D. H. Lawrence: A Tale of Two Kitties

I. The Death of Mrs Nickie Ben

For cat lovers, there's a very distressing scene early on in D. H. Lawrence's first novel, The White Peacock (1911). Cyril, the narrator of the story, and his sister, Lettie, are out walking in the woods and fields surrounding the local reservoir, when the latter suddenly lets out a cry:

"On the bank before us lay a black cat, both hind-paws torn and bloody in a trap. It had no doubt been bounding forward after its prey when it was caught. It was gaunt and wild; no wonder it frightened the poor lapwings into cheeping hysteria. It glared at us fiercely, growling low."

Whilst Lettie stands looking on and lamenting the cruelty of man, Cyril takes action:

"I wrapped my cap and Lettie's scarf over my hands and bent to open the trap. The cat struck with her teeth, tearing the cloth convulsively. When it was free, it sprang away with one bound, and fell, panting, watching us."

This is no anonymous stray cat, however. This is a creature known to Cyril: Mrs Nickie Ben, who belongs at Strelley Mill, the home of his friend George Saxton. And so he wraps the poor creature in his jacket and carries her there. 

Unfortunately, however, she is too badly injured to be saved, one of her paws having been broken: "We laid the poor brute on the rug, and gave it warm milk. It drank very little, being too feeble." Even the presence of her mate, another fine-looking black cat, doesn't rouse her. And besides, he seems indifferent to her suffering: 

"Mr Nickie Benn looked, shrugged his sleek shoulders, and walked away with high steps. There was a general feminine outcry on masculine callousness."

George decides to put the cat out of her misery. His preferred method of doing so - and the quickest - is to "'swing her round and knock her head against the wall'", but Lettie protests. And so he decides to drown her: "We watched him morbidly, as he took a length of twine and fastened a noose round the animal's neck [...]"

George smiles as he walks to the garden pond and then drops "the poor writhing cat into the water, saying 'Goodbye, Mrs Nickie Ben'". Vile deed done, he hauls the cat out, amused by the grotesque character of the corpse.

He then buries her in a shallow grave, commenting to Cyril and Lettie: "'I had to drown her, out of mercy [...] If the poor old cat had made a prettier corpse, you'd have thrown violets on her.'"

II. Lady Chatterley's Pussy

Interestingly, there's another black cat who also comes to a sticky end in Lawrence's final novel. In chapter six of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Connie goes for a walk in the woods - as she often did on one of her bad days. The sound of a gun shot nearby startles her out of her vague indifference to her surroundings.

Going to investigate, she hears the sound of a man's voice, followed by the sound of a child sobbing. The thought that someone might be ill-treating the latter rouses Connie's anger: "She strode surging down the wet drive, her sullen resentment uppermost. She felt just prepared to make a scene."

It was the keeper - Mellors - and a little girl, wearing a purple coat and moleskin cap. The latter was crying, to the irritation of the former: "'Ah, shut it up, tha false little bitch!' came the man's angry voice", though, not surprisingly, this only  made the child wail louder. 

Connie marches up to them, with her dark blue eyes blazing, demanding to know what's going on. He salutes her ladyship, but with a faint smile all too like a sneer on his face and he tells her - in broad vernacular - that she'd best ask the child, not him, what the problem is. And so Connie turns to the "ruddy, black-haired thing of nine or ten", saying: "'What' is it, dear?'" with conventionalised sweetness of tone.

     

The child, however, continues to sob; violently, but also self-consciously. In the end, Connie bribes her with a sixpence. This placates the brat and enables her to speak: "'It's the - it's the - pussy!'"

It turns out that the keeper - her father - has shot a poaching cat: a big black cat, that now lies stretched out and bleeding amongst the bramble. Connie is repulsed by the sight and she turns on her soon-to-be lover and tells him it's no wonder the child was upset.

She tries to further reassure the child (whilst secretly disliking the spoilt, false little female), before escorting her home to her grandmother, leaving Mellors to dispose of the dead moggie in a manner undisclosed.


III.

Whether these two scenes reveal anything of import about Lawrence's views on black cats, cruelty, and sexual politics is debatable.

