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 Two Recent Poetry Collections by Simon Armitage 1: Dwell (2025)

Simon Armitage: Dwell 

(Faber & Faber, 2025)

Jetzt wär es Zeit, die tiere träten / aus bewohnten Dingen ... 

I. 

 

As a Heideggerian, I was obviously going to be intrigued by a book with the title Dwell. 

 

For dwelling [wohnen] is one of the key ideas in Heidegger's later work and refers to the fundamental way human beings exist in the world; not simply occupying space like bumps on a log, but caring for, preserving, and finding meaning as earth-dwelling mortals beneath the sky and before the gods [b]. 

 

It's the antithesis of the homelessness that for Heidegger characterises modernity. But so too is it distinct from the Nazi idea of a life rooted in Blut und Boden (even if it has a Völkisch feel to it) and is tied to the Heideggerian ethic of letting be [Gelassenheit]. 

 

When we dwell, we allow other beings to be what they are in all their complexity and do not seek to dominate, manipulate, or exploit them as a resource. 

 

Poetically speaking - and Heidegger links dwelling explicitly to poetry - man learns how to inhabit the earth by acknowledging the sacred mystery of otherness (be that in the form of birds, beasts, flowers, or demons) and finding a new revealing other than the revealing of technology, which he terms enframing [Ge-stell]. 

 

He names this new revealing poiesis - a term that refers to the act of creation as a bringing-forth (or unfolding) into being.

      

 

II.  

 

So, then, to the collection of sixteen poems by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage (illustrated by Beth Munro); a work which attempts to illuminate and reimagine the dwelling places of animals native to the UK and particularly those that inhabit the Lost Gardens of Heligan [c]. 

 

Interestingly, and in a way in which I approve, distinctions between human and animal are curdled without ever denying their otherness. Similarly, Armitage blurs the distinction between natural and cultivated when it comes to dwelling places inhabited by creatures, such as the twig-and-leaf construction of a bird's nest. But he also "warns of the fragility of these spaces and their dwellers, exposed to relentless and sadly familiar environmental threats" [d].   

 

Just as even a small back-garden can provide refuge for whatever wildlife remains in this, one of the most nature-depleted nations in the world, so too, hopes Armitage, can his poems "offer lasting homes to those who dwell within their lines" [e].

 

However, Armitage also notes that, as a bare minimum, actual flesh-and-blood creatures also need to eat and breed in the extra-textual world; "and to achieve those things they need the shelter of somewhere to live" as the "consequence of homelessness for most living things is extinction" (x). 

 

Unfortunately, "human dominance on Planet Earth has proved disastrous for the habitation needs of most non-human populations" (x). As a species, we are, at the very least - and it's a word I'm borrowing from Armitage - inhospitable.  

 

Because, ultimately, he's a humanist, Armitage soon says things such as this: animals should be valued because they "encourage the expansion of the human mind" (x) and "enhance what it is to be human" (xi). That's not my position: I try to think animality (and, indeed, vegetal life) outside of their value to us; to think of them as beings in their own right - but not beings that should be accorded rights by Man. 

 

As beings with irreplaceable singularity they exist independently of human evaluation or legal frameworks and should not be driven into extinction nor subjected to industrial scale slaughter. Armitage seems slightly uncomfortable at the use of the word genocide with reference to this, although he admits it has a "certain amount of justification" (x).

 

Finally, before we take a look at the verses themselves, let me quote what Armitage says re the topic of dwelling. Obviously, he's not Heidegger, but it still has some interest:

 

"If Dwell is about 'the garden' as a sanctuary or refuge, about the locations we must provide and safeguard if we are serious about co-existing with lives other than our own, its simultaneous meaning is an encouragement to slow down and spend time with ideas. [...] And the poems themselves are dwellings, too - constructions built from language and contemplation, places to enter." (xii-xiii)    

 

 

III. 

 

The short collection opens with a poem titled 'Pond'. 

 

That's a good place to start, as the word pond derives from an old English term for a confined space - particularly an enclosed body of water - which, of course implies a dwelling place, and Armitage mentions the newts that live there. 

 

However, rather strangely, he seems more concerned with the surface of the pond; "the glassy water's / two-way mirror" (3), which merely reflects life  - and that's a little concerning; as is the cinematic metaphor that follows, suggesting animals are but projections upon a screen. 

 

On a less troubling note, the verse is primarily about the fragile (but resilient) stillness of life, which Armitage (rightly) finds magical. Violent disruptions are inevitable, but the world eternally returns.      

 

 

IV. 

