On Living a Solitary Life: the Case of Elsie Eiler

Elsie Eiler and the Monowi town sign 

Photo: Reuters (2011)

I.  No Man is an Island

For Lawrence, who passionately believed in generating new forms of relationship and the establishment of an immanent utopia that he termed the democracy of touch, the idea of an individual living a solitary life was anathema and invariably ended badly (see the case of the man who loved islands, for example).  

As Aaron tells Lilly: you've got to be alone at times - and know how to be alone - but to just go on being alone is not only pointless, but impossible; sooner or later you begin to look around for other people with whom to form living connections.* Even Birkin, for all his talk of starry singularity and a posthuman world, knows that he ultimately needs to be part of a wider society. **

And Mellors, too, accepts that he can't stay alone forever in his forest hut; that he has to be broken open again and accept the pain as well as the pleasure that comes with a new set of social and sexual entanglements: 'There's no keeping clear', he tells Connie, 'And if you do keep clear, you might almost as well die'.***        

Yet the rather touching story of Elsie Eiler seems to demonstrate that, actually, isolation can be a splendid thing ...


II. The Case of Elsie Eiler

84-year-old Elsie Eiler is the sole resident of America's smallest town: Monowi, Nebraska, est. 1902. Everyone else, including her two children, has either moved away or, like her husband, Rudy, passed away (a fate that befell many other small communities in the Great Plains as the big cities exerted their pull).

But Elsie, a life-long resident of Monowi, can see no good reason to leave: it's her home, she likes it, and she intends to stay. And - contrary to what Lawrence might think - she's doing just fine and is perfectly happy.  

She still opens up the little tavern that she and her husband bought in 1971 - around the same time that the local grocery store and the post office closed - and passing truckers and travelling salesmen will frequently stop by for coffee and a chat. So, admittedly, whilst leading a solitary life, she's not entirely devoid of all human contact, like some kind of hermit.    

Elsie is also very conscious of her civic duties as Monowi's only resident. In her capacity as town mayor, for example, she is required to collect taxes and produce a municipal road plan every year in order to secure state funding for the town's four street lamps.

Elsie also maintains the 5000-volume library founded in memory of her husband, so she has plenty to read - and who's to say our relationship with dead authors isn't as vital as that with living beings? As a homotextual, I know I'd sooner live alone with a few good books, than in the company of most people ...

See:

* D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

** D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

*** D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 

'Population of one: the smallest town in the US', a 3 minute BBC film about Elsie Eiler and her life in Monowi: click here.


Thanks to Simon Solomon who kindly suggested this post and sent me a link to the above film.

Siderodromophilia (A Post for Valentine's Day)

The Simpsons (S4/E15): 

Lisa's card to Ralph

I've written elsewhere on this blog about objectum sexuality with reference to the fascinating case of Erika Eiffel [click here]. But I don't believe I've specifically mentioned the love of trains, or siderodromophilia as it is known amongst those who are in the know.

So, since it's Valentine's Day - and since I'm always happy to discuss fetishistic forms of desire and kinky romantic attachment (which may or may not incude an erotic component) - I thought I'd get on board with this topic here and now, giving locomotive lovers their fifteen minutes of critical attention.

All siderodromophiles are, to a greater or lesser extent, physically excited by trains; be they life-sized engines or Hornby scale models; powered by steam or electricity; stationary or rattling along the tracks.

Some are aroused simply by images of trains, or films featuring trains - such as The Lady Vanishes (1938) or Murder on the Orient Express (1974). Others like to be actual passengers and achieve sexual gratification by fucking in a private compartment, or, rather less salubriously, in one of the toilets. As one siderodromophile of my acquaintance told me:

"Travelling in style and comfort on a sleeper train - with or without a partner - is always a highly sexual experience thanks to the gentle back-and-forth rocking motion and the clickety-clack sound of the wheels on the tracks. Who needs the Mile High Club?"

We should, I suppose, also mention those who get their thrills via non-consensual acts on trains, such as rubbing up against fellow passengers or indecently exposing themselves. Arguably, however, frottage - like exhibitionism - deserves to be analysed as a practice in and on its own terms and shouldn't be seen as in anyway an essential component of siderodromophilia.  

Finally, it's important to point out that this particular paraphilia is as old as the history of trains themselves - that it's certainly not something peculiar to our age. Thus, for example, we discover that the decadent anti-hero of Huysmans's magnificent novel À Rebours - published in 1884 - is, amongst other things, something of a siderodromophile.

Women, he concedes, are a natural wonder who possess "the most perfect and original beauty". But, having said that, there's nothing anywhere on this earth to compare to the dazzling and outstanding beauty of the two locomotives that have caught his eye:

"One of these ... is an adorable blonde with a shrill voice, a long slender body imprisoned in a shiny brass corset ... whose extraordinary grace can be quite terrifying when she stiffens her muscles of steel, sends the sweat pouring down her steaming flanks, sets her elegant wheels spinning in their wide circles and hurtles away, full of life, at the head of an express train.
      The other ... is a strapping saturnine brunette given to uttering raucous, gutteral cries, with a thick-set figure encased in armour-plating of cast iron; a monstrous creature with her dishevelled mane of black smoke and her six wheels coupled together low down, she gives an indication of her fantastic strength when, with an effort that shakes the very earth, she slowly and deliberately drags along her heavy train of goods-wagons."    