But what they do demonstrate is that there's more than one way to kill a cat and that underlying all of Lawrence's fiction is not so much a naive or innocent vitalism, but a fascination with violence and death and the part these things play in life as a general economy of the whole. In other words, Lawrence's philosophy is a form of tragic pessimism - but a pessimism of strength.   

 

See:

D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 12-13.

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 58-59.

D. H. Lawrence and the Novel (Part 1)

Henry Rayner: Portrait of D. H. Lawrence (1929)

D. H. Lawrence was acutely concerned with the (moral) question of the novel: its conventional limitations and its future possibilities. No surprise, therefore, that he wrote several short essays on the subject ...

I. The Future of the Novel

Is the novel still in its infancy as an art form - or is it on its death-bed? 

It was a question in 1923 and it's still a question now, almost 100 years later; albeit no longer a question that many people care about (which perhaps says more about us rather than the contemporary novel).

The answer, for Lawrence, is that the "pale-faced, high-browed, earnest novel which you have to take seriously" [151] is senile precocious. That is to say, it's childishly self-absorbed: I am this, I am that, I am the other.    

One assumes that Lawrence is not referring to his own works here, though heaven knows his novels can be so sincere and intense at times, that one might fairly describe them as earnest and overwrought. Lawrence, though, is taking a pop at the novels by writers such as James Joyce and Marcel Proust; authors who "tear themselves to pieces, strip their smallest emotions to the finest threads" [152]. 

He doesn't think much of the smirking popular novel either; just as self-conscious and also written by those who think it funny to drag their adolescence into middle age and even old age.

The novel, declares Lawrence, has got to grow up: by which he means stop with the played out emotional and self-analytical stunts and find the "underlying impulse that will provide the motive-power for a new state of things" [154].

Interestingly, this requires that fiction and philosophy come together again: reuniting into a new form of myth and a new way of understanding. The novel has got a future, concludes Lawrence, providing it has the courage to "tackle new propositions without using abstractions [and ...] present us with new, really new feelings [...] which will get us out of the old emotional rut [155].    

II. Morality and the Novel

What is the business of art?

"The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment." [171]

That's a succinct and interesting definition: one that might be said to anticipate actor-network theory, even whilst remaining anthropocentric in that it posits man as the centre of a universe about whom all things revolve. 

And morality?

"Morality is that delicate, forever trembling and changing balance between me and my circumambient universe, which precedes and accompanies a true relatedness." [172]

That's another concise definition: one that allows us to understand why it is Lawrence values the novel above all else. For whilst works of philosophy, religion, or science are all of them busy trying to nail things down with laws and fixed ideals in order to establish stability, the novel insists on difference and becoming.

Lawrence writes:  

"The novel is the highest complex of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered. Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue outside of its own place, time, circumstance. If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail." [172]

And immorality?

Immorality is the attempt by an author, for example, to impose themselves upon a text and tip the balance one way or the other, thus bringing to an end the tembling instability upon which everything in the social and natural world - including the world of fiction - depends. They might not even intend to do this; often the immorality of the novel is due to the novelist's unconscious bias or predilection.  

For an artist to remain moral, he or she must affirm a general economy of the whole in which all things, all ideas, and all feelings are admitted and none are thought to be supreme or exclusively worth living for:

"Because no emotion is supreme, or exclusively worth living for. All emotions go to the achieving of a living relationship between a human being and the other human being or creature or thing he becomes purely related to.
      All emotions, including love and hate, and rage and tenderness, go to the adjusting of the oscillating, unestablished balance between two [actants ...] If the novelist puts his thumb in the pan, for love, for tenderness, sweetness, peace, then he commits an immoral act: he prevents the possibility of a pure relationship [...] and he makes inevitable the horrible reaction, when he lets his thumb go, towards hate and brutality, cruelty and destruction." [173]

This helps explain why Lawrence often brands seemingly pure and innocent works false and obscene and why he famously advises readers to always, always trust the tale, not the teller.

