Argonauts

Lorenzo Costa: The Argo

(detail of a panel painting c. 1480–90) 

Civic Museum, Padua, Italy

 

 

I. 

 

As everybody knows, the Ἀργοναῦται were the heroic crew aboard the good ship Argo who, sometime before the Trojan War kicked off, accompanied Jason on his quest to find the Golden Fleece, protected by the goddess Hera.  

 

Whether there is any historical basis to this ancient Greek myth - or whether it was pure fiction - is debatable, but hardly important. It remains, factual or not, central within the Western cultural imagination and, in the modern world, the term argonaut refers to anyone engaged in any kind of quest of discovery ...

 

 

II.       

 

For Nietzsche, a philosophical argonaut was one who continually sought out what he terms die große Gesundheit - that is to say, a form of well-being way beyond the bourgeois model of good health we've been given and endlessly told we have to protect; a form of well-being that doesn't make us superhuman, but, on the contrary, allows us to conceive of that which lies overman. 

 

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche describes this new and greater type of health as "more seasoned, tougher, more audacious, and gayer than any previous health" [1] and he argues that anyone who wishes like an artist-philosopher to experience every desire and sail round the dangerous coastal regions of the soul, needs this great health above all else.    

Argonauts of the spirit, who stand divinely apart from others and who "with more daring than is prudent" risk disastrous shipwrecks, will eventually come upon "an as yet undiscovered country whose boundaries nobody has surveyed [...] a world so overrich in what is beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine" that to return home no longer holds the slightest attraction.

 

 

III.

 

In 2015, the genre-defying American writer Maggie Nelson published her award-winning and best-selling book The Argonauts; a series of autotheoretical reflections on desire, identity, family, etc.

 

For Nelson, the term refers to one who sets out to explore (in a quasi-Barthesian manner [2]) the possibilities (and limitations) of love and language and she discusses in detail her relationship with the transgender artist Harry Dodge, with whom she lives in Los Angeles. 

 

This queering of the term Argonaut is certainly an interesting development and one wonders what Apollonius would have made of it ...? 

 

Of course, as almost nothing is known about this ancient Greek author who composed the epic poem about Jason and his quest to locate the Golden Fleece in the 3rd century BC - the Argonautika - it's impossible to answer this question. 

 

However, as Apollonius was clearly interested in the pathology of love, I'm fairly confident he'd approve of Nelson's "always questioning, sometimes wonderfully lyrical" [3] attempt to document the series of bodily experiments she and Harry engage in in order to construct a happy and rewarding life [4]. He might even recognise Nelson's book as belonging to a classical genre of literature that deals with queer phenomena: paradoxography. 

 

The literary critic and cultural historian Lara Feigel rightly identifies the question that haunts Nelson's book; namely, can a love that claims to be radically-other or queer unfold within a conventional domestic setting? Or, to put it another way: can one be a sexually and socially transgressive Argonaut and also a regular mom?

 

Although she attempts to get round this by insisting that "queerness can hold together forms of strangeness that have nothing to do with sexual orientation" [5], Nelson remains "conscious of the dangers of 'homonormativity' [...] and aware that the more the state opens its institutions to the LGBTQ world, the less that world will "'be able to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe'" [6].

 

Perhaps that's the ultimate sign of the Argonaut: someone who wants the best of both worlds; someone who thinks it reasonable to demand the impossible ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Die Fröliche Wissenschaft (1887), V. 382. I am using the English translation by Walter Kaufmann published as The Gay Science (Vintage Books, 1974). See pp. 346-347. Lines quoted here are on p. 346. 

[2] According to Nelson, the title is a reference to Barthes's idea that two people in a long-term love affair have to continually renew things without changing the form of their relationship - i.e., a bit like the Argonauts had to gradually replace each piece of their ship. Nelson expresses her surprise and joy at the manner in which love can be forever renewed. 

      See the sections Le vaisseau Argo and Le travail du mot in Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Papermac, 1995), pp. 46 and 114. 

 

[3] Lara Feigel ...'The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson review - a radical approach to genre and gender' The Guardian (27 March 2016): click here. 

 

[4] Whilst Maggie busies herself becoming pregnant with a sperm donor, Harry undergoes a bilateral mastectomy and begins taking testosterone. 

 

[5-6]  Lara Feigel ... op. cit. 

 

 

Fot a follow up post to this one - on board the Ship of Theseus with Melissa Mesku - click here. 

 

I am grateful to Maria Karouso whose blog post on the Greek poet Seferis and mythic history inspired this one: click here. 

D. H. Lawrence: In Sickness and in Health

D. H. Lawrence: self-portrait (June 1929) 

It was Nietzsche, of course, who first put forward the idea that artists and philosophers are physicians of culture for whom phenomena are symptoms that reveal a certain state of forces. Without explicitly saying so, I think that D. H. Lawrence also recognised that the critical (in the literary sense) and the clinical (in the medical sense) are destined to enter into what Deleuze describes as a new relationship of mutual learning.

In other words, as a writer, Lawrence is essentially interested in the relation literature has to life, with the latter conceived as an ethical principle that is both impersonal and singular.

Arguably, because he had such a frail physical constitution and was so often ill, Lawrence was always vitally concerned with the possibility of a greater health; something over and above the bourgeois model of wellbeing tied to keeping fit and staying safe; something which must be attained or activated within the self via a struggle with sickness. And perhaps because - like Gethin Day or the man who died - he so often came close to death, he was always fascinated by life as a phenomenon of pure immanence that is lived beyond good and evil and which has had done with judgement.

