We're Born Naked ... Notes on Simon Doonan's Complete Story of Drag (Part 3: On Popstar Drag, Movie Drag, and Radical Drag)

Simon Doonan: Drag: The Complete Story (2019) [a]

Alt. cover feat. Curtis Dam-Mikkelsen (aka Miss Fame)  

Photo by Albert Sanchez and Pedro Zalba

 

 

I.

 

And so we come to chapter 7: Popstar Drag ...

 

Doonan claims that for most of the 20th century, "the guiding principle for men's clothing design was anonymity" (163) and that's true, though perhaps requires some qualification - and I don't believe it's because the average male is "terrified of being stared at" (163). 

Actually, the desire for anonymity - founded upon uniformity of dress and the will to conformity - can be traced back to a shift in sensibility known as the Great Male Renunciation, which began in the late- 18th century and saw men abandon ornate and colourful clothing in favour of more sober, functional attire. 

 

It was the age of the dark suit, designed to signal seriousness and professionalism as well as social conformity. But the aim was not anonymity per se, but to look the business whilst not being conspicuous [b].   

 

It's the modern pop star - that 20th century dandy born of the music business in the 1950s - who challenges this: "In order to sell records, the male popstars of the conservative American mid-century needed fans to take notice, and a sure-fire way to stand out was to raid the feminine repertoire." (163)

 

Doonan continues (in a passage that again rather reinforces the argument often put forward by conservative critics; namely, that pop music was an assault on manly virtue):

 

"The boys were encouraged in their flamboyance by a select and influential group of homosexuals, such as gallery owner Robert Fraser, interior designer Christopher Gibbs, Brian Epstein (manager of The Beatles), Robert Stigwood (Cream and Bee Gees), Simon Napier-Bell (The Yardbirds, Marc Bolan), Billy Gaff (Rod Stewart) and Ken Pitt (David Bowie). These gay Svengalis were drag enablers ..." (165) [c]  

 

For Doonan, two names in particular stand out when it comes the golden age of glam rock in the 1970s: Bolan and Bowie - but they were by no means the only two camping it up:

 

"Billowing bohemian blouses and cascading tresses became the norm. Boys wore girls' skimpy knits and crop tops with unisex crushed-velvet bellbottoms. Ladies' accessories [...] were piled on with gypsy-ish abandon. The emerging popstar drag was nothing if not radical." (166)

 

At this point, Doonan return us to his (strangely unisex) vision of utopia "where men and women overcame their vast differences by dressing alike" (168). 

 

I'd really like to know what he thinks these differences are exactly; is he here talking about differences that are constructed socially, or differences that have a crucial biological basis? If these differences are so vast - his word - then can they really be overcome simply by wearing the same clothing or shade of eyeshadow? I doubt it. 

 

And I'm pretty sure also that Doonan's claim that glam rock (or what he calls popstar drag) was "repellent to the establishment" (171) is simply not the case. It may have been viewed by some members of the older generation with mild disdain and dislike, but, in general, it was met with confusion and amusement. It was certainly not feared and hated in the way that punk rock would be a few years later (or even the countercultural, drug-taking hippie movement had been in the '60s) [d]. 

 

While androgynous fashions, a garish use of makeup, and gender troubling behaviour were scandalous to some, glam was a popular, commercial force that was ultimately tolerated - and often enjoyed - by the wider public; Bowie and Bolan and company were regulars on Top of the Pops and their records were not banned (cf. the Sex Pistols). 

 

In sum - and despite what Doonan likes to think - popstar drag was considered frivolous rather threatening and its huge commercial popularity meant it was soon just seen as another form of showbiz. That was true in the 1970s and it remained true in the 1980s, when figures like Boy George and Marilyn [e] were dominating the charts and airwaves.     

 

And don't get me started on Eurovision - an annual festival of "gloriously naff pop, easy to mock but never boring" (181) - if Doonan really thinks this is in anyway radical or presents a positive vision of the future, then, I'm afraid to say, he's more naive than I thought he was.  

 

 

II. 

 

From the world of pop drag to the world of movie drag ... 

 

Those of you who read part 2 of this post will recall I have already noted my favourite celluloid scene involving drag. 

 

For those of you who haven't read part 2, it's the one in Carry On Constable (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1960), in which officers Benson and Gorse - played by Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey respectively - drag up as Ethel and Agatha in order to go undercover as store detectives.      

 

For me, this scene is as good as it gets when it comes to comedy drag on film and I rank it above the work even of Laurel and Hardy in Twice Two (dir. James Parrott, 1933), or Curtis and Lemmon in Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot (1959). But, funnily enough, Doonan doesn't mention the film - so I guess it's not amongst his favourites, although he predictably raves about the latter as "the most beloved movie of all time" (187).  

  

Doonan also indicates how movie drag is often associated with pervy horror and homicidal insanity - starting with Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and coins the amusing term dragsploitation. Being dressed to kill often means putting on a frock and wig in the mainstream cinematic imagination.   

 

Meanwhile, underground movie makers - including Andy Warhol - also liked to include elements of drag: 

 

"What was unsavoury and objectionable to a mainstream audience - as we've seen, drag was acceptable only as laughable slapstick or the prelude to a homicidal bloodbath - was given a warm and rousing reception in the art houses of yore." (192) 

 

What he had done for soup cans, Warhol also did for drag queens and trans women: 

 

"Warhol's genius was to plonk [... marginal figures and] unconventional attention junkies in front of the camera and let their natural charisma do the rest. Plots were thin but the screen magic is undeniable." (192)

 

I don't mind Candy Darling, but, I have to admit, I'm not a big fan of Divine; described by Doonan as the "empress of underground movie drag" (192), so will skip past the films made by John Waters ... 

 

And, because I hate them so, I'm also not going to say anything either about those "upbeat, non-sexual, non-homicidal, and worthy" (195) films made in the 1980s, when drag became family-friendly, Tootsie (dir. Sydney Pollack, 1982), starring Dustin Hoffman, and Mrs. Doubtfire (dir. Chris Columbus, 1993), starring Robin Williams. 

 

Similarly, I don't wish to say anything about The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (dir. Stephan Elliott, 1994) - although that's not a film I've seen (and, by the sound of it, don't think I want to, either; even Doonan describes it as shrill and cartoony).   

 

Ultimately, whilst I'm all for films spreading joy and celebrating individuality, I don't want to have sequins thrown in my face and an ideological message shoved down my throat to do with the need for greater DEI. 

 

In other words, I prefer those films involving drag and/or trans actors that are non-shrill and non-cartoony and don't invite audiences to dress up and sing along à la The Rocky Horror Picture Show (dir. Jim Sharman, 1975) - films such as Sean Baker's Tangerine (2015), described by Doonan thus:

 

"Tangerine is a groundbreaking 2015 movie that combines the early Warhol approach - find charismatic gender-fluid individuals and let the cameras roll - with more solid plotlines. It is is also very Warholian in that the individuals are not presented as noble or worthy." (204)    

  

 

III. 

 

And finally ... chapter 9 - Radical Drag - and a chance to really examine the politics of the topic (or at least Doonan's understanding of such) ... 