Des Esseintes concludes:

"It is beyond question that, among all the fair, delicate beauties and all the dark, majestic charmers of the human race, no such superb examples of comely grace and terrifying force are to be found ..."

The irony is, that, as a homotextual whose pleasure is derived from fine writing, even though I don't have the slightest interest in trains, I find these passages extremely arousing ... 

Happy Valentine's Day to lovers everywhere in all their splendidly queer difference!  

See: Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick, (Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 23-24. 

Surprise musical bonus: click here.  

On the Pleasure of the Text and the Politics of Reading

Ever since a young child, I have loved reading and would define myself as a homotextual. That is to say, someone who derives their primary pleasure from books, not from people, and accepts that reading in what Barthes terms a living sense (i.e. homogeneous with a virtual writing) is always perverse in nature and immoral in character.     

I remember at primary school we had to line up and slowly make our way towards the teacher's desk, book in hand. The splendidly named Mrs Horncastle would ask each pupil in turn what page they were on and then request that they read a short paragraph to her.

She was, I suppose, a good woman attempting to be a good teacher. But I fear she understood only dead readings in which the printed word was recognised and mechanically repeated, but failed to produce an inner text or deterritorialize the subject. Her concern was with improving comprehension, not intensifying pleasure or bringing children's relationship with language to a crisis of some kind. 

Once, the line moved so slowly that I finished reading the Ladybird Book I'd been assigned before I'd reached the front of the class. And so, when asked: 'What page are you on Stephen?' I placed the closed work onto her desk and replied proudly: 'I've read it Miss!' in anticipation of praise and a possible gold star.

Maybe she didn't believe me - or maybe she wanted to punish what she regarded as impudence - but I was unjustly sent to the back of the line and told to begin the book again from page one. This taught me an important early lesson about the exercise of authority and that within a culture of institutionalised stupidity, it doesn't pay to be too clever ...              
 

Carry On Cruising

www.azquotes.com

Unless one happens to be aboard a ship, the term cruising is usually understood in its urban-erotic sense - appropriated from gay slang - to refer to the random quest for anonymous, casual sex partners. 

But for homotextuals, the word has a further meaning given to it by Roland Barthes, who considers reading and writing primarily in terms of enjoyment freed from any moralizing imperatives.

Thus, for Barthes, cruising is a notion that can easily be transferred from the erotic realm to the literary arena, becoming in the process a search not for strange bodies as such, but certain surprising features of the text that might give pleasure in the blissful, perverse sense that effects a loss of subjective consistency.

Cruising, writes Barthes, is the voyage of desire. The amorous reader and lover of language is always on the lookout for chance encounters and to experience that first-time feeling: “As if the first time possessed an unheard-of privilege: that of being withdrawn from all repetition.”

This, above all, is the key: cruising is an act that might obsessively repeat itself, but it’s absolutely opposed to the cosy and reassuring return of the same; of convention, of stereotype, and of the ready-made self in all its staleness.

See: 'Twenty Key Words for Roland Barthes', from an interview by Jean-Jacques Brochier (Feb 1975), trans. by Linda Coverdale in Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, (University of California Press, 1991), pp. 205-32. The line quoted is on p. 231.

Geoff Dyer

Photo by Matt Stuart (2011)

geoffdyer.com

Someone - not quite a friend, but not, I think, someone motivated by any real enmity either - writes to tell me what is wrong with this blog and why it fails to find an audience of any size: It's too random, he says, too much made up of bits and pieces that lack any coherent theme or continuity.  

This, of course, is not untrue, but it somewhat misses the point; i.e. that I'm very deliberately subscribing to a fragmented method of writing which encompasses as wide a range of concerns and interests as possible, all of which are assembled in a single space, but without being coordinated or synthesized into any kind of unity or whole. Obviously, such a non-systematic (and anti-systematic) approach is indebted to several of the writers I love the most, including Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and Roland Barthes. 

Geoff Dyer understands: for he shares in this love of the fragmented and whimsical and has built a successful non-career by following wherever his imagination and his desire has taken him, producing a variety of original works, without any regard for a target audience, that speak of his admirable (and enviable) freedom as a writer. 

By learning how to loiter, as Dyer says, on the margins of everything, "unhindered by specialisms ... and the rigours of imposed method", one becomes not merely a man of letters, but a homotextual - i.e., one whose life is virtually synonymous with their writing.

I might not particularly care for all of his books, or share all of his passions or opinions; I might even find him something of a fraud. But, in Dyer, I recognise a degree of kinship and so can't help feeling a little friendly and fraternal towards him - whilst not entirely sure this would be reciprocated ...