 

'Pond' is followed by 'Drey' which opens with the lovely description of a squirrel's dwelling place:

 

 

It's a twig-and-leaf crow's-nest squat

wombed with feather and moss

wedged in the fork of an oak. (6)

 

 

If it had been me, I'd've finished there; for it's kind of perfect as is and whilst the 26 lines that follow tell us what the poet thinks of the squirrel, they don't reveal anything of what the squirrel thinks of the poet.

 

I suppose, as a long-time reader of Lawrence, I was expecting a rather more ontologically insightful verse; to hear something of the vital, non-human otherness of the squirrel and not simply be told that squirrels have beady black eyes and are jumpy creatures which like to steal nuts from bird-feeders.  

 

Also, I don't mind a degree of anthropomorphism, but it has to remain critical in nature and not merely be a projection of human traits on to animals in an attempt to be humorous. And so, for the record; squirrels do not wear "soft work-gloves" (6) in order to tackle daily jobs and beavers - the subject of the following verse, 'Lodge' - do not watch cable TV, read House and Garden, or sip Earl Grey tea (8) [f]. 

 

If - as I've seen it said - Armitage wishes to satirise the Disneyfied manner we often think of animals by incorporating twee and sentimental images into his own poetry, then, unfortunately, I think he fails on this occasion. In other words, it's a self-defeating move that obscures the actual creature, creates a collision of tones, and takes away from the poem's ecological seriousness.

 

V. 

 

'Den' is a much harder and superior poem to 'Lodge' and 'Drey' - and I like it! One wonders: does Armitage prefer foxes to squirrels and beavers; do they more readily set his mind on fire? 

 

He certainly seems to have a greater degree of imaginative understanding and I was excited to encounter the Armitage fox emerging "out of ash and filth" into "a wet morning" and "dripping with flames" (13).

 

 

VI. 

 

'Hive' is one of my favourite poems in the collection - and not just because I love honey or "jars of sunlight / in edible form" (17), as Armitage writes.   

 

Of course, it's not just sunlight that can be devoured; the darkness too can provide vital nourishment - if you're a bat! And in 'Roost', Armitage speaks of that twilight hour when the sun "fizzles out" and bats "unhug themselves and fly" from their dwelling places ready to "eat the night" (19).  

 

 

VII.

 

If I liked 'Hive' and 'Roost' on the one hand, I hated 'Insect Hotel' on the other: a series of imaginary online reviews posted by six-legged guests on a site such as TripAdvisor. Obviously, it's intended to be comic, but, unfortunately, it isn't funny at all - indeed, it just may be, to paraphrase Comic Book Guy, the Worst. Poem. Ever.   

 

And considering that it's written by a Professor of Poetry whose work has received numerous prizes and awards - in 2018, for example, Armitage was even given the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry) - it's a poem that, if I were him, I'd seriously consider removing from the collection. 

 

It may have a place in a children's poetry anthology, but it does not belong in a book which is intended to address a painfully tragic situation: "Tragic for the plight of animals, of course, but also a pitiful reflection on our own attitudes and activities." (x) 

 

Armitage seems to think he can have it both ways: offering a profound poetic meditation on dwelling and animality on the one hand, whilst giving us anthropomorphic dad humour on the other; but he can't. There's nothing fun or wacky about ecocide and the extermination of wildlife (including insects) and not even Beth Munro's illustrations [h] can save you this time, Simon.  

 

 

VIII.    

 

It's an interesting philosophical idea to conceive of rabbits as the intelligence of the hillside: 'Warren' (31); i.e., to suggest that consciousness is just an epiphenomenal effect of non-sentient matter.  

 

I also liked the first six days of 'Deer Diary' (32-33), in which the distinction between animals and their environment was shown to be anything but clear cut; the narrator mistakes wood smoke, a heap of leaves, shadows, patches of snow, and heat haze for various deer. 

 

I could do without Sunday's unicorn (33), however; just as I could do without the young girl's angel in 'Nest Box' (36). 

 

Again, actual biological entities such as deer and barn owls, are magical and awe-inspiring in themselves - we don't need legendary creatures and supernatural spirits, ta very much. 

 

(At a push, if feeling generous, I'd concede that all objects are equally real objects and exist on the same flat ontology, but can't help feeling that here unicorns and angels add nothing and detract from the poetic realism of the work.)  

 

 

IX. 

 

Compared with 'Insect Hotel', 'Cote' is a masterful work: and at least it rhymes. 

 

But, again, for all its attempted witty word play, it's got that depressingly unfunny comic tone and so fails to do what it wishes to do; namely, challenge the idea that the value of birds is their symbolic significance for man.  