 

Before we turn to the material in chapter 9, however, I'd like to pick up on a sentence from earlier in the book (ch. 8), which suggests where I think Doonan will be heading:   

 

"In these trans-positive times [...] nobody is going to high five a hetero dude for frocking up unless he actually means it. Dragging up purely for attention or dough would, in our era of increased sensitivity, be viewed as less than respectful." (185)

 

That, I think, is true - but it's also a call for authenticity that I find problematic and something which has led to a lot of recent debate within the acting profession: should a straight cis male actor be able to play gay or trans (even if he does so in all sincerity and his performance is sympathetic and convincing)? [f] 

 

I would answer 'yes' to this, but understand the controversy surrounding the issue - particularly when it is presented in terms of representation and opportunity, rather than in terms of authenticity or the need for lived experience in order to play a part (lived experience is the most overrated thing in the world - something that the unimaginative unempathetic pride themselves on). 

 

And surely, if drag is radical in any sense, it's precisely because it deconstructs gender roles; how does that square with a modern sensitivity that insists only certain people have the right to inhabit certain identities? Answer: it doesn't.    

 

Moving on ...

 

Predictably - but still a bit disappointingly - in chapter 9 Doonan returns to all his favourite themes to do with Victorian prudery and puritanism in contrast to the subversive fuck you attitude of drag queens whose rebellion against the binary nature of society is to be uncritically lauded:

 

"Even when done in jest, the donning of a frock or a drag king suit is a provocation that automatically messes with the stale conventions of any society." (208)

 

Subscribing to this line of thought gives Doonan a good deal of what Foucault called speaker's benefit - i.e., a false sense of pride in one's own courage and rebelliousness in daring to speak up and speak out on issues which are (mistakenly) believed to still be feared and subject to censorship by mainstream society. 

 

Foucault argued this perceived transgression actually reinforced existing power structures and that the benefit of speaking in terms of repression and resisting power is merely a way to feel edgy and enlightened, while still adhering to an old-fashioned and untenable model of sexual politics.  

 

It strikes me as a little odd that, having compiled a complete history of drag, Doonan sometimes writes as if nothing important really happened before the late-1960s and '70s (i.e., when he was a young man):

 

"When, in the late 1960s, the counter-culture began to bloom - black power, gay lib, women's lib - drag followed suit. With the gays for solidarity, drag finally had the support it needed to hit the streets and to walk tall [...] Harassment and discrimination continued, but this time the dragsters fought back, birthing new and creative genres of drag activism." (210)

 

Out of this period of political upheaval, three radical groups emerged: the Cockettes [i], the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence [j], and the Radical Faeries [k] ... Now, without wishing to denigrate members of these groups - about whom my knowledge is strictly limited - one might ask whether they are truly sticking it to the Man or, actually, just engaging in theatrics and arty provocation?   

  

The fact is that, during the period Doonan specifies, drag was already being recuperated into the Spectacle as a safe (and highly commercial) form of subculture - as he himself has shown in his chapters on popstar drag and movie drag.  

 

I have respect and admiration for those highly idiosyncratic individuals and brave souls who "through a combination of daring, resilience and reckless disregard for their own safety, lubricated the wheels of social progress" (218), but I have to admit I'm increasingly bored by radical activists of every stripe - dragged up or otherwise.      

That doesn't mean I'm a Trump supporter. But it does mean I don't find drag so "wickedly compelling in these new politicized times" (233) and don't believe that drastic times require dragtastic measures. 

 

Doonan closed his 2019 study insisting that, thanks to technology and social media, "mocking, shocking, radical satirical drag" (233) would spread into "every corner of the universe" (233), presumably changing things for the better. 

 

And yet, as we know, Trump won the Presidency for a second time in 2024 - winning both the Electoral College and the popular vote - and his administration has taken a firm stance against drag culture, prioritising the removal of drag performances from public venues like and limiting federal funding for related initiatives. 

 

So it seems that a revolt into a queer politics of style might not be the answer after all ...   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The page numbers given here (in round brackets) refer to the 2024 concise paperback edition published by Laurence King. 

 

[b] Roland Barthes writes about all this in The Language of Fashion, trans. Andy Stafford, ed. Andy Stafford and Michael Carter (Berg, 2006).  

 

[c] Some might also suggest that Doonan's enabler narrative strips the artists of their own agency; framing them as puppets of a homosexual cabal (a trope that again feeds into the conservative and homophobic agenda). 

 

[d] Doonan doesn't say much about punk, other than that it was unconventional in every way, but not drag-friendly: "While drag was largely anathema to the genre, the punk makeup styles [...] have proven influential to subsequent drag queens." (175) 

      Again, I'm tempted to push back on this claim ... An openly queer aesthetic - informed by the drag queens, transvestites, and transsexuals associated with Warhol - was crucial to the clothing designed by McLaren and Westwood for their boutique, Sex. Iconic items of punk clothing - such as bondage trousers and the Tits T-shirt - were intentionally transgressive and could be worn by either sex.  

      One might even describe Jordan - with her extreme theatrical look - as a kind of drag queen. And who can forget Malcolm's cross-dressing in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980)?  

 

[e] Doonan obviously had the hots for gender-bending popstars Boy George and his pal Marilyn, admitting that he was "totally smitten" (176) with the former and claiming (rather laughably) that the latter's appearance on Top of the Pops in 1983 "is seared into the national consciousness" (178). 

      That might be true of a few ageing new romantics and homosexuals, such as Doonan himself, but I suspect it's not true for most UK residents. 

 

[f] The same debate is also taking place with reference to race and disability; should a black actor, for example, be allowed to play a role previously associated with a white actor (a lot of people were exercised by the prospect of Idris Elba becoming James Bond); or should an able-bodied actor be given the role of a paraplegic - think, for example, of Tom Cruise as Ron Kovic in Oliver Stones's Born on the Fourth of July (1989)? 

      Again, as I say in the main text, I recognise that there are a limited number of roles open to actors belonging to minority groups, but, even so, I can't get behind the idea that an actor must be X, Y, or Z in order to play the part (though the current trend within the profession seems to be moving more and more in that direction).  

 

[h] See Foucault writing in The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge (1976). 

 

[i] With their glitter-encrusted beards, the Cockettes "pioneered a delightfully amateurish do-it-yourself genre of performance drag" (213). 

 

[j] The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were a "group of gays [... wearing] nun's habits and a smidgen of makeup" (214), who wished to challenge religious fundamentalism with impromptu street theatre. According to Doonan: "By combining elements of religious piety with rampant decadent artifice, they successfully satirize conventions of gender and morality." (214)

 

[k] Founded in California in the late '70s, the Radical Faeries "embody many aspects of counter-culture, including environmentalism, paganism, communal living and free love" (215). Their drag is characterised by "a wilful randomness and lack of rigour" (215) and often they prefer nudity and body paint.  

 

To read part 1 of this post, click here.

To read part 2 of this post, click here. 

 

 

We're Born Naked ... Notes on Simon Doonan's Complete Story of Drag (Part 1: On Glamour Drag and Art Drag)

(Laurence King Publishing, 2024)

 

 

I.