If the novel reveals or helps establish vivid relationships that gleam with a fourth dimensional quality, then it is a moral work, no matter how the relationships may be judged from the perspective of conventional morality. And if these relationships also happen to be new and displace old connections, then even better - no matter how much pain they cause, or what offence they may give:

"Obviously, to read a really new novel will always hurt, to some extent. There will always be resistance. The same with new pictures, new music" [175] - but who wants art that only makes comfortable and complacent?  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Future of the Novel' and 'Morality and the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 149-155 and 169-176. 

See also the first version of 'Morality and the Novel' which is published as an appendix in the above, pp. 239-245. It ends with the following two lines that essentially summarise Lawrence's thinking on the novel: "The novel is the one perfect medium for revealing to us the changing glimmer of our living relationships. The novel can help us live as no other utterance can help us. It can also pervert us as no other can." [245] I have to admit - as a perverse materialist - the latter notion intrigues and I wish Lawrence had said more about it. 

Readers interested in part two of this post on Lawrence's essays 'Why the Novel Matters' and 'The Novel and the Feelings', should click here. 

Strange Flesh: Notes On Sodomy

Sleeve artwork for Mortal Way of Life (1988) 

by German thrash metal band Sodom

I. The Sin of Sodom is Polysemic

Sodomy is one of those lovely old-fashioned words that is commonly misunderstood. Many people, for example, think it refers exclusively to anal sex - particularly between two men - and perhaps recall that Oscar Wilde was accused (not unfairly) of posing as a sodomite by Queensberry.

Historically, however, sodomy possessed a much broader meaning and referred to all non-procreative sexual activity, including, for example, oral sex and bestiality. It was often also tied to the practice of pagan witchcraft. Sodomy was thus not simply a form of perversity, but heresy; a rejection of God and a libidinal defiance of his moral authority.

It's hardly surprising, therefore, to discover that sodomy has a biblical origin ...


II. What Begins with the Threat of Angel Rape Ends with Fire and Brimstone 

According to the account in Genesis [18-19], God decided to exact divine retribution upon Sodom after two of his angels entered the city (in human form) and were immediately threatened with gang rape by the inhospitable locals.

Although Lot, who was charged with looking after the divine messengers, offered the townsfolk his virgin daughters as sexual substitutes, the men of Sodom were adamant they wanted to experience strange flesh whilst they had the very rare opportunity to do so.

For the Good Lord, who had long identified Sodom (along with the twin city of Gomorrah) as a hotbed of impenitent sin and sexual depravity, this was the final straw and He unleashed his destructive wrath upon it and its inhabitants in the form of fire and brimstone.

Only Lot and his family were given the opportunity to get out of town, although, unfortunately, their escape didn't quite go to plan after Lot's wife made the fatal mistake of looking back, as if secretly longing to stay and continue her old life in Sodom. For this, as everybody knows, she was turned into a pillar of salt.

(Interestingly - and as perhaps fewer people know - Lot and his daughters found solace in this time of apocalyptic upheaval and great personal loss by entering into an incestous relationship and having drunken sex in a cave ... but that's another story, for another post: click here.)
 

III. On the Necessity of a Little Sodomy

Never one to shy away from these matters, D. H. Lawrence insists that not only can bawdiness be healthy, but even sodomy can be sane and wholesome, provided there is a proper give and take between parties: "In fact, it may be that a little sodomy is necessary to human life."

It's only the fanatic insistence on purity, writes Lawrence, that always leads to madness, denying as it does the simple truth that all men and women are subject to desire and possess "blood and bowels and lively genitals".

The only problem is that Lawrence wishes to restrict acts of sodomy to the right time. But, by definition, such acts occur at the the wrong time, in the wrong place, with the wrong partners and involve a misuse of organs; this is what makes them such unnatural acts.

Nevertheless, it's important to be reminded that however problematic many aspects of his work are for a contemporary readership, Lawrence was not someone who wished to restrict human freedom and experience. Just so long as we don't get our sex on the brain and seek to form an ideal identity upon it, he was happy to acknowledge the necessity of vice as belonging to a general economy of the whole.   

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'What's sane and what isn't', The Poems, Vol. III, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1614-1615.

On Marcus Aurelius: Meditations

Marcus Aurelius (121-180 EV) 

Although a white European male, mature in years, I'm not a statesman or ruler of any kind, so it surprised me to discover just how much affinity I felt with Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher described by Matthew Arnold as the most beautiful figure in history.  