Like Nietzsche, Lawrence is of the belief that there are some ideas one cannot possibly think except on the condition of being a decadent and harbouring deep resentment against life (even whilst concealing oneself behind the highest idealism). On the other hand, there are also feelings one cannot possibly experience or express unless one is a strong and healthy individual who affirms life (even if committing deeds that the herd regard as immoral).  

In sum:

(i) Bad life, as Lawrence understands it, is an exhausted and degenerating mode of existence that judges life from the perspective of its own sickness; the good life, by contrast, is a rich and ascending form of existence that is able to transform itself and open up strange new possibilities or becomings.

(ii) In so far as every great work of literature provides a model of living, then they must be evaluated not only critically, but clinically. Thus it is that the question that links literature and life (in both its ontological and ethical aspects) is the question of health.

In Sickness and in Greater Health (Or Something I Need to Get Off My Chest)

First I had a flu-like virus that left me with a dry ticklish cough and a dry stuffy nose. This mutated into a chest infection, for which I was prescribed anti-biotics. This left my bronchial system so inflamed and hypersensitive, that it triggered some form of asthmatic reaction. 

So now I've been told to suck on an inhaler and puff away up to four times a day, like a real fucking invalid. Masculine pride (or what women often term stubborn stupidity) dictates that I ignore medical advice. But a tight chest and inability to breathe properly gradually erodes all virtue; indeed, what else is sickness ultimately other than a loss of dignity?  

On a positive note, the dry ticklish cough has gone. Unfortunately, the nasal congestion continues; this despite repeatedly shoving a Vicks inhaler up my nose. If Nietzsche is right and human genius resides in the nostrils, then I've subjected my creative intelligence to a huge quantity of menthol, camphor and Siberian pine needle oil during the last weeks.

Hopefully, this might make my thinking clear and cool (though I doubt it). What it has done is make me much more sympathetic to D. H. Lawrence and Gilles Deleuze who suffered terribly with their chests and often experienced breathing difficulties (not that I'm equating my condition with theirs, both of whom had tuberculosis).        

It's no wonder that both authors seemed to be so obsessed with fresh air and subscribed to a vitalist philosophy built upon the Nietzschean notion of die große Gesundheit - "a new health, stronger, more seasoned, tougher, more audacious, and gayer than any previous health".

This sounds nice. But it's important to know that such a health grows out of sickness and is in fact an affirmation of the latter.  

See: Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), Section 382. 

Note: Lawrence eventually coughed and spat his way out of this mortal life on 2 March, 1930, aged just 44. Deleuze committed suicide on 4 November 1995 after his chronic respiratory condition(s) became increasingly severe and even writing became difficult.  

Torpedo the Ark: Thoughts on the Occasion of a 1000th Post

Orizuru (origami cranes)

Those who love stats or genuinely believe that numbers have occult significance, will be interested to learn that this happens to be the 1000th post on Torpedo the Ark. But whilst this may provide a convenient opportunity to reflect back and look forward, I'm neither nerdy nor superstitious enough to get unduly excited about this conventional milestone.

As for the suggestion that this might be not only a good time to stop writing the blog, but delete it entirely - leaving no trace behind, in order that I may begin a new cycle of work and a new phase in my creative life ... Well, I have to admit, the first (nihilistic) part of this millenarian fantasy rather appeals. But the second part - the hope of a new beginning - strikes me as laughable; the kind of thing subscribed to by those happy-clappy idiots who think the universe rewards optimism and enthusiasm, or that the future is full of promise.

And so, Torpedo the Ark will continue firing on all fronts and I will keep writing posts and stringing sentences together in the same way that Sadako Sasaki liked to fold and tie paper cranes - though not in the expectation of being granted a wish by the gods, obviously.

As for dreams of good luck and rude good health ... The first of these things, says Lawrence, is desired only by the vulgar and the desperate; whilst the latter - understood in its reactive sense as the absence of suffering - is less honourable than death, according to Deleuze.    

In sum: torpedo the ark means cultivate pessimism, curb enthusiasm, affirm misfortune, and seek out that strangely fragile greater health which allows Dasein to face up to its own mortality with angst, but also with courage and with joy.  

Happy to be Hopeless this Christmas

In his 1886 preface to the second edition of The Gay Science, Nietzsche speaks of the gratitude of the convalescent and by which he refers to the rejoicing of one who has resisted a terrible ordeal or period of sickness without complaint, without submission, and, crucially, without hope. 

I have to say, I find this idea - an old Norse idea - very attractive this Christmas; the refusal not only to give in or give up, but to accept the consolation of any teaching that promises a better time to come. It's easy - or at any rate, easier - to endure great hardship or pain if you believe that tomorrow will bring relief or even some form of reward (if not in this life, then in the next). 

It takes a more cheerful form of bravery and a more philosophical bent, to abandon all hope and put aside all trust in those ideals and sentimental illusions in which we may have formerly found our virtue and our humanity. 

For Nietzsche, we are born into what he terms the greater health when we realise that it is often sickness, suffering and, indeed, wretched failure, which best liberate the spirit; that is to say, it is pain and loss that make us not exactly better souls, but almost certainly more profound thinkers. 

Of course, it's true that such a pessimistic teaching means that one is no longer able to trust in life and life's goodness - that life itself becomes problematic (becomes a question of evil). Yet one should not assume that this makes gloomy or unable to love; on the contrary, love remains possible, but one must love differently "with a more delicate taste for joy". 

At the bottom of Pandora's box lies the unopened gift of hope - it can stay there!

Note: this post is dedicated with affection to Princess Kiran who thinks differently on this issue ...