 

Firstly, I should point out that the above is a concise edition. And so, whether it's quite as comprehensive as the story told in the complete (hardback) edition, published in 2019, I don't know. 

 

However, I'm guessing by the shared number of pages, that it is and that this (paperback) edition is therefore just smaller in size, but not scope; a book to be carried and read on the tube, rather than left at home sitting on one's coffee table. 

 

I believe the only real textual difference is that this mini-edition comes with a Foreword by Fenton Bailey, the award-winning British producer, director and author of Screen Age: How TV Shaped Our Reality ... (2022) - a book that I have not read, but which, as a Baudrillardian and one who forages "the detritus of popular culture" [a], has a title that interests.   

 

As Bailey points out, Doonan aims to give drag historical context in the hope that this will give drag queens a greater understanding of themselves, thus providing "a creative boost and a sense of empowerment" (2). 

 

Obviously, I'm tempted, as a Foucauldian, to insert a rolling eye emoji here, as this clichéd notion of empowerment is one that triggers a certain amount of irritation and disdain. But I shall resist the urge to do so, even though it pains me to see how this concept continues to be employed by the very people it was designed to further entrap by providing a false sense of agency that hides the real functioning of power.  

 

Bailey also insists that we live in performative times and that drag is thus the perfect medium or art form for the 21st century: 

 

"We are children of the screen [...] we have grown up [...] watching countless performances. It makes sense that we would explore and express ourselves in the same way, playing and performing as the star of our own musical/drama/sitcom - or all three." (3)

 

That's an interesting point of view and one I'm broadly sympathetic with. 

 

However, I smiled to see Bailey end his Foreword by suggesting that it's conservatives who have "failed to address any of the serious issues facing America and the world" (3) - not drag queens and trans activists who subscribe to this playful and performative ideology. 

 

That seems a little partisan and sectarian to me ... And I'm surprised that after eighteen seasons of RuPaul's Drag Race - Bailey and his partner Randy Barbato are executive producers - he's still subscribing to a repressive hypothesis and speaking about attempts to erase the LGBTQ community [b].   

 

To demonise conservatives and posit a simulated political struggle is to avoid looking at how drag itself has been institutionalised and robbed of its subversive character by the corporate-media machine that Bailey himself plays a leading role within. What is the drag queen today if not just another neo-liberal subject within a commercial universe ...? 

 

 

II.  

 

To be fair, Simon Doonan is alert to the dangers of corporate assimilation. As he notes in his Introduction, the mainstreaming of drag over recent years "seemed like a death knell" (7). 

 

However, thanks to the success of RuPaul's Drag Race and the new generation of queens, drag has been reinvented and the future looks even more fabulous than the past. The gender revolution has also transformed everything for the better; gender fluidity results in a revival of interest in drag. 

 

"And who could have anticipated the vigorous politicizing and reinvigoration of drag that would be triggered by the election of Donald Trump?" (9) 

 

Who indeed? It seems that conservatism can be catalysing and not just repressive, then. Doonan kind of gives the game away by acknowledging that the politics of resistance is symbiotic with oppression.   

 

Like Bailey, Doonan quickly falls into a trap of his own making. On the one hand, he insists that we must cast aside old definitions and preconceived notions; learn to accept that the rules have changed: "In fact, there are no rules." (10)

 

But, on the other hand, he is obliged to apologise in advance to the rule-enforcing pronoun police: "I have done my best to use the correct pronouns and to dot all my i's and cross all my gender-identity t's" (11), so any offensive faux pas are "completely unintentional" (11).

 

Unfortunately, I'm not sure, Simon, ignorance of the new morality is a defence in woke law ...

      

 

III. 

 

The first chapter is on what Doonan calls Glamour Drag ... One of the defining characteristics of which is fierceness and the ability to deliver "taboo-busting spectacle" (13); something a bit Medusa-like. Having said that, Doonan wants to backtrack a little: "It would be a mistake, however, to think of glamour drag as being nihilistic" (16). 

 

To which one can only say, that's a shame - but worse is to follow; ultimately, says Doonan, drag is not a confrontation with the terrifying aspect of womanhood, it's a way of "satirizing our gender confusion, misogyny and castration anxieties [...] thereby mitigating our hang-ups" (16). 

 

In other words: "Drag is profoundly therapeutic." (16)  

 

At this point, I can no longer resist inserting the emoji I thought about inserting earlier: 🙄

 

If this is true, then drag is not an art and nor is it transgressive; it is rather a queer form of self-help (or self-empowerment to use that term again). 

 

But perhaps it isn't true: Doonan himself later quotes Holly Brubach (author of the 1999 study Girlfriend) who sees glamour drag "as less of a psycho-therapeutic" (40) phenomenon and more an attempt by men to to enter the 'realm of appearances' and so enjoy "'the privilege of not being accountable to truth or meaning or content, of dwelling entirely on the surface'" (40). 

 

Somewhat surprisingly, Doonan says this point is essentially true - thereby moving across from the sexual politics of desire to the fetishistic politics of seduction; i.e., a magical and ritualistic form of artifice that challenges the modern obsession with truth, transparency, and sexual liberation. Again, as a Baudrillardian, this makes happy. 

 

Moving on, one comes across other problematic claims: "The Victorian and Edwardian eras were noteworthy for their extreme prudishness." (18). Again, if the author only bothered to read a little Foucault, then he'd know not to say such silly things [c]; no woman ever fainted at the sight of a piano leg. 

 

Doonan is much better at simply giving us names, dates, and other details concerning actual drag queens from days gone by (and the book comes with many fantastic images). Though I'd have liked to have heard a little more about this claim: "The sexualization of drag [in the 1950s] was propelled by working-class gay men, living out fantasies of seducing heterosexual men and thereby becoming 'real women'." (23)

 

If that's true, then it feeds into (and arguably justifies) the so-called Lavender Scare which - along with the fear of communist infiltration - defined American culture in the post-War period [d]. 

  

I'm hoping Doonan might also say a bit more at some point about the relationship between drag queens and trans women - one might imagine certain tensions arising amongst those for whom femininity is pure artifice and performance (i.e., about the clothes and the makeup and the wigs and about the way you walk and talk) and those for whom it is born of hormonal drugs and gender affirming surgery.    

 

This paragraph, referring to the world after Wigstock - a drag festival founded in 1984 in Manhattan's East Village - certainly caught my attention:

 

"The post-punk era saw an explosive growth in a new kind of drag queen culture. Suddenly drag became much hipper, smarter, and, yes, postmodern. Glamour drag queens began to graze on perverse aspects of pop culture, mashing it up and spewing it back at their audience with knowing vigour. Judy and Marilyn were fine for the old gin-swilling gay audiences of the 1950s, but the Wigstock generation craved fresh sources of dragspiration." (33)

 

Doonan explains how the "new wave dragsters were inspired by a broad range of camp cultural offerings" (35), drawn from the worlds of film and popular music, and "propelled drag out of the gay ghetto and into broader culture" (35). In other words - and these are Doonan's words - the tacky gave way to the trendy. 