His Meditations constitute such a remarkably modern series of philosophical reflections on ethics, rationality, and the nature of the self, that it's hard not to love both book and man. And it's difficult also not to look at those moral and intellectual pygmies in positions of power today, exercising their authority over millions of lives, and feel a growing sense of despair.

I can't, for example, imagine Donald Trump tweeting something as lovely - or as profound - as this passage taken from Book 3, in which Aurelius stresses the importance of attending to little things in life, including small imperfections, and of affirming elements of baseness and corruption on the grounds that these too possess their own charm and belong to what Nietzsche will later term an economy of the whole:

"Take the baking of bread: the loaf splits open here and there, and those very cracks, in one way a failure of the baker's profession, somehow catch the eye and give particular stimulus to our appetite. Figs likewise burst open at full maturity: and in olives ripened on the tree the very proximity of decay lends a special beauty to the fruit. Similarly the ears of corn nodding down to the ground, the lion's puckered brow, the foam gushing from the boar's mouth, and much else besides - looked at in isolation these things are far from lovely, but their consequences on the processes of Nature enhances them and gives them attraction. So any man with a feeling and deeper insight for the workings of the Whole will find some pleasure in almost every aspect of their disposition, including the incidental consequences. Such a man will take no less delight in the living snarl of wild animals than in all the imitative representations of painters and sculptors; he will see a kind of bloom and fresh beauty in an old woman or an old man; and he will be able to look with sober eyes on the seductive charm of his own slave boys." [3.2]           

As Diskin Clay, Professor of Classical Studies at Duke University indicates, this passage not only has real philosophical interest, but an almost poetic quality.

In conclusion, we might say that whilst it's true the Ancient world cannot directly provide us with answers to the problems facing us today, there are nevertheless a number of texts containing a treasury of devices, techniques, ideas, and procedures, that may help us, as Foucault argues, form a perspective upon the present and serve as tools for analysing what's happening today. Meditations is surely one such text.         

See: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. with notes by Martin Hammond, introduction by Diskin Clay, (Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 16-17. 

Reflections on the Vulture 2: The Poetic Vision of Robinson Jeffers

VULTURE

I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling high up
    in heaven,

And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit narrowing, I
    understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight-feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer. I could see the
    naked red head between the great wings
Beak downward staring. I said "My dear bird, we are wasting time here.
These old bones will still work; they are not for you." But how beautiful
    he'd looked, gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the sea-light
    over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak and
become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes -
What a sublime end of one's body, what an enskyment; what a life after
    death.

                                                      - Robinson Jeffers (Last Poems 1953-62)

This is a very lovely poem about what is believed to be a very ugly bird and the even uglier fact of our own mortality. 

But Jeffers has the knack - as a poet in his own right and as a reader of Nietzsche - of making ugly things and terrible truths seem beautiful and desirable. Not by sugar-coating them with the lies and aesthetic illusions of moral idealism, but by placing them within the context of his own Inhumanism and affirming all things as belonging to a general economy of the whole.  

Jeffers encourages us to revel in our experience of life as is - not seek refuge from it, nor try to transform or transcend reality via flights of fancy. Like Lawrence, he wants us to intensify our perception of (and participation in) the natural world, which is red not just in tooth and claw, but also hooked beak.  

For Jeffers - a tragic poet in the noble sense - it is the sacrificial essence of existence that makes life beautiful. It's astonishing that things are born and grow; but it's equally astonishing that they decay and die. In 'Vulture', he expresses his eco-paganism in relatively simple language, but with all the visionary dynamic of a man for whom the god-stuff is roaring in all things. 

Give your heart to the hawks - but let the vultures pick over your bones ...

See: The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt, (Stanford University Press, 2001).

To read part one of this post - on Lawrence's philosophical dislike of vultures - click here. 
To read an earlier post on Robinson Jeffers and his Inhumanism, click here.

This post is dedicated to Simon Solomon, who introduced me to the work of Robinson Jeffers.