 

We may like to believe that a dove, for example, is a symbol of the holy spirit, or divine love, or peace, hope and purity, but such idealism degrades the actual being of the bird in all its avian alterity and complex biological nature.   

 

And it also fails to offer them any protection, which is why, for example, many populations of dove are in severe decline and/or critically endangered [h]. 

 

 

X.

 

I began this post by discussing Heidegger's notion of dwelling and I'd like to close with one of Heidegger's thought-poems [Gedachtes], which affords an interesting contrast in style and tone with Armitage's verses: 

 

 

Forests spread

Brooks plunge

Rocks persist

Mist diffuses

 

Meadows wait

Springs well 

Winds dwell

Blessing muses [i] 

 

Notes

[a] I'm reworking the famous opening lines of an untitled poem written by Rilke about a year before his death in 1926 (see Insel ed., II. 185), replacing daß Götter with die tiere, so that it reads in English: 'Now it is time that the animals emerge / from things by which they dwell'.    

 

[b] Heidegger refers to these elements - earth, sky, mortals, divinities - as the fourfold [das Geviert] and argues that dwelling is a harmonisation of these things (it's not just about constructing a shelter - even if that shelter happens to be a Black Forest hut). 

      The important essay 'Building Dwelling Thinking' (1951) can be found in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1993), pp. 343-363. Or in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Harper Perennial, 1975), pp. 143-161.   

 

[c] Armitage was invited (i.e., commissioned) to write a series of poems for the Lost Gardens of Heligan; a large garden restoration project and major tourist attraction, in Cornwall: "Protected and carefully managed, the Gardens also provide a haven - both intentionally and inadvertently - for wildlife." 

      See the 'Welcome Note' to Dwell supplied by Armitage, p. xii. All future page references to this book will be given directly in the text.   

 

[d] Quoted from the publishers blurb found on their website and on the inside of the book's front cover.  

 

[e] Ibid.   

 

[f] I did like the description of beavers as teeth "that have grown bodies and tails" (9) and, again, there is little wrong with Armitage's description of a beaver's lodge, as "a kindling hut" held together "with sludge and stones" (8); a description which made me think of Heidegger's little three-roomed cabin in the Black Forest and known as die Hütte. 

      Readers who are interested in the latter might like to see Adam Sharr, Heidegger's Hut (MIT Press, 2006), a work which explores the intense relationship between a man and his environment and how thinking is related to dwelling.    

 

[g] Beth Munro is a hybrid printmaker and illustrator: click here to visit her website. It might be argued that Munro's complex and clever illustrations add a necessary extra layer of philosophical seriousness to Dwell - the images are certainly not just decorative.

 

[h] The European turtle dove, for example, is on the brink of extinction in the UK, its numbers having fallen by 99% since the 1960s, due to intensive agricultural practices, habitat loss, shortage of food, and shooting for sport by the French, Spanish, and Portuguese.   

 

[i] See Martin Heidegger, 'The Thinker as Poet', in Poetry, Language, Thought ... p. 14. 

      Readers who wish to read more should also get hold of Martin Heidegger, Thought Poems, trans. Eoghan Walls (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2021). 

 

 

For reflections on another cleection of verse published in 2025 by Armitage - New Cemetery - please click here.

 

 

Reflections on Simon Critchley's Philosophical Short Cuts (Part 1)

Simon Critchely: Bald (Yale University Press, 2021) 

Essays edited by Peter Catapano 

Cover design by R. Black

 

 

I don't know Simon Critchley: but he's one of the Simons that I can't help admiring and to whom I feel a vague connection, that is part philosophical in nature and part generational; we share many of the same ideas and points of reference and we were all born in the same decade [a]. 

 

Having said that, there are differences between me and the Simons, including Herr Professor Critchley, whose collection of essays Bald (2021) I'd like to discuss here in an amicable if still critical manner. Readers might best see this post then as less the staging of a confrontation or a reckoning [Auseinandersetzung] and more an attempt to offer an insightful commentary in the same kind of engaging, jargon-free - or bold and bald - style that Critchley adopts in this work.  

 

Note: whilst there are thirty-five essays in Bald - all originally published in the New York Times - I'll not be discussing each of them here; just the ones that really catch my interest or which I find particularly provocative [b]. The titles in bold are Critchley's own. And all page numbers refer to the 2021 edition shown above. If the post becomes overly-lengthy - as these posts often do - I'll publish it as two (or possibly even three) parts.   

 

 

Happy Like God  

What is happiness? 

 

In an attempt to answer this question Critchley calls on Rousseau, who provides him with the idea that happiness might simply be the feeling of existence; a feeling that fills the soul entirely. 