 

Drag culture formed a close alliance with the growing Harlem ball scene (i.e., the world of voguing) and it was "only a matter of time before drag hit the runways" (35) of the fashion world; the supermodels were, argues Doonan, essentially a type of drag queen - and Billy Beyond was a type of supermodel.   

 

Finally, Doonan closes his first chapter by inviting readers to meet the look queens ... 

 

"Look queens are glamour drag queens who generate shock and awe through extreme levels of cosmetic artistry. [...] They take that shimmering feminine visual realm that Brubach talked about, and magnify it for the age of Insta selfies and social media." (43)

 

Again, it was Jean Baudrillard who got there first and provides the best description of these look queens: 

 

"Everyone seeks their look. Since it is no longer possible to base any claim on one's own existence, there is nothing for it but to perform an appearing act without concerning oneself with being - or even with being seen. So it is not: I exist, I am here! but rather: I am visible, I am an image - look! look! This is not even narcissism, merely an extraversion without depth, a sort of self-promot­ing ingenuousness whereby everyone becomes the manager of their own appearance." [e]

 

There is, as we have mentioned, a politics attached to this - but it's a politics of seduction and not the politics of empowerment - a term that Doonan tediously returns to. To seduce, is to disempower the subject who exerts their gaze - it's the revenge of the object (something we have discussed many times on Torpedo the Ark).   

 

But seduction requires a certain horror and Doonan insists that the look queens have "helped to expunge any sordid and sinister overtones" (43) associated with drag; "constructing a creative, welcoming environment for cis females and young kids" (43). It's glamour drag for all - which is very democratic and inclusive, but also very boring; just another form of good clean fun for all the family. 

 

 

IV. 

 

Chapter two is on art drag. But readers who hope this will mean I reproduce a picture of Grayson Perry - the patron saint of such - are going to be disappointed. For I do not like Grayson Perry and do not recognise him as a "beloved public intellectual" (45). 

 

I'm a bit suspicious of this bold claim: "The incendiary nature of drag telegraphs edgy avant-gardism ..." (45) - particularly as it comes just a couple of pages after Doonan has told us that drag is now free of any danger or threat. You can't have it both ways, Simon. 

 

And, ultimately, there's a world of difference between Duchamp and Grayson Perry. As there is, indeed, between Warhol and Perry. The latter may be indebted to these two - who isn't? - but while Perry works within the conceptual framework they established, he seems keen to place art back on a more traditional basis (i.e., as something involving craftsmanship rather than just amusing ideas, ready-made objects, and mass production).     

 

Whilst I'm not overly keen on Grayson Perry, I really dislike someone else that Doonan seems to think the business - Leigh Bowery. 

 

Did Bowery really achieve "unimaginable levels of artistic originality, perversity and creativity" (57), or, ultimately, was he not just a self-indulgent narcissist looking to shock via crude provocation? 

 

One can't deny he had a talent for this - and that he was influential on the work of many talented individuals - but I think we need to keep things in critical perspective when it comes to figures who are regarded as iconic and/or legendary (though I appreciate that the curbing of enthusiasm is not a concept understood within the world of drag; a world wherein everyone and everything is fierce and fabulous all of the time).      

 

Doonan says that in comparison to someone such as Bowery, Duchamp's "early forays into art drag now seem quite genteel" (61). And I suppose that's true. But - Barthesian criticisms of gentility aside - I think I prefer some degree of refinement and self-restraint and see these as vital components of art (and society). I don't like vulgar individuals whether they are seeking to naturalise bourgeois values or passing themselves off as transgressive. 

 

One might even build a case arguing that in the current age good manners and good taste might ironically be seen as avant-garde (because countercultural) - and that it just might be more interesting to be charming and delightful than "appalling and provocative" (63). 

 

But that's another post, for another day ...  

 

  

Notes

 

[a] Fenton Bailey, Foreword to Simon Doonan's Drag: The Complete Story (Laurence King Publishing, 2024), p. 2. Please note that all future page references to Doonan's book will be given directly in the main text (in round brackets). 

 

[b] Not only has RuPaul's Drag Race aired for eighteen seasons in the US, but it has inspired many spin-off shows and numerous international franchises. The show has also earned multiple Emmy Awards, including the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program, for four consecutive years (2018 to 2021). 

      So I'm not quite sure why Bailey continues to speak only of the repression and erasure of his community by mainstream (heteronormative) society.      

 

[c] I'm thinking of L'Histoire de la sexualité 1: La volonté de savoir (1976) and Foucault's famous interrogation of the repressive hypothesis; i.e., the idea that Western society suppressed sexuality from the 17th to the mid-20th century. Foucault argues that discourse on sexuality in fact proliferated during this period, during which experts began to examine sexuality in a scientific manner and encouraged people to confess their sexual feelings and actions. 

      Interestingly, Foucault also shows how in the 18th and 19th centuries society took an increasing interest in sexualities that did not fit within the heteronormative framework; this included the sexuality of children, the mentally ill, the criminal, and the homosexual.   

 

[d] See the post titled 'Cocksuckers and Communists' (21 May 2015): click here.  

 

[e] Jean Baudrillard, 'Transsexuality', in The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict (Verso, 1993), p. 23.  

 

 

Readers who enjoyed this post might like to see a very early post on TTA - dated 26 December 2012 - and titled 'Life's a Drag' - click here.  

 

 

Part two of this post on butch drag, black drag, historical drag and comedy drag, can be accessed by clicking here.  

 

And for part three on popstar drag, cinema drag, and radical drag, click here.  

 

 

Reflections on Two Recent Poetry Collections by Simon Armitage 2: New Cemetery (2025)

Simon Armitage: New Cemetery (Faber & Faber, 2025) 

Cover Image: Insecticide 24 (2008) by Matt Collishaw 

 

'In this collection, if the poems concern themselves with one kind of mortality, 

then the moths relate to another: death within nature.' 

 

 

I. 

 

Armitage opens his new collection with a preface entitled 'Moths': "Because moths / bring word / from the dead" [a]. A moth also features on the front cover of the book; a powerful image by contemporary British artist Matt Collishaw [click here to visit his website].  

 

And so, we're off to a good start: for moths are one of the privileged creatures on Torpedo the Ark - click here - and unlike Armitage, I do not think they are drab and dull in comparison to butterflies [b]. 

 

Armitage explains that a new cemetery was recently built near to his moorland home in West Yorkshire and that rather than object to this development, he decided to make "peace with the dead" (xi) and accept them as his new neighbours. And I think he's right; better to look out over the dear departed than a car park, shopping centre, or a new housing estate (see the poem '[Dark Brocade]', pp.4-5).   

 

And, as it turned out, the cemetery proved a source of poetic inspiration and Armitage produced a significant number of new verses; I've not counted, but there must be over fifty or sixty poems collected here, written "in short-lined tercets linked with/by intermittent rhymes and half-rhymes" (xii). 

 

That's a size and structure I'm personally very fond of and I loved the fact that Armitage describes the process of writing the poems and assembling them into a book as like "threading daisy chains or stringing shells" (xii).  