Morgenröthe: Nietzsche's Red Dawn

Alicia Dunn: Red Dawn No. 5 (2017)

aliciadunnart.com

I. If Passion Ends in Knowledge then Nietzsche is the Best-Read Man in Town

According to Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's 1881 work Morgenröthe - usually translated into English as Daybreak or Dawn - is the most neglected of all his texts.*

If that's true, then it's a real shame. For it's a brilliant and beautiful book which illustrates how philosophy is, first and foremost, a form of erotics. For what is the pursuit of knowledge if not a passion, suggests Nietzsche; an intense desire to shatter established patterns of thinking and abandon the fears and consoling fictions that have for the greater part of history reduced man to the status of a herd animal.

Nietzsche anticipates "a new dawn in human existence" in which individuals are free to "cultivate their lives in a manner that is conducive to themselves and beneficent to others" [44]. He proposes ways of becoming who one is that involve thinking differently and, just as importantly, thinking critically with regard to the self. It's philosophy as a playful and experimental practice; what he'll term in his next work die fröhliche Wissenschaft.


II. Say Yes to a Single Joy and You Say Yes to All Woe

Nietzsche completed Daybreak in the Italian city of Genoa. He had by this time retired from his professorship at Basel University due to ill health and was living on a very modest annual pension in an unheated garret. His diet was as restricted as his income and consisted mostly of porridge and risotto, followed by more porridge.

Not only did he have to endure extreme cold and isolation, but Nietzsche spent a lot of his time suffering with blinding headaches that lasted for days at a time and caused him to vomit. His only relief was provided by that solitary vice much favoured by Diogenes, but condemned by Kant as an unnatural form of self-abuse. "And yet", writes Ansell-Pearson, "it was under these harsh conditions that he wrote over the course of a year one of his 'sunniest' books" [65].

And this is why one loves Nietzsche: for the fact that he says Yes to life in all circumstances and under any conditions; affirms, in other words, life as an economy of the whole and gives even the most terrible aspects of existence his blessing. It takes an almost inhuman degree of courage to affirm even a single moment or joy, when it's in the knowledge that by so doing we affirm all eternity and every pain, every sadness, every evil.

In sum: Nietzsche constructs a harsh philosophical ethic not only beyond good and evil, but, as Ansell-Pearson argues, beyond solitude and compassion as well; one that rests upon endurance and cruelty. Free-thinking, as he conceives of it, "will, initially at least, plunge people into despair and grief" [111]. But it results at last in happiness and in greatness.

Obviously, this isn't a philosophy that everyone might choose to live by, or be capable of living by: 

"I think it is clear, both from hints he gives in Dawn and says in other texts, that Nietzsche thinks the tasks of free-spirited thinking are ones reserved, and perhaps best reserved, for a few individuals who will constitute what we might choose to call a moral (or 'immoral') avant-garde." [112]


*Note: Ansell-Pearson reminds us that the original German title literally means 'morning redness' and specifies "the precise but fleeting moment at which the sky is aflame with colour and before the red yields to the customary blue or grey. It suggests a time of possibility, invention, inspiration and renewal, in which the freshness of the day augurs a new way of life." [67] 

See: 

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2018). All page numbers given in square brackets refer to this book. 

Nietzsche, Dawn: Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality, trans. Brittain Smith, (Stanford University Press, 2011). 

Indecent Exposure: Further Thoughts on Male Sexual Display

A male peacock spider putting on an 
impressively iridescent courtship display

I. He Took It Out (Again)

Several days on, I'm still thinking about the case of Louis CK which I discussed at the prompting of (and in collaboration with) the poet and critic Simon Solomon in an earlier post [click here]. In other words, the question of why a man should wish to strip naked and masturbate in front of a clothed woman or group of women, continues to intrigue. 

As I said, I'm prone to see this behaviour as an illicit form of erotic performance - a transgressive but joyful expression of male libido - rather than frame it in moral-legal terms as slightly sad, somewhat sinister sexual misconduct. Nor do I buy into the psycho-political reading advanced by some feminist commentators which regards male exhibitionism as a phallocratic act of terrorism, intended to humiliate, intimidate, or outrage female spectators who maintain their right not to be subject to such displays without prior consent.         

