an audiopoetic symphony in five short movements)', in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), pp. 89-119. 

      Professor Görner's comment is taken from his blurb on the back cover of this book. He goes on to add that, in short, "Solomon's work is a stunning testimony to the significance of the audiopoetic in our increasingly prosaic world". 

[3] It's not that I didn't find the last two sections - which discuss Greek (amphi)theatrics and the politics of the Hörspiel respectively - of interest, but they belong to areas of research about which I have almost no knowledge and so don't feel qualified to join in the conversation.      

[4] Greil Marcus, The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs, (Yale University Press, 2015), p. 33, quoted by Solomon on p. 90 of Hölderlin's Poltergeists.

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 110.

   

[6]  Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 90. 

      Solomon is referring to the Joy Division debut single, 'Transmission', released in October 1979 on Factory Records. Readers unfamiliar with the track - and with Ian Curtis - are encouraged to click here and watch the official video (a live performance on Something Else (15 Sept 1979)). 

 

[7] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 91. 

 

[8] Solomon notes of the Blue Velvet director: "Legend has it that Lynch became so fixated with his film's prosthetic ear that he and his make-up supervisor Jeff Goodwin came to regard it as a character in its own right - calling it 'Mr Ear', redesigning it out of silicone rather than latex and even embellishing it, in a superbly disquieting fetishistic signature, with locks of Lynch's own scissored hair." See Hölderlin's Poltergeists, pp. 99-100. 

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 103. 

[10] Ibid.

 

[11] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 101. 

[12] D. H.Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, pp. 103-104. 

      It's interesting that Lawrence mentions the howling of cats as a form of singing that acts directly on the sensual centres. According to Johnny Rotten, his mother once described Kate Bush's singing as sounding like a bag of cats and yet, despite this - or because of this - Rotten loves Kate Bush, as does Síomón Solomon, who describes her musical persona as an angel-cum-banshee. See Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 93.  

 

[13]  Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, pp 102-103.

 

[14] Ibid., p. 103. 

[15] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Silence', in The Poems, Vol. I., p. 612. 

 

 

This is the 5th - and possibly final - post in a series inspired by Síomón Solomon's work in Hölderlin's Poltergeists. The earlier four posts are: 

How Fascism Makes Killers Of Us All

 

There is No Tongue That is Not Forked

 

A Brief Note on the Life and Work of Stephan Hermlin

What's in a Name? Quite a Lot When That Name is Scardanelli

 

Again to Nowhere and Nothing Again: The Multiple Death-in-Life Masks of Charles Manson - A Guest Post by Símón Solomon

With the 50th anniversary overlap of Quentin Tarantino's latest movie - a black comedy-cum-thriller set in 1969 LA - and an orthodoxy-busting new book by Tom O'Neill, the helter-skelter spiral concerning the life, death and afterlife of celebrity mass murderer, Charles Manson, continues to unravel.

If Tarantino’s title attests to a sense of his picture's elliptical storyboarding, O'Neill’s obsessive study, two decades in the making, underwrites its anarchic archetypal matrix. Either way, should one or both works help to provoke laughter at the facile official version of the Family's choreographed career, a valuable public service will have been performed. In any event, the supposed madman who derailed free love's peace train and called himself no one is a media star all over again.

Some might need to think of him as beyond the pale, but, arguably, Manson was very much a product of American post-War popular culture and a toxic body politic. Thus, at a time when the psychedelic Summer of Love was turning - or being turned - hateful and psychotic, the Family's graphically mediated slaughter of the heavily pregnant actress Sharon Tate, plus three unfortunate friends and a visitor, would be obscenely exploited in order to euthanise the counter-culture by injecting a final shot of fatal terror into the haunted paradise of the beautiful people.

Although the Leno and Rosemary LaBianca slayings two nights later in a separate Los Angeles neighbourhood were suspected by investigators to be copycat homicides, the synergetic contiguity of the two events sealed the Manson clan's fate, implicated as its purported ringleader already was in the murder of Gary Hinman by Bobby Beausoleil.