 

What I didn't love, however, was Armitage's confession that, in the end, he "fell back on a fairly conventional approach" and that he belongs to a school of thought "that believes the best way of enclosing the lifespan of a written sentence is with a capital letter and a full stop" and that finally admitting to this has provided him with "a kind of grammatical relief" (xiii). 

 

That offends me not just as an admirer of E. E. Cummings [c], but as a Nietzschean, who regards grammar as the presence of God within language, i.e., its metaphysical component subscribed to by theologians as well as pedants, pedagogues and, apparently, our present Poet Laureate [d].     

 

Enclosing language with capitalisation and periods is an impossibility in an intertextual universe; you can no more do that than you can permanently enframe being within technology. Any logical stabilisation or relief gained can only ever be temporary.   

 

Still, I'm happy for now to overlook this compromise with grammar - which arguably mirrors his making peace with the dead - and move on to the poems themselves, which are intriguingly named (but not titled) after a species of moth, 

 

In a lovely passage, Armitage explains his thinking: 

 

"Any relationship between a specific moth and the specific subject of the poem is at best ambiguous, and at times accidental. Instead, their inclusion is a form of honouring and memorialising. They are the dedicatees of the poems, and if it is stretching a point to claim that each three-line stanza should be thought of as two wings and a body part, in my mind there is something intentionally fragile, diminutive and moth-like about their construction and design." (xiv)

 

 

II.  

  

The collection opens in Armitage's shed, where it seems he likes to (if not exactly bury) then at least busy himself with his writing: a "stripped-back world / of a wooden chair, an old desk" (3). 

 

One thinks of Heidegger's hut; but also of Van Gogh's bare little room in the Yellow House. And perhaps even of Jesse Pope, as played by Mark Williams in The Fast Show, coming out of his shed to announce that this season, he will be mostly writing poems about moths and the recently deceased.  

 

It is followed by '[Dark Brocade]', mentioned above, which is one of my favourites in the book, dripping as it is with contempt for the living and preference for the company of the dead who "shore up the good earth" (5). 

 

I rather like the idea that, in some ways, the deceased are more vital than obese consumers and weed-killing gardeners.   

 

 

III.  

  

Sometimes, the writer can sit so still at the desk, lost in contemplation, that they might almost be mistaken for one of the dead by an electronic device: "a sensor detects / no movement, /no signs of life, and turns out /the one light bulb" '[Blossom Underwing]' (7).  

 

I think it was the American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein who said: 'Stillness is our most intense mode of action. In stillness, the human being becomes a poet or most resembles an angel' [e]. Or a moth. 

 

 

IV. 

 

In its modern sense, the word smug refers to someone who is self-satisfied and shows excessive pride in their achievements; not quite arrogant, but moving in that direction. 

 

Poets are not immune - even Armitage with his cheeky-chappie grin and boyishly annoying haircut - might be found a little smug by some readers on occasion, including me (not least when he consents to having the title Poet Laureate printed under his name on the covers of his books) [f].  

 

But the universe, despite being the totality of all space, time, matter and energy, is not smug and nor does it possess a face and to suggest otherwise - as the poem '[Speckled Yellow]' suggests - is profoundly annoying. I do wish Armitage would abandon his attempts at humour - can't someone at Faber take him aside and speak to him about this ...? 

 

His bathos, vulgarity, and anthropomorphism may be very knowing, but it simply isn't funny.     

 

 

V. 

 

I like '[Vapourer]': for one can never tire of descriptions of mummification. 

 

And I like '[Pine-Tree Lappet]' for its "undying loyalty / to simple things" (20); wristwatch, comb, leather belt, shaving brush, wallet, boots, and pen. We remember the dead best of all by the objects they handled [g].        

 

And I really like '[Figure of Eight]' - it seems to me that Armitage really ups his game when it comes to writing about foxes (even dead vixens which he's obliged to bury); perhaps they're his totem animal, who knows? [h]    

 

Some of the poems, however, I don't really understand, or see how they belong in the collection; '[Reddish Light Arches]', for example. 

 

And it transpires that many of the poems did, in fact, appear elsewhere originally - including the latter, which was "commissioned by Aberdeen Performing Arts, for an exhibition of poetry and illustration for the reopening of Aberdeen's Music Hall (2018)" (vi) ... So what has it to do with the new cemetery on the outskirts of Huddersfield?   

 

  

VI. 

 

The annoying thing is, when he wants - and when he resists the urge to play the joker - Armitage is capable of writing some really lovely lines, full of powerful and evocative imagery. Lines like these from '[Lunar Thorn]':

 

 

But at night

            the false moon 

                        of the moth trap

 

bloomed and bloomed,

            the unwordly glow

                       of the 'black light'

 

drugging the air,

            the lawn and flower beds

                       under your window 

 

steeped in an ultraviolet brew. (42)

 

 

I would like a little more of that. 

 

But then perhaps I'm one of those readers that Armitage lampoons in the poem '[Brown-line Bright-eye]' (47); i.e., one who wants shrivelled chestnuts, rusty apples, and human gravediggers shovelling dirt; one who cannot accept plots being dug by heavy machinery and litter being strewn on graves.

 

Perhaps when it comes to death I remain Romantic ...

 

 

VII. 

 

'[Reed Leopard]' is a meditation on a millipede that ends with a terrible thought: if humanity could be vanished with just one magic word leaving the world / to the world, would you / say it? Would you / sing it out loud?" (51) 

 

Armitage doesn't answer: but we know how Rupert Birkin would respond and his reassuring fantasy of a posthuman future expressed in Women in Love is a vision that is shared by several groups on the radical fringes of deep ecology whose members believe, like Birkin, that mankind is an obstruction and a hindrance to the future unfolding of evolution and that only man's self-extinction will allow life to continue perfect and marvellous and non-human [i]. 

 

I have to admit, I'd also find the temptation to whisper the word almost irresistible.  

 

 

VIII. 

 

Is the narrator-poet of '[Heath Rivulet]' the same as the poet-author and did he really call an exterminator "in T-shirt and shorts / to pump white dust / under a roof tile" (52)?

 

That is to say, did he really arrange for the destruction and removal of a wasp's nest in his attic? 

 

I find that more than a little disappointing: readers familiar with Torpedo the Ark will recall my battle with moths in the summer of '22 and how my reluctance to spray them ultimately won out over my bourgeois desire to protect a new carpet. See the post 'Insouciance Über Insecticide' (31 July 2022): click here.     

 

Were the lines in the preface mourning the rapid and shocking decline of insect numbers over the last twenty or thirty years [j] just so many words?  

 

 

IX.

  

Another verse I love: '[Maiden's Blush]' ... off-white moths and ghostly barefooted women - what's not to love? 

 

One is almost tempted to credit Armitage with having established a zone of proximity [k]. Almost.   

 

Another verse I hate: '[Burnished Brass]' ... here's an additional anagram we can (almost) make with the author's name: I am a monster ego [l]. 

 

What is the point of this lipogrammatic exercise; is he trying to say his name is legion and that the unified subject is a convenient fiction (that the 'I' contains a multiplicity of selves)? Or that the living are all the names in history as they embody the molecules and memories of the dead? [m] 

 

Maybe. 