It's mistaken - and possibly dangerous - to demonise men and pathologise their sexuality. And, as Simon Solomon wrote, it's far from clear why being afforded the opportunity to witness somebody pleasure themselves should be construed as inherently traumatogenic.  

II. Homo erectus*

Within the animal world, masturbation and courtship behaviour involving overt sexual display is a given; birds do it, bees do it - even eight-legged critters like the spider shown above do it. All male creatures like to show off and attempt to appear virile and attractive in the eyes of the female; to exhibit their desire and ability to fuck.

Some males do it with song; some males do it with dance. Some males put on bright colours; some engage in mortal combat with other males. But some males get right to the point and expose their genitalia - and there's evolutionary evidence to indicate that the most successful human males have long favoured this tactic.   

Indeed, according to the American anthropologist Nancy Makepeace Tanner, the sexual selection of mates by females on the basis of phallic display was a major factor in the evolution of hominid bipedalism. In other words, men first stood upright in order that the women might better be able to admire their sexual organs. The more visible they could make their penises - and the better endowed they were - the more likely they were to get laid.

For unlike chimps and bonobos that walk on all fours and thus have their (relatively small) genitalia obscured from view, a naked man on two legs has everything out in the open for inspection by potential lovers (and/or potential opponents) and that seems to have been a turn on for ape-women.

Tanner writes:

"Such an image might appear amusing and improbable, but let us remember that these ancient forebears living in the warm African savannas had not yet invented clothing. As the female hormonal cycle and ovulation came to contribute less to timing of her arousal, it is not illogical that visual cues could become increasingly significant. If so, sexual selection for bipedalism would be yet another instance of natural and sexual selection together advancing the species adaptation farther along the same path for both females and males."

Of course, females also valued males with good social skills and intelligence; Tanner isn't denying that. But the ability to stand erect - to exhibit bipedalism and an impressive hard on - significantly increased a male's chances of passing on his genes.   


III. Die großen Ökonomie des Ganzen

Now, none of this is to excuse the behaviour of Louis CK or other men who have indecently exposed themselves and/or masturbated in front women. It's simply an attempt to expand the terms of debate and help provide a new narrative in which we consider the Blakean possibility that just as "The pride of the peacock is the glory of God" and "The Lust of the goat is the bounty of God", so the nakedness of man is divine in origin.

The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the ejaculating phallus all belong to a Nietzschean grand economy of the whole and must ultimately be affirmed as such if we are to ever think beyond good and evil (i.e. beyond the standpoint of fixed and absolute moral judgement).

Of course, many - perhaps most - people will find such a general economy of life abhorrent. But I'm hoping that at least some readers of this blog (those whom I term torpedophiles) will recognise a vital philosophical insight when they're offered one ...

See: 

William Blake, 'Proverbs from Hell', The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93)

Nancy Makepeace Tanner, On Becoming Human, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 165-66. 

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), section 23. Nietzsche returns to this idea in his final work, Ecce Homo, and suggests that even the most terrible aspects of reality are more necessary for man as a species than the cherished ideals of humanism. 

*Note: I'm aware, of course, that the earliest bipedal ape-men were around long before Homo erectus; I'm using this designation simply for comic purposes.          

On the Difficulty of Death for Old Ladies

Tony Luciani: Internal Reflection,
 from  Mamma: In the Meantime (2016)
(A series of photos and paintings featuring his 93-year-old mother, Elia.)

The comic actor, Steve Martin, once conceded that he'd never made a great movie. But, he went on to say, he had made several films that contained genuinely great scenes. I think something similar might be said about the verse of Michel Houellebecq; no really great poems, but many that contain genuinely great lines. 

Those critics who characterise his work as callow and clichéd, or dismiss it as insipid and ineffectual, are not so much mistaken as beside the point. For these things, of necessity, belong to a body of work that is bold enough and big enough to incorporate them; a form of writing that affirms what Nietzsche terms a general economy of the whole.

In other words, the secret of really interesting poetry, like Houellebecq's, is not the fact that it contains powerful and original elements, but that it's unafraid to make mistakes and display its weaknesses. Further, it parades intertextual indebtedness with pride and invites readers to hear echoes of other authors.
        