What fascinates about Manson's legacy as Hollywood's Bluebeard-esque signature villain, is his shapeshifting multiplication through a panoply of visages that evoke resemblances with Jim Morrison, a desert Christ, Büchner's schizophrenic assassin Lenz, and a swastika-stamped beatnik Nazi.

Shot through with a consummate performer's narcissistic and solipsistic grandiosity (in my mind's eye my thoughts light fires in your cities) and memorably inflected anti-humanism (I have X-ed myself from your world), Manson may or may not have been a malignant killer, but, like some fire and brimstone reincarnation of Oscar Wilde without the dress sense, he was always fiendishly quotable.

One can readily see how Tarantino was drawn to his cinematically suggestive story, even as one suspects a superior auteur like David Lynch - whose noirish attunement to Hollywood’s underside is indissociable from the Manson-magnetised termination of flower power  - might have concocted a far more unsettling film.

As we might expect of a mortal so manufactured, if not consumed, by his own demoniacal myth, it is difficult to exaggerate Manson's enduring cultural impact. Yet the more prosaic and humiliated humanity onto which his personae were pinned curdles the legend: a rootless and institutionalised roamer from a broken family; a beatnik thief; a sociopathic fantasist of race war who hung out with Hell's Angels; a failed musician with a monstrous superiority complex.

His archetypal reversion to zero, to a politics of utopian and/or dystopian annihilation, is presumably the clearest clue to the Family's engineered reality. To take Charlie at his word means to view him as essentially a cipher, a figment, of Hollywood’s phantasmic horror, a parodic Freddie Kruger precursor to the Terrible Beauty generation.

His final reported phone call from jail, a recursive quasi-Beckettian microscript, says it all in its unsaying:

'Nothing with everyone and everything over and gone to start backwards again and again to nowhere and nothing again.'

Notes

Quentin Tarantino's new film, Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 21 May 2019. It is released in the UK on 14 August 2019. Click here to watch the official trailer.

See: Tom O'Neill (with Dan Piepenbring), Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, (William Heinemann, 2019).

Símón Solomon is a poet, translator, and critic. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and currently serves as managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He can be contacted via simonsolomon.ink

This is a revised and updated version of an earlier (unpublished) post of the same title. 

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

On the Myth of Maternal Impression (with Reference to the Case of Joseph Merrick)

Joseph Merrick (aka the Elephant Man) 

Photo from c.1889

I remember being amused by the suggestion made in David Lynch's mawkish and moralizing movie The Elephant Man (1980), that Merrick's unfortunate condition may have been caused by his mother having been frightened by a rampaging elephant during her pregnancy. 

At the time, I thought this was just a cinematic fantasy, or a typical piece of Hollywood hokum. But I eventually discovered that the folklorish idea of maternal impression (or what is sometimes referred to with the German term Versehen) is a genuine - though long-discredited - theory of inheritance from a world before genetic science. It was particularly popular in the 18th century.

Basically, this superstitious concept rests on the belief that a powerful mental stimulus experienced by a woman-with-child could produce an impression on the gestating fetus, thus causing the newborn baby to be marked in some manner. Or as my friend Simon Solomon would say, a psychic disturbance or trauma is realised on the physical plane as some kind of birth defect or congenital disorder (thus demonstrating that mind and imagination shape matter). 

Whilst we now know that this is essentially nonsense - that a woman frightened by a cat is extremely unlikely to give birth to a child with whiskers - there is of course evidence to suggest that physical or psychological illness in the mother can affect the fetus in adverse ways, as can the consumption of alcohol or the smoking of cigarettes, for example.

So, ladies, don't over do it on the vino when pregnant and lay off the fags; but, please, don't worry too much about any perverse longings, being attacked by monsters, or coming into direct contact with animal skins ...