 

But this seems an overly generous (and overly philosophical) reading in my view. And the one thing I have discovered reading this book is that Armitage loves to see himself reflected in his own verse and play with his own literary persona - he's worse than Lawrence (though perhaps not as narcissistic as I can be).

 

 

X. 

 

Speaking of Lawrence, the fat brown trout  "hammocked in amber water / next to St Oswald's church" (62), reminded me of the shadowy fish that "slide through the gloom of the mill-pond" at the beginning of his debut novel The White Peacock (1911) - even though these fish were neither fat nor brown, but "grey descendants of the silvery things that had darted away from the monks, in the young days when the valley was lusty" [n]. 

 

It's funny the connections that the mind makes. Not just between literary fish, but rainbows too; cf. Armitage's "Cheap rainbows everywhere" (69) with the vast rainbow that Ursula Brangwen observes and which fills her heart with anguished hope. 

 

For she saw in the rainbow "the earth's new architecture [...] the world built up in a living fabric of Truth" - even as realises that "the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption were living still" [o]. 

 

And when Armitage writes: "Think of / your hand or arm / brushing / actual skin" (73), who doesn't reacall Lawrence's idea of the democracy of touch and by which he refers to:

 

"The touch of the feet on the earth, the touch of the fingers on a tree, on a creature, the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love." [p]   

 

Armitage has admitted to being an admirer of Lawrence and often turns to his work for inspiration. But I wonder if he ever wishes he could write like him - or would that be admitting too much for a professional writer and Poet Laureate?   

 

 

XI. 

 

The fact that Armitage's father died when he was about to finish New Cemetery certainly adds a level of poignancy: 

 

"I had been ready to draw a line under the collection early in 2021, but my dad's sudden death that year provoked further poetic responses, less abstract this time, driven and informed by deep personal loss." (xiii)  

 

One wonders if it always takes the loss of a loved one - a parent, a partner, a child - to really bring home the visceral reality of death. And if that's so, what does this tell us about the limits of art and philosophy?  

 

(Having said that, I can't stand those people who value experience above everything else and boast that they are graduates of the University of Life.)    

 

 

XII. 

 

'[Straw Dot]' and '[Grey Chi]' are two further poems worth a mention and worth a read, although they require no further commentary, except to say that Armitage's direction and cinematography are at their best in the latter and his humour at its most charming in the former.   

 

And the line in '[Coronet]' "Here he isn't again," (94) brilliantly captures the absent presence of someone recently departed. When you enter the home of your dead mother or father, you do expect to see them rise from their chair to greet you.

 

It's pointless saying one doesn't believe in ghosts when the dead so obviously leave a presence of some kind. Whether we best think of this in spiritual or tangible terms is really the only point of debate; is it an emotional trace or memory left behind, or is it something a bit more like the mucous trail left behind by slugs and snails?  

 

Either way, I find it more comforting than disconcerting to experience this presence of a loved one. And whilst I clearly have certain issues with Armitage as a poet, I'm grateful to him for this collection in which he reminds us of the important truth that although the dead are "unable to love", they are "capable still /of being loved" (100).  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Simon Armitage, '[Scotch Annulet]', in New Cemetery (Faber and Faber, 2025), p. 78. Future page references to this book will be given directly in the post.  

 

[b] To be fair, Armitage goes on to concede that, upon closer inspection, one sees within the somewhat sombre colouring of moths "arrangements of dazzling complexity and hypnotic intricacy" (xiv). 

 

[c] The 20th century American poet E. E. Cummings is known for his modernist free-form verse and much of his work uses idiosyncratic syntax and lower-case spellings in order to strip "the film of familiarity" from language and from the world, as Norman Friedman notes.   

[d] In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche famously writes: "I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar ..." I'm quoting from Hollingdale's translation (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 48. For those using other editions, see the section 'Reason in Philosophy' (5). 

      You can tell grammar is ultimately a matter of faith by the fact that Armitage says he believes in it - that his use of it is not simply a preference or a question of convenience.    

 

[e] I'm paraphrasing from memory, so note that this might not be entirely accurate. I'm sure readers who wish to can track down the actual quotation.  

 

[f] No doubt Armitage was persuaded by the marketing people at Faber that this would be a good idea, but one assumes he gave permission for this. He is, of course, fully entitled to use the title Poet Laureate, but, like Foucault, I would welcome a time in which books were published in complete anonymity so that they could be judged on the contents alone and not the author's name, reputation, or title. 

      See Michel Foucault, 'The Masked Philosopher', in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston (Semiotext[e], 1989), pp. 302- 307. 

 

[g] See the post 'Notes on the Material Remains of My Father' (6 June 2016): click here.  

 

[h] Armitage wrote a poem with the title 'The Fox' which can be found in Ruth Padel's 52 Ways of Looking At a Poem (Vintage, 2004), p. 138. See also his fox poem 'Den', in the collection titled Dwell (Faber & Faber, 2025), pp. 12-13. 

 

[i] See D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 127-129. See also my post on the movement for voluntary human extinction (12 Oct 2013) - click here - and my post 'Birkin and the Ichthyosaur' (7 Mar 2023): click here. 

 

[j] Insects in the UK have experienced a severe (and ongoing) decline throughout the 21st century. Studies indicate a drop in numbers of over 60% between 2004 and 2023. See my post 'Insecticide and the Eco-Apocalypse' (21 Oct 2017): click here. 

 

[k] A zone of proximity is a concept used by Deleuze and Guattari to describe a chaotic space wherein distinct forms, subjects, or species - such as human and insect - lose their boundaries and become indistinguishable (thus they sometimes refer to it as a zone of indiscernibility). It is such zones, in other words, that allow the process of becoming to unfold.

      The reason that I hesitate before saying such is what Armitage establishes in his poem is because he shows little inclination to think in such terms and I don't want to simply map alien concepts and personal concerns on to his work. Needless to say, however, it would add a good deal of interest and philosophical depth to his poetry were he to do so.

 

[l] This only works if I am kindly given permission to swap an unwanted 'i' for an additional 'a' and 'e'.    

 

[m] See the post 'Even the Dead Don't Rest in Peace' (2 July 2013) - click here - in which I argue that, thanks to the conservation of mass, the carbon atoms of the departed are forever recycled and reincarnated and in this way the souls of the dead might be said to re-enter and pervade the souls of the living. 

      See also the related post: 'Atomic: the D. H. Lawrence Memorial Post' (1 Mar 2021): click here.  

 

[n] See D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 1. The poem by Armitage I'm quoting from is '[Shining Marbled]'. 

 

[o] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 458-459. The poem by Armitage I'm quoting from is '[Mother Shipton]'.   

 

[p] D. H. Lawence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 323. 

 

 

For my thoughts on another recent collection of poems by Armitage - Dwell (2025) - please click here. 

 

Reflections on Simon Critchley's Philosophical Short Cuts (Part 2)

Simon Critchley: Bald 

(Yale University Press, 2021)

Part 1 of this post can be read by clicking here.  

All page numbers given below refer to the above edition of the book. 