But this post isn't intended to be a defence of Houellebecq as an artist, nor a comprehensive review of his new dual-language selection of poems entitled Unreconciled. Rather, I want simply to indicate how some of Houellebecq's reflections on old women approaching death resonate with my own observations and experience ...

Death is difficult for old ladies who are too rich, says Houellebecq, referring to the kind of women who own antique furniture and wind up in cemeteries: Surrounded by cypresses and plastic shrubs. But, actually, death is often difficult for many women - even those whom he calls the council-flat old / Who imagine till the end that they are loved and wind up at the crematorium: In a little cabinet with a white label.

For many women - particularly mothers - simply refuse to let go and die. Men, as a rule, die sooner and with less fuss, less bitterness; they know when the game is up and they'll be best off out of it, as my father would say. Women - particularly mothers - aim to stay for as long as possible in their sordid bedrooms where they keep little objects tucked in their wardrobes - the insides of which reveal just how cruel and how futile life can be.

On and on these undying women persist; watching TV without quite catching what is said (despite the increased volume) and eating their meals without appetite (despite the added salt); growing older and increasingly feeble in mind and body: You see clearly the nothingness awaiting them / Especially in the morning when they rise, pale, / And moan for their first cup of tea.

In a very moving couple of stanzas, worth quoting in the original French, Houellebecq writes:

Les vieux savant pleurer avec un bruit minime,
Ils oublient les pensées et ils oblient les gestes
Ils ne rient plus beaucoup, et tout ce qui leur reste
Au bout de de quelques mois, avant la phase ultime,

Ce sont quelques paroles, presque tourjours les mêmes:
Merci je n'ai pas faim, mon fils viendra dimanche,
Je sens mes intestins, mon fils viendra quand même.
Et le fils n'est pas là, et leurs mains presque blanches.

This is mostly true and, sadly, often the case. Though, not wanting to be defined as a son by my absence, I'm doing what I can to provide care and ensure my mother doesn't become just another unloved body dying without mystery. It's hard work though; depressing, tiring, frustrating, boring, etc.

But so are many jobs and at least caring affords me the opportunity to listen to the little birds in the garden and read poetry on my birthday ...  


See: Michel Houellebecq, Unreconciled: Poems 1991-2013, trans. Gavin Bowd, (William Heinemann, 2017). All the lines quoted, in full or part, are Bowd's translations from the French and are taken from three untitled poems, pp. 29-33. 

For those interested in the work of Tony Luciani, click here to access his website, or here for information about his exhibition, Mamma: In the Meantime, at the Loch Gallery, Toronto, Canada.

Sanctus Januarius: A Nietzschean New Year Message

Portrait of St. Januarius, by Caravaggio (1607)

Granting himself the right to do so in accordance with popular custom, Nietzsche famously opens Book IV of The Gay Science, written in January 1882, with a new year's resolution:

"I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation ... I wish to be only a Yes-sayer." [276] 

This section, one that I often return to, might be regarded as an essential thought for me; fundamental to the philosophy of Torpedo the Ark which is all about having done with judgement and the assigning of blame, or subscribing to what Nietzsche elsewhere terms a hangman's metaphysic.

But, although a short and seemingly straightforward passage, one has to be careful not to misunderstand what Nietzsche is saying here: 

Firstly, he is absolutely not saying that life is beautiful and attempting to fob us off with a feel good philosophy built upon false idealism. For Nietzsche, life is monstrous and inhuman and what is necessary in things (that is to say, fateful), is what most people would describe as morally repugnant or evil. 

Secondly - and even more crucially - Nietzsche not only wants to see what is necessary in things as beautiful (even when, in fact, it's often repulsive or malevolent in nature), he wishes to affirm this aspect as belonging to what he terms an economy of the whole in which all things are entwined. 

Thirdly, to love fate is not merely to resign oneself to the facts; but, rather, to interpret the latter and struggle to find new perspectives and create new ways of living.

Saying Yes, in a Nietzschean manner, doesn't therefore mean one must become a nodding donkey; one's No is contained in this affirmation and one learns how to actively negate the negative simply by turning one's face with aristocratic disdain upon those things (including those people and those gods) who demand worship, obedience, and submission. 

Happy New Year to all readers.


See: Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), IV. 276.