 

Perhaps in order to update the language slightly, Critchley reframes this feeling as one of "momentary self-sufficiency that is bound up with the experience of time" [5]. Happiness, in other words, is learning to enjoy the nowness of the present (no regrets and no longing for a better tomorrow). 

 

Achieve a state of joyful reverie and, says Rousseau, you become like God - and Critchley doesn't demur, which is slightly strange for an atheist, but indicates the direction his thinking often takes; i.e., towards secular mysticism (whether this makes him a crypto-theologian more than a critical theorist is a question we can return to later). 

 

And where and when is Critchley happiest? 

 

Sitting by the sea, or in his lover's bed; happiness can be a solitary state, but "one can also experience this feeling of existence in the experience of love" [6]. Maybe: though I'm not sure that love is ever that blissfully straightforward and Critchley is honest enough to admit that even the most oceanic feeling of happiness is outrageously short lived: "Time passes, the reverie ends and the feeling for existence fades." [6].

 

Didn't Goethe once say that no one can enjoy looking at a beautiful sunset for more than a few seconds without getting bored; and I remember also Johnny Rotten once characterising love as less than three minutes of squelching noises. 

 

In other words, we are incapable of being permanently happy (or even happy for long) [c].  

 

 

How to Make It in the Afterlife 

 

As a thanatologist, what I like about Critchley is that, sooner or later and no matter what the topic - he's going to speak about mortality. And sure enough, we quickly pass from happiness to death and the relation between them, which he discusses in relation to ancient Greek philosophy (his other specialist subject). 

 

The key is: live a good life and die a noble death and happiness will be yours. Which means that "happiness does not consist in whatever you might be feeling [...] but in what others feel about you" [13]. 

 

In other words, happiness is something posthumously ascribed - a very unmodern view, but one worth considering; particularly if the adoption of such a view encourages us to live in a more beautiful manner so as to be remembered with smiling fondness.  

 

 

The Gospel According to Me

 

That's a nice title. And it's a crucial short essay attacking the search for individual authenticity, which Critchley rightly recognises is born of a "weak but all-pervasive idea of spirituality [...] and a litugy of inwardness" [15]. 

 

This ideal of authenticity - which was central to existentialism before becoming central to New Age therapeutic culture - is basically a type of selfish conformism; something which "disguises acquisitiveness under a patina of personal growth, mindfulness and compassion" [16]. 

  

Those who think the quest for authenticity is an ethical practice, might be surprised to find Critchley dismiss it as a form of passive nihilism. Passive nihilism and the zen fascism of the 21st century American workplace. For when the office is such a fun place to be and encourages you to be yourself and express yourself, then "there is no room for worker malaise" [17] or class war and in in this way authenticity becomes "an evacuation of history" [17] [d].    

 

I like it when Critchley nails his colours to the mast and pops his political hat on; exposing not just the fantasy of authenticity, but the evils of the workplace - even those that allow us to wear our favourite T-shirt "and listen to Radiohead" [17] on our i-Phones while at our desk. 

 

And I like it too when he relates his philosophical and political critique to literature; pointing out, for example, that Herman Melville, "writing on the cusp of modern capiatlism" [19] in the mid-19th century, had already twigged that "the search for authenticity was a white whale" [19]; i.e., an obsessive quest that is "futile at best and destructive at worst" [19] [e].   

 

 

Abandon (Nearly) All Hope

 

Having demolished the ideal of authenticity, Critchley now attacks the ideal of hope: is it, he asks, such a wonderful thing? 

 

Obviously, I don't think so and I've long been an vociferous opponent of this Christian virtue: see the post dated 6 Feb 2022, for example, on Shep Fairey's Obama poster: click here. Thus, I was pleased to see that Critchley is also hostile to the idea, regarding it from a Graeco-Nietzschean perspective as a form of moral cowardice that "allows us to escape from reality and prolong human suffering" [20].    

 

Hope, says Critchley - contra Obama - is not audacious; it is mendacious; something exploited by our religious teachers and political leaders alike. And what we need is not blind hope but clear-sighted courage in the face of reality (including the courage to abandon hope). 

 

Or, to put that another way, "skeptical realism, deeply informed by history" [25], that knows how to smile like Epictetus (the slave turned Stoic philosopher admired by Nietzsche).    

 

 

What Is a Philosopher? 

 

An idiot who falls down the well (like Thales); or one who takes their time ...? 

 

Probably a combination of both: 

 

"The philosopher [...] is free by virtue of his otherworldliness, by the capacity to fall into wells and appear silly" and this freedom "consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic" [71] [f].   