Titles are Critchley's own. 

 

 

The Cycle of Revenge [a]

 

Critchley, somewhat surprisingly, takes a very Christian position on the question of revenge: turn the other cheek and forgive those who have sinned against you; at least on the first 490 occasions [b] and even if you have just witnessed the death of nearly 3000 of your citizens: 

 

"What if the grief and mourning that followed 9/11 were allowed to foster a nonviolent ethics of compassion rather than a violent politics of revenge and retribution? What if the crime of the September 11 attacks had led not to an unending war on terror, but to the cultivation of a practice of peace - a difficult, fraught and ever-compromised endeavour, but perhaps worth the attempt?" [111]    

 

As I say, that strikes me as very Christian - but almost inhuman in its idealism; as D. H. Lawrence says, man isn't a spiritually perfect being full of light, he is rooted in blood and soil and has natural instincts and vital passions and it's probably better in the long run to give these expression rather than deny them. 

 

Thus, although Lawrence acknowledges the madness of those who live solely for revenge - see his poem 'Erinnyes', for example [c] - he is not going to be meekly submissive before those who would devour him; nor is he going to love his enemies, bless those that curse him, or pray for his persecutors [d]. 

 

As for Nietzsche, well, he wasn't a big fan of revenge, describing it as a manifestation of ressentiment that often masquerades as justice. The noble individual, he says, knows not only how to forgive - for that is merely Christian - but also how to forget. Just like the spirit of gravity, the spirit of revenge must be overcome. 

 

On the other hand, however, Zarathustra teaches us that a small revenge is better than no revenge at all; that an action taken spontaneously and limited in scope prevents the malignant growth of resentment that will ultimately issue as a repulsion against time and earthly existence itself [e]. 

 

The Good Book ends, one might recall, not with Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, but with John's call for the Apocalypse, the great book of revenge and world destruction that gives the death-kiss to the Gospels [f]. That tells us something important, I think. 

 

 

The Art of Memory

 

This is the first of a series of essays collected under the section heading 'Athens in Pieces' and written during the first four month of 2019, whilst Critchley was based in the Greek capital. 

 

Like him, I too have a fondness for the city - though for different reasons; Critchley thinks it "a magical city [...] where what we still recognise as philosophia really began" [124]; I think of it as the birthplace and hometown of My Little Greek. 

 

In other words, he has a more professional and I have a more personal reason for loving Athens and, whilst I'm not disputing it's ground zero for philosophy, my interest in the latter is really more Franco-German in character and located in the modern and postmodern period, rather than the Classical Age of Greece. 

 

Nevertheless, let's explore a city and a time whose ghosts "continue to haunt our present, often in unexpected and unimagined ways" [124] - ghosts whom we must find a way to make speak (or moan a bit at the very least); something which, says, Critchley, requires giving them "a little of our lifeblood" [124]. 

 

For only when we have transplanted a little of our blood into these ancient Athenian ghosts, will they communicate in a manner that will make sense to our modern ears and "tell us not just about themselves but also about us" [124] (and let's be honest, we moderns only really want to hear about ourselves):

 

"We always see antiquity in the image of ourselves and our age. But that image is not some Narcissus-like reflection; it is more an oblique refraction that allows us to see ourselves in a novel way and in a slightly alien manner." [124]

 

That's a positive spin and not one I'm sure I agree with. And I certainly have problems with the idea that the ancient past should be valued for providing "some kind of solace and escape" [125] from the present; "for a time", writes Critchley, "we can be transported elsewhere, where life was formed by different forces" [125].

 

He'll be telling us next we can even learn from the ancients, but I tend to agree with Foucault that we must exercise extreme caution here; our world and the world of ancient Greece are fundamentally distinct and we can't, for example, simply adopt their model of ethical behaviour, no matter how much we may admire aspects of it, and "you can't find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people" [g].

 

The Stench of the Academy 

  

On my one and only trip to Athens, I crashed through a glass door - click here - and I took a look at the Acropolis. 

 

But I didn't visit Plato's Academy, although, from Critchley's description, it doesn't sound like I missed much: a run-down space smelling of piss calling itself a park in "a not particularly nice part of town" [128], where undesirable go to get high (and not on philosophy).   

 

Funnily enough, Critchley also does his best to put readers off the Academy even in its heyday and its founder:

 

"The Academy was a privately funded research and teaching facility, situated outside the city. Most of us have a rather whimsical idea of philosophy as a bunch of men in togas having a chat in the agora. And we think of Socrates as a gadfly philosophising in the street and somehow speaking truth to power. The idea is attractive. But it is a literary conceit of philosophy - one that is still in circulation today. It is the fiction that Plato wanted his readers to believe." [130-131]

 

Critchley continues - and I think these are my favourite paragraphs in Bald so far -

 

"Behind that fiction stands the library, the editing and copying rooms, and the entire research engine of the Academy, which was devoted to the careful production and dissemination of knowledge through texts and teaching. Much as we may flinch at the idea, philosophy has been academic and linked to the activity of schools since its inception." [131]

 

In other words, it's always been a business on the one hand and factional on the other and Plato - if that was even his name - was ultimately just a rich fantasist backed by wealthy patrons and fleecing wealthy students who led us all into an Ideal dead-end: 

 

"We are less attracted to the idea of a wealthy aristocratic philosopher sequestered in his research facility and making occasional trip to visit foreign tyrants than to the image of the poor, shoeless Socrates causing trouble in the marketplace, refusing to be paid and getting killed by the city for his trouble. But out captivation with this image, once again, is overwhelmingly Plato's invention." [131-132-   

 

It's the great philosophical swindle ...  

      

 

In Aristotle's Garden 

 

After visiting the Academy, Critchley obviously had to go next to the "beautifully maintained site" [137] of the Lyceum; Aristotle's answer to the former [h] - only bigger and better, transforming his new space into "the most powerful and well-endowed school in the world" [136]. 

 

And he was able to do this because if Plato had a few bob, Aristotle was one those individuals we now term the super-rich. Anyway, the Lyceum was the "aspirational school destination of choice" [137] for the elites to send their children and for ten years or so, Aristotle was top dog in the philosophical world (which is not to imply he was in any way a Cynic).  

 

For Critchley - and I agree with him here - it's important to point out that the Lyceum, like most ancient schools, had a lovely garden, and he ponders what it was for:

 

"Was it a space for leisure, strolling and quiet dialectical chitchat? Was it a mini-laboratory for botanical observation and experimentation?  Or was it [...] an image of paradise?" [138]

 

Critchley finds the latter possibility the most intriguing, but personally I prefer to think that his first suggestion concerning its use is the right answer. But whatever the answer, it's true that there's a close and vital relationship between gardens and philosophical thought. Indeed, I would suggest that those who lack green fingers and an appreciation for the beauty of flowers can never be a true lover of wisdom:

 

"At the end of the Nicomachian Ethics, Aristotle sees the promise of philosophy as the cultivation of the contemplative life, the bios theoretikos [...] What better place for this than a garden? Might not botany be the royal road to paradise, an activity at once empirical and deeply poetic." [138]

 

Is Critchley - someone who by is own admission was formerly insensitive to the pleasure to be found amongst plants and trees - becoming a floraphile at last ...? Will he end up like Rupert Birkin, rolling in the grass and ejaculating in the foliage in a state of delirium? [i]  

 

Perhaps not. But, then again, anything's possible ...  

