Chrysopoeia 2: Volpone (He's the Fox - the Fox with the Golden Brush)

Aubrey Beardsley:  

Volpone Adoring His Treasures (1898)

 

Good morning to the day; and next, my gold: 

Open the shrine, that I may see my Saint.

 

 

I. 

 

Ben Jonson's brilliant comic play Volpone (1606) opens with a very famous scene of gold veneration that is worth reproducing in full:

 

 

A ROOM IN VOLPONE'S HOUSE. ENTER VOLPONE AND MOSCA. 

 

VOLPONE: 

 

Good morning to the day; and next, my gold: 

Open the shrine, that I may see my Saint. 

 

MOSCA WITHDRAWS THE CURTAIN REVEALING PILES OF GOLD, PLATE, JEWELS, ETC.

 

Hail the world's soul, and mine! More glad than is 

The teeming earth to see the long'd-for sun 

Peep through the horns of the celestial Ram, 

Am I, to view thy splendour darkening his; 

That lying here, amongst my other hoards, 

Shew'st like a flame by night; or like the day 

Struck out of chaos, when all darkness fled 

Unto the centre. O thou son of Sol, 

But brighter than thy father, let me kiss, 

With adoration, thee, and every relick 

Of sacred treasure, in this blessed room. 

Well did wise poets, by thy glorious name, 

Title that age which they would have the best; 

Thou being the best of things: and far transcending 

All style of joy, in children, parents, friends, 

Or any other waking dream on earth: 

Thy looks when they to Venus did ascribe, 

They should have given her twenty thousand Cupids; 

Such are thy beauties and our loves! 

Dear saint, Riches, the dumb god, that giv'st all men tongues; 

That canst do nought, and yet mak'st men do all things; 

The price of souls; even hell, with thee to boot, 

Is made worth heaven. Thou art virtue, fame, 

Honour, and all things else. Who can get thee, 

He shall be noble, valiant, honest, wise - [1]

 

 

II. 

 

There are many things I love about this speech: for one thing, Volpone's is a profoundly cynical and materialist philosophy, which imagines even the anima mundi in chemical-elemental (non-spritual) terms. This is to immediately challenge all those idealistic thinkers from Plato to Hegel who identified the world-soul as a force of vital intelligence which is accesible to (because self-identical with) human reason.

 

The Gnostics may, like Volpone, have also posited gold as the essence of all that exists, but for them this was alchemical allegory; for them, gold was not a metal gifted to mankind from beyond the stars in an age before life itself, it was rather the Light Soul to be contrasted with the dead matter within which it is imprisoned. 

 

Gold may have been recognised as the noblest of all noble metals - and their origin - but it is still regarded with contempt by those whose real concern is with the inner gold (i.e. the spark of divinity) within each of us. Volpone may use religious language - open the shrine that I may see my saint - but he does so mockingly, that is, in a knowingly idolatrous manner. 

 

And when Volpone expresses a desire to kiss his gold, we are reminded that there is also an erotic aspect to his gold fetish. However, unlike Auric Goldfinger - whose case we discussed here - Volpone doesn't desire gold in a perverse manner and, ultimately, I don't think he is guilty of either greed or lust; what he does, in fact, is exploit the vices of others. 

 

For as he confesses to his man-servant, confidant, and fellow-schemer, Mosca: "I glory more in the cunning purchase of my wealth / Than in the glad possession ..."

This line is crucial, I think, in understanding Volpone's character - and my attraction to him; for he reminds me of the Embezzler, played by Malcolm McLaren in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980); a man who enjoys manipulating events, exploiting the gullible, and defrauding the rich. Yes, he wishes to generate cash from chaos, but it's the swindle itself that most excites his imagination. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm quoting from Ben Jonson's Volpone as found freely online as a Project Gutenberg eBook: click here. 

 

 

I Would Like to Know the Stars Again: Reflections on Astronomy and Astrology in the Work of D. H. Lawrence

"I would like to know the stars again ... I would like to be able to put my ego into the sun, 

and my personality into the moon, and my character into the planets, 

and live the life of the heavens." - D. H. Lawrence

 

I. There's a Star Man Waiting in the Sky

 

To his credit, Lawrence was always open and honest about his preference for astrology over astronomy. 

 

For him, the former is an ancient body of esoteric knowledge - a lost science - concerning the vital relationship between man and the universe; whilst the latter is merely an attempt to restrict human consciousness and kill the true splendour of the heavens, as his Introduction to Frederick Carter's The Dragon of the Apocalypse makes clear:

 

"I have read books of astronomy which made me dizzy with the sense of illimitable space. But the heart melts and dies, it is the disembodied mind alone which follows on through this horrible hollow void of space, where lonely stars hang in awful isolation. And this is not a release. It is a strange thing, but when science extends space ad infinitum, and we get a terrible sense of limitlessness, we have at the same time a secret sense of imprisonment. Three-dimensional space is homogeneous, and no matter how big it is, it is a kind of prison. No matter how vast the range of space, there is no release."*      

 

Works of astrology, on the other hand, bring a marvellous release of the whole imagination:

 

"In astronomical space, one can only move, one cannot be. In the astrological heavens, that is to say, the ancient zodiacal heavens, the whole man is set free, once the imagination crosses the border. The whole man, bodily and spiritual, walks in the magnificent fields of the stars [...] and the feet tread splendidly upon [...[ the heavens, instead of untreadable space." [46]

        

Essentially, Lawrence is contrasting two types of experience and privileging one over the other:

 

"To enter the astronomical sky of space is a great sensational experience. To enter the astrological sky of the zodiac and the living, roving planets is another experience, another kind of experience; it is truly imaginative, and to me, more valuable. It is not a mere extension of what we know: an extension that becomes awful, then appalling. It is the entry into another world, another kind of world, measured by another dimension. And we find some prisoned self in us coming forth to live in this world." [46] 

 

It's not that Lawrence wishes to deny the first experience. But he much prefers the sense of being part of the macrocosm that astrology affords him:

 

"I become big and glittering and vast with a sumptuous vastness. I am the macrocosm, and it is wonderful! And since I am not afraid to feel my own nothingness in front of the vast void of astronomical space, neither am I afraid to feel my own splendidness in the zodiacal heavens." [47]  

 

Astrological symbolism may only be a type of fantasy - may not be factually correct or true in the scientific sense that astronomy is true - but it provides one with a feeling of joy and sense of power as well as freedom: "So we need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with." [47]**

 

 

II. Transcendental Egoism à la D. H. Lawrence

 

Let me begin by saying that I understand Lawrence's objection to positivism and his response to the inhuman scale of the cosmos as given to us within astronomy. When you first encounter the facts and figures of the universe you can indeed become dizzy with the sense of illimitable space. 

 

However, I think we should accept the challenge of this and affirm our vertigo and our imprisonment - Lawrence's word - within a godless and, for the most part, lifeless universe. Nihilism is not something to fear, or seek to overcome, but, as a form of intellectual integrity, something to celebrate.***

 

Alas, in order to guarantee imaginative freedom, Lawrence is prepared to dismiss empirical evidence in favour of subjective truth and to cheerfully exchange scientific knowledge for religious myth. As a fantasist and a theo-humanist, of course he prefers astrology to astronomy. And why not, when the former is so much more flattering to one's sense of self-importance.

 

By his own admission, placing his feet upon the heavens makes him feel alive and powerful; and that's not a minor consideration when you are as close to death as Lawrence was when writing here. Small and insignificant, Lawrence wants to project himself into "the great sky with its meaningful stars and its profoundly meaningful motions" [