 

Critchley endorses this Socratic defnition further by agreeing that the philosopher is also one who is indifferent to convention; shows no respect for rank; never joins a political party or a private club. Of course, this kind of attitude and behaviour can get you in trouble - Socrates  was ultimately put on trial and condemned to death for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens [g]. 

 

Thus, Critchley (amusingly) decides: "Philosophy should come with the kind of health warning one finds on packs of European cigarettes: PHILOSOPHY KILLS" [72]. 

 

It is thus not only a perverse love of wisdom - a form of erōtomaniā (see below) - but a risking of one's own life; i.e., a practice of joy before death. 

 

Critchley concludes (in a slightly confessional, slightly self-dramatising manner):

 

"Nurtured in freedom and taking their time, there is something dreadfully uncanny about philosophers, something either monstrous or godlike, or, indeed, both at once." [73]

 

 

Cynicism We Can Believe In

 

Ancient cynicism is "not at all cynical in the modern sense of the word" [83], writes Critchley. 

 

And that's certainly true; ancient cynicism was a rigorous philosophical way of life that involved self-debasement in order to make its case, whilst modern cynicism, on the other hand, is "an attitude of negativity and jaded scornfulness" [83]; often no more than a fashionable pose.  

 

The modern cynic isn't expected to live like a dog, eat raw squid, or masturbate in the market place and his cynicism lacks the moral and political radicalism of the hardcore cynicism that Diogenes practiced. 

 

But in a world like ours - self-interested, lazy, corrupt, and greedy - "it is Diogenes's lamp that we need to light our path" [85]. Though I think we can do without the flash-wanking or pissing in public, thank you very much.    

 

 

Let Be - An Answer to Hamlet's Question

 

For Heidegger, letting be [Gelassenheit] is a fundamental granting of freedom, born not of indifference, but an active concern for otherness and a refusal to see the world as something to be manipulated and exploited. In other words, it's a form of care. 

 

Critchley - who certainly knows his Heidegger - prefers to think the idea of letting be in relation to Shakespeare's Hamlet, however. In response to the play's famous ontological question - 'To be, or not to be?' - he says 'Let be'. 

 

But in order to let be, requires, he says, the cultivation of "a disposition of skeptical openness that does not claim to know aught of what we truly know naught" [107]. 

 

He elucidates:  

 

"If we can cure ourselves of our longing for some sort of godlike conspectus of what it means to be human, or our longing for the construction of ourselves as some new prosphetic god through technology, bound by the self-satisfied myth of unlimited human progress, we might let be." [107] 

 

I think we can all agree this would be a good thing. But it's not going to happen, of course; man is the creature who just can't help interfering and organising and wanting to be master of the universe; Homo sapien is also Homo importunus.   

  

 

Notes

 

[a] The other Simons include Reynolds and Armitage - see the post dated 17 Jan 2026: click here - and also the monstrous figure of Síomón Solomon; see the post dated 19 Jan 2026: click here. 

 

[b] Readers will note that I don't, for example, refer to any of the five essays in the section entitled 'I Believe'. Essentially, that's because I don't know anything about (or have much interest in) Mormonism, Russian literature (Dostoevsky), or Danish philosophy (Kierkegaard). 

      Nor do I share the (quasi-religious) faith of a football fan and find Critchley's paean to Liverpool FC a bit cringe if I'm honest. Does he really believe that football teaches us something important about our humanity and that being a Red inculcates a set of purely noble values: "solidarity, compassion, internationalism, decency, honour, self-respect and respect for others" [63] -? (Opposing fans sometimes accuse Liverpool supporters of moralising sentimentality and hypocrisy, but we can leave this for another post, another day.) 

      The essay on money - 'Coin of Praise' - I did read and found myself nodding in agreement with the idea that our financial system essentially rests on faith; i.e., money is the most ideal of all material things and our one true God. But saying that didn't seem to justify an entire section in this post.      

 

[c] See the follow up piece entitled 'Beyond the Sea' (pp. 7-11), in which Critchley addresses some of the comments and criticisms he received from readers of 'Happy Like God'. Crucially, he recognises that happiness in the moment is often topped by happiness of the memory of our happiness in the moment; that the best kind of happiness isn't ecstatic, but melancholic.  

 

[d] Michel Foucault famously dismissed what he called the Californian cult of the self in comparison to the ethico-aesthetic stylisation of self as practiced by the ancient Greeks and modern dandies. See 'On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress', in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Penguin Books, 1991), p. 359. 

      And see also what Foucault writes on the 'arts of existence' and 'techniques of self' in The History of Sexuality 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin Books, 1992). 