 

 

We Know Socrates's Fate. What's Ours?

  

Interesting that Critchley should claim he was named after Simon the Cobbler; a good friend of Socrates and someone who "also pretended to be a philosopher of sorts" [154]. 

 

Apparently, whenever the latter called into his workshop, Simon made notes on their conversation; thus some claim that it was Simon - not Plato - who was the first author of a Socratic dialogue. 

 

Simon was also much admired by the Cynics, for refusing the patronage of Pericles in order to safeguard his freedom of speech (parrhesia): 

 

"For the Cynics, only those people who achieved self-sufficiency (autarkeia) or independence of mind could truly exercise their freedom speech. For a cobbler-philosopher like Simon to work for a powerful political figure like Pericles would have undermined that independence and compromised his freedom." [158]

 

One wonders if Critchley ever has doubts about his own relationship with powerful institutions like the New School for Social Research and the Onassis Foundation; ever wishes he were repairing old boots instead?     

 

 

The Happiest Man I Ever Met

 

From Simon the Cobbler's workshop to Mount Athos ... and three days, two nights at the monastery of Simonopetra, founded in the 13th century. Critchley wishes to know: "What is it like to be a monk? And what does it take to become one?" [161]

 

These are not questions I would ask and it's not somewhere I would go: anywhere that doesn't welcome the presence of women is a place I choose not to visit. I'm fine with the idea that monks choose to hide themselves from the world of Man, but not that the only female creatures tolerated on their Holy Mountain are cats and that this is justified on supposedly religious and spiritual grounds.

 

How, one wonders, does Critchley look his wife and daughter in the eye after going to a place from which they are barred on the grounds of maintaining a pure environment [j] ...?  Expensive four-wheel drive cars - no problem; they apparently don't pollute the place in the way that women would stink up the joint. 

 

At the end of his stay, Critchley takes off the little wooden cross he had been given to wear, and returns back into the profane world, resuming his "stupid philosophical distance and intellectual arrogance" [169].

 

I know it's a Latin phrase associated with the Jesuits, rather than a Greek phrase associated with the Orthodox monks of Athos, but, clearly, Critchley has found out what it takes to be a monk: sacrificium intellectus (i.e., the voluntary subordination of reason to faith; or what Nietzsche describes as moral self-mutilation).  

 

What shocks me is that Critchley seems to think this is something admirable and he ends this profoundly depressing piece by describing his time at Simonopetra as "the closest to a religious experience that I have ever come" [169] - as if such a psychotic episode were a good thing!

 

        

Adventures in the Dream Factory

  

This is the third of three pieces on the science fiction writer (and garage philosopher) Philip K. Dick - not someone I've ever read (or wish to read), although, yes, I know the film adaptations of his work. 

 

Dick was a kind of Gnostic on Critchley's reading and Dick's Gnosticism enables us to ditch the traditional Christian idea of original sin:

 

"Once we embrace Gnosticism, we can declare that wickedness does not have its source within the human heart but out there, with the corrupt archons of corporate capitalism or whomever. We are not wicked. It is the world that is wicked. This insight finds its modern voice in Rousseau before influencing a Heinz variety of Romanticisms that turn on the idea of natural human goodness and childhood innocence." [219]

 

Critchley continues in a paragraph that returns us to where we began this post, with a critique of authenticity:   

 

"On the gnostical view, once we see the wicked world or what it is, we can step back and rediscover our essential goodness, the diving spark within us, our purity, our authenticity. It is this very desire for purity and authenticity that drives the whole wretched industry of New Age obscurantism and its multiple techniques of spiritual and material detox [...] Against this toxic view of the world, I think we need to emphasize what spendidly impure and inauthentic creatures we are." [219]

 

Horray! Something I can agree with and get behind! Probably a good place to finish then. But let me first wish Mr Critchley a happy 66th birthday - that's not quite the number of the Beast [ἑξακόσιοι ἑξήκοντα ἕξ], but it's two-thirds of the way there ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This essay should probably be read in conjunction with the following piece 'Theater of Violence', pp.112-120, though it's not absolutely necessary to do so and I do not, in fact, analyse this later essay here; not because I disagree with Critchley's view that we need to "understand the history of violence from which we emerge" [113], but because Greek theatre, Shakespeare, sport, and the work of American rapper Kendrick Lamar do not particularly interest me (and, to be honest, I'm increasingly sceptical that complex philosophical problems can best be addressed in terms of football and/or popular music).    

 

[b] Critchley quotes Jesus telling Peter that it is not enough to forgive someone seven times, you must, rather, forgive them seventy times seven, which Critchley interprets as meaning that the quality of forgiveness is infinite and unconditional. See Matthew 18:22 and see Bald p. 110. 

  

[c] The poem 'Erinnyes' (1915), can be found in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. III., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1526-1527. Or it can be read online by clicking here. 

 

[d] Whilst admitting that the Christian vision is one form of consummation for man, Lawrence makes his opposition to Luke 6:27-28 clear pretty much throughout his work. See, for example, 'The Lemon Gardens'; in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 119.

 

[e] See Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'Of the Adder's Bite' (in Part 1) and 'Of Redemption' (in Part 2).

 

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

 

[g] Michel Foucault, 'On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress', in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Penguin Books, 1991), p. 343. Developing this point, Foucault goes on to say: "I think there is no exemplary value in a period which is not our period ..." [347]. To think otherwise, of course, sets one on a slippery path towards universal humanism. 

 

[h] Aristotle established the Lyceum after being snubbed by Plato, who chose Speusippus as his successor, rather than him. Critchley wonders whether Aristotle was angry and disappointed not to have become the main man at the Academy and I would imagine that he was; for, in fairness, although he was "reportedly a difficult character" and "not much loved by the Athenians" [134], he was undoubtedly the best qualified for the role.    

 

[i] I'm referring to the (in)famous scene in chapter VIII of D. H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love (1920), to which I have referred numerous times here on Torpedo the Ark: see, for example, the post 'Floraphilia Redux' (17 Oct 2016) - click here.    

 

[j] Critchley explains, but doesn't challenge, the Athonite legend which has it that the Virgin Mary travelled to Athos and liked it so much that her son Jesus declared it her private garden, from which all other female creatures were banned. The 335 sq km peninsula that Mount Athos sits at the heart of is the largest area in the world that women cannot enter (they are not even allowed within 500m of the coast).

      What strikes me as a little hypocritical, to say the least, is that in an essay written earlier, Critchley says that the BBC Television series The Ascent of Man (1973) has an admittedly sexist title and wishes to point out that there are "a few great women too!" [190] who have played a key role in human history (not that any of them would be allowed to visit Athos).  

      In this same essay, Critchley also opposes monstrous certainty which, he says, leads "not just to fascism but to all the various faces of fundamentalism" [193] - though that apparently does not include the dogma of Greek Orthodoxy.