Note: Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels, two collections of essays, and several genre-defying books. The line quoted is from his Introduction to Anglo-English Attitudes: Essays, Reviews, Misadventures 1984-99, (Abacus, 2004), p. 4. 

On the Joy of Text

Picasso: Two Girls Reading (1934)

Since I feel in a generously pedantic and somewhat indulgent mood today, let me try to clarify for a friend who seems puzzled by the concept how the term text is used by writers such as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes.

Firstly - and crucially - it does not simply refer to words on a page containing some fixed and authoritative truth. In other words, the text is not simply a piece of writing that has been signed and sealed and which can be explained by a literary critic schooled in the art of hermeneutics. A book can be held in hand; but a text can only ever be held in language and experienced as a signifying practice which takes language to its paradoxical limit. 

Or, to put it another way, the text is a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original and drawn from innumerable sources, promiscuously and pleasurably come together not to express an extra-linguistic reality or give birth to meaning, but, rather, to ensure the constant deferral and systematic exemption of the latter.

In the text, everything is to be disentangled and nothing deciphered. As a reader, one cruises the surface without ever imagining that one might delve beneath it, or step beyond it. For there is nothing beneath the text, nothing behind the text, and nothing outside of the text: signs point only to other signs and never towards a transcendental signified. To presuppose the category 'world' as existing prior to and as the origin of the text, is simply to fall back into onto-theology. 

Having said that, there are small holes (aporia) in the fabric of the text, no matter how tightly or carefully it has been woven together and, like Alice, we can conveniently disappear down these. The fact that the text is a tissue of lies and stereographic plurality is precisely what offends those who believe that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God, etc.

Finally, as I have already hinted, the text allows for an erotics of reading that is linked to jouissance rather than the dull pleasure of consumption. We don't discover ourselves in the text, we lose ourselves and find that our cultural and psychological assumptions are unsettled; i.e., the subjective consistency of our tastes, values, and memories is brought to a crisis of some kind.  

And so - as confessed in a recent post - I'm happy to declare myself a homotextual. That is to say, someone who affirms difference, contradiction, and ambiguity; but who sees no need for divine judgement and makes no demand for conformity with a categorical imperative determining universal good taste. 

Those who oppose the text and call for its foreclosure, either in the name of morality or rationalism, have effectively placed themselves outside of desire. And this not only means they lack a sense of intellectual playfulness, but that they're physically a bit dead and sexless too: you wouldn't want to think like them and you wouldn't want to sleep with them.  

Letter to a Harsh Critic

Deleuze isn't the only one to receive mail from harsh critics containing a vicious mixture of aggression, accusation, and abuse. Almost everyday in my inbox there's something from someone or other outlining the weaknesses of my arguments and my personal shortcomings; i.e. a sort of celebration of my supposedly sorry condition. 

Thus, for example, I was recently informed by a correspondent - who shall remain nameless - that I'm a text-obsessed, theory-loving intellectual with no experience of actual events in the real world and that this - coupled to my continued support for radical feminism - makes me the kind of weak and unmanly figure who refuses to take a firm or fixed position and simply dances round the issues.

Obviously, these charges are meant to make me feel bad or guilty in some manner and are intended not just to provoke a response, but to wound and to shame. But, unfortunately for my finger-pointing and finger-wagging friend, they simply make me smile.

For one thing, it's true that I do love books. Indeed, I'd proudly identify myself as a homotextual. However, I must insist that reading and writing is not something abstract or ideal; rather, it's a fully material process that is itself an actual event in the real world. In other words, theory is a form of praxis. As an anti-dualist, I simply don't subscribe to the metaphysical model that places thinking on one side of a divide and doing on the other.

Further, I would advise my critic to be extremely wary of using the word 'intellectual' in a derogatory manner as if it were a term of abuse. For whilst there is a long tradition of anti-intellectualism, it's really not one that any decent individual should wish to belong to, originating as it does in French anti-Semitism (the term 'intellectual' having been coined by those who sought the conviction of Dreyfus to sneer at his supporters such as Zola). 

As for this idea of skirting or dancing around ideas like a woman ... Well, I can't see anything wrong with that either: I am openly transpositional and admire all those individuals who are light-footed as well as lighthearted and quick-witted. My critic seems to think that being flat-footed, iron-fisted, and pig-headed makes one manly and Nietzschean. But he's mistaken on both counts: it just makes boring. And stupid. As Zarathustra says, he would never make himself the enemy of young girls with fair ankles. Besides, what is all great writing - be it philosophical or literary in character - other than a process of becoming-woman?

One is tempted in closing to paraphrase Emma Goldman: If I can't dance, then I don't want to be part of your libertarian revolution! And just as Deleuze advises Michel Cressole so I would advise my critic: as charming, intelligent, and mischievous as you are, you might also try to be a bit kinder.


Disclaimer: The character appearing as my critic in the above post is of course entirely fictitious; a functional component of the text. As of course am I in my role as author and narrator. Any resemblance to actual persons outside of this textual space, living or dead, is purely coincidental. My apologies to those for whom this goes without saying.