 

[e] Critchley also refers to his hero Shakespeare, reminding readers that no one is more inauthentic than Hamlet and that the depiction of his radical inauthenticity "shatters our moral complacency" [19] as witnesses to the drama that unfolds.    

 

[f] I would suggest that just as there are two types of philosophical freedom, so too are there are two types of philosopher; I belong to the first type, who flit from topic to topic; my friend Síomón Solomon belongs to the latter type and enjoys the freedom to return and ruminate upon the same problems over and over. This naturally enough produces a different type of thinking and writing style.

 

[g] Critchley notes: "Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety" and philosophy has "repeatedly and persistently been identified with blasphemy against the gods" [72]. Because their attitude is perceived (rightly or wrongly) as one of not giving a fuck, philosophers are often regarded as "politically suspicious, even dangerous" [72].

 

 

Part 2 of this post can be accessed by clicking here.  

 

Retromania: Reviewed and Reassessed - Part 4: Tomorrow (Chapter 10: Ghosts of Futures Past)

Simon Reynolds: Author of Retromania (2011)
and an 'old modernist-minded post-punk'

I.

Technically, this is not really a review, so much as an attempt to occupy the textual space that Reynolds has generously opened up in his book Retromania and meet him there in and on his own terms.

But it is also the staging of a confrontation or reckoning [Auseinandersetzung]; an attempt not to find common ground - I clearly share with Mr Reynolds certain interests, ideas, and points of reference - but key areas of difference, so as to open up a pathos of distance between us as cultural commentators.

Readers who have worked their way through the first three parts of this post can decide how successful I've been in that aim so far ... 

II.

The title of chapter 10 suggests that the hauntological theme with which Reynolds closed chapter 9 is going to be developed. And obviously, that makes me happy, as I'm somewhat smitten by this spooky pop cultural concept developed by Reynolds and Mark Fisher in 2005, based on Derrida's philosophical work in this area [a]. 

 

I even like the punning neologisms that have been coined, such as ghost modernism and seance fiction - though maybe Reynolds might be challenged when he describes sampling as groove robbing (not because it's a pun too far, but because it implies intellectual property and the ownership of sounds) [b].  

Sampling isn't theft; it's a practice that reveals the musical equivalent of intertextuality (this is sometimes known as sonic resonance, or intersonority); i.e. the manner in which all recordings echo and refer to other recordings. To put it simply: there is no such thing as an original pop song or an original piece of music; everything's a cover version and the dead are always with us.   

Reynolds finds this uncanny - "because different studio auras and different eras were being placed in 'ghostly adjacence'" [c] - but then, as he goes on to point out, it's not unusual. For recording has "always had a spectral undercurrent" [312], not least because it separates "the human voice from a living body" [312]. 

 

He continues: "Records have certainly habituated us to living with phantoms [...] In a sense, a record really is a ghost: it's a trace of a musician's body, the after-imprint of breath [...]" [312]. That's true. At least that's true of analogue recordings, but not digital works, in which the direct physical relationship with the sound source is replaced by a reading of such in terms of binary data.    

Reynolds concludes: "Recording is pretty freaky, then, if you think about it." [313]. Though the same can be said of photography, of course; "both are reality's death mask" [312]. Sampling simply intensifies this inherent supernaturalism, creating a "musical event that never happened; a mixture of time-travel and seance" [313]. 

 

(Again, at this point I have to express my admiration for Reynolds's thinking here - I love all this stuff on the art of musical ghost arrangement, etc.)

 

But is sampling a form of exploitation? Reynolds seems to think so: 

 

"In a certain sense - neither literally true nor utterly metaphorical - sampling is enslavement: involuntary labour that's been alienated from its original environment and put into service in a completely other context, creating profit and prestige for another." [314]

 

Let's, for the sake of argument, say that's also true: one could just give a Warholesque shrug and say so what? 

 

Alternatively, as a Nietzschean, one might point out that slavery is a necessary precondition for the flourishing of higher culture and that artists have always exploited the work of untold others. Reynolds may find that a politically uncomfortable fact, but, as a cultural theorist he's obliged to acknowledge such an inconvenient truth. 

 

Art is not a form of liberal humanism; it's an aristocratic practice that requires a certain cruelty to impose new forms upon chaos and create new values, etc. For me, therefore, sampling can be defended from a philosophical perspective that is anything other than 'left-wing' [d].      

 

As for the argument that sampling shifts power to the producer and disempowers those "real musicians who think they're so cool and hip", that only holds up providing one wishes to deny the phonographic artistry of the former and see them as merely technicians, devoid of creative talent or skill, just because they wear less "complicated shoes" [e].  

 

Musicianship is, in my view - as a McLarenista - hugely overrated - so more power to the elbow of people like the Canadian composer and audio pirate John Oswald, who on Plunderphonic (1989) "turned sampling into a form of digital iconoclasm, literally smashing pop idols to smithereens" [317], as well as challenging notions of originality and identity [f].    

 

Rock musicians are often the most self-serious and pompous of all artists and so deserve to be "subjected to various degrees of insult, satire or travesty" [321]. 

 

But it should be noted that often digital-era artforms like hip-hop often display an almost reverential regard for the obscure analogue grooves they exploit; "they honour through recycling, in the process conferring a kind of immortality for the music, if not for its anonymous creators" [323]  

 

 

III. 

I was a bit surprised by Reynolds's admission that his sense of Britishness remains so acute after so-many years living in the United States with an American wife.  

 

Obviously, he doesn't define such in terms of blood and soil, but, rather, sees it in cultural terms; nationality is, he says, "a matrix of collective character that involves gesture and intonation, phrase and fable, and an immense array of common reference points [...] from the shape of post boxes to newspaper fonts" [337], which, I suppose is true enough.   

Interesting to consider hauntology as a specifically British thing, however; a mourning for a lost time, before the British were increasingly pressured to apologise themselves out of existence or make themselves either more American or more European (isn't this pretty much the same line that Morrissey takes - or does he veer a little too close to ethnonationalism as well as cultural pride?) [g]. 

1958-1978: this is the golden era that haunts hauntologists and ghost boxers alike; and, ironically, it's the era that "rock 'n' roll in some sense rebelled against by celebrating desire, pleasure, disruptive energy, individualism" [338]. The nanny state suddenly doesn't seem so "suffocating and oppressively intrusive" [338] from the perspective of the early 21st century ...

Everything was better, wasn't it, in the sixties and seventies; the music, the fashion, the films, the football, and, of course, the TV: "The memoradelic imprint left by vintage TV on the child's impressionable grey matter is central to hauntology." [h]  
 

The question is: is this just a British thing catering to a certain generation? Or does "every country, and each successive generation within that nationality [...] produce its own version of hauntology - a self-conscious, emotionally ambivalent form of nostalgia that sets in play the ghosts of childhood?" [343]  

 

 

IV. 

 

Unsurprisingly, some commentators are less than impressed with all this; seeing hauntology as postmodern retro by another name. And Reynolds admits: 

 

"It's true that hauntology emerged from the same matrix of baseline cultural conditions - the scrambling of pop time, the atrophy of any sense of futurity or forward propulsion - that generated many of the things I've castigated in this book." [355]

 

But, of course, he's not going to let go of the concept that he and Fisher worked so hard to develop and popularise: "What makes hauntology different, what gives it an edge, is that it contains an ache of longing - for history itself." [355-356] 

 

By this I think Reynolds means that hauntology is a profoundly serious desire for the real pain and actual horror of past events and not just the nice things which make us feel comfortable in the present; he's affirming history as is (or as was). 

 

And he does this because unless you affirm the past as a total economy, you'll never be able to recover the lost futures he and Fisher hope to find. In other words, tomorrow can be ours - but there's a price to pay and it will require courage (not just irony); the one thing that for Ursula Brangwen really matters at last [i]. 

 

 

V. 

 

If Reynolds is, shall we say, ambivalent about sampling, he clearly doesn't like the mash-up; "bootleg remixes that combined two or more pop hits" [356] to produce nostalgia without the ache. He explains that whilst mash-ups may briefly amuse due to their incongruous juxtaposing of elements, there is no "creation of surplus value, musically; even at their very best they only add up to the sum of their parts" [359].    

 

Mash-ups are thus a form of pseudo-creativity "based on a blend of mild irreverence and simple pop fandom" [359]. Worse: "Mash-ups mash the history of pop like potatoes, into indistinct, digital-data grey pulp [...] devoid of nutritional value" [360], by which I think he means they don't feed the soul.

 

And so, forget about mash-ups and retro. For even if it remains a "precarious and paradoxical strategy" [361], its hauntology which will resurrect the "eyes-on-the-horizon optimism" [361] of late modernism, by radically parodying heritage culture and uncovering "alternate pasts secreted inside the official narrative" [361], thereby turning the past into a foreign country.

 

As Heidegger might say: Nur noch ein Geist kann uns retten ... [j] 

 

 

Notes

[a] See the post 'Notes on Hauntology and Ghost Modernism' (28 Sept 2023): click here.

      Whilst for Derrida hauntology is a framework for understanding that being is always haunted by what is not fully present (traces of both past and present; the no longer and the not yet), for Reynolds and Fisher hauntology is more about the way in which pop culture explores a zone of nostalgia in the hope of finding a way beyond the present (so-called lost futures). It's a little amusing how, on the one hand, Reynolds expresses a certain anxiety about sampling and yet, on the other hand, cheerfully borrows (shall we say) Derrida's term simply because he liked the sound of it.  

[b] It turns out that Reynolds didn't invent this pun, but borrowed the idea of groove robbing from someone called DJ Shadow. See p. 323 of Retromania where he writes of the appropriately Gothic nature of the term. 

 

[c] Simon Reynolds, Retromania (Faber and Faber, 2012), p. 312. Future page numbers will be given directly in the post and refer to this edition.

[d] Reynolds writes: 

      "It's curious that almost all the intellectual effort expended on the subject of sampling has been in its defence [...] nearly always focused on the legal aspect, framing the samplers in punk-like terms (as rebellious, iconoclastic). Academic studies of sampling have likewise generally sided with 'the streets' versus the multinational entertainment companies. This reflects the left-wing bias of academia and a tendency to see the whole area of property rights, including copyright, as intrinsically conservative, aligned with corporations and [...] the status quo. [...] A Marxist analysis of sampling might conceivably see it as the purest form of exploiting the labour of others. In a more general sense, you could see it as a form of cultural strip-mining, a ransacking of the rich seams of past musical productivity." [314-315] 

      Hopefully, my post-Nietzschean analysis provides an interesting alternative. 

[e] I'm quoting George Costanza here from an episode of Seinfeld, 'The Burning' (S9/E16), dir. Andy Ackerman (1998). 

 

[f] Plunderphonic (1989) was a 25-track CD in which Oswald reworked material by both popular musicians like The Beatles, and classical works such as Beethoven's Symphony No. 7. Whilst sources for all the samples used were scrupulously listed, Oswald was happy to acknowledge that authorisation for their use had neither been given nor sought. Although the work was not made available for sale, all undistributed copies were destroyed after a threat of legal action by the Canadian Recording Industry Association on behalf of several of their clients, including Michael Jackson, whose song "Bad" had been chopped into tiny pieces and rearranged as 'Dab': click here. 

      One suspects Jackson wasn't best pleased with the albums cover art either; a photo collage that transposed his head and leather jacket from the cover of his album Bad (1987) onto a naked female body - something that Reynolds compares with "the on-line porn practice of taking images of movie stars and other celebrities and Photoshopping their heads onto nude bodies engaged in hardcore sex acts" [317]. 

      Obviously, this practice has massively accelerated and become ever more widespread and sophisticated thanks to AI. I don't really have an issue with it, but Reynolds insists that, for him, its a "blatant infringement of an individual's rights in their own image" [317] and infringes their dignity, blah, blah, blah.  

      Reynolds does concede, however, that Oswald's 'Dab' is a masterpiece that injects alien DNA into an all-too-human pop song; "micro-syllable vocal particles are multitracked as if in some infinite hall of mirrors and a strobing swarm of micro-Jacksons billows back and forth across the stereo field" [317]. 

 

[g] Reynolds discusses the case of Stephen Morrissey in terms of reflective nostalgia (good) and restorative nostalgia (bad) in a footnote on pp. xxvii-xxviii. 

      Describing him as the "supreme poet of reflective nostalgia", he neverthless fears that Morrissey has, at times, crossed over to the dark side and flirted with fascism, declaring England to no longer be recognisable to the country of his youth due to mass migration. 

 

[h] Where I differ from Reynolds here is that I never gave a shit about British shows like Doctor Who - it was American shows (and their theme tunes) I loved best; see the post 'Theme Tunes in a Man's Life' (2 Feb 2013): click here. 

 

[i] See D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 270. When her uncle asks her "'Courage for what?'" Ursula replies "'For everything.'"

 

[j] I'm paraphrasing Heidegger's famous statement - 'Only a god can save us now' - from a 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, published posthumously in 1976. It reflects his belief that modern humanity is trapped in a crisis that cannot be resolved through human agency alone. Not that he was referring by his use of the term 'god' to a traditional religious deity or a personal saviour, anymore than by my use of the term 'ghost' I am referring to a sheet-wearing apparition or supernatural entity in the clichéd sense. 

      The interview with Heidegger, conducted by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff, was translated by William J. Richardson and can be found in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Transaction Publishers, 1981), pp. 45-67. Click here to read on the Internet Archive.   

 

 

To read part 1 of this post, please click here. 

 

To read part 2 of this post, click here. 

 

To read part 3 of this post, click here. 

 

The fifth and final part will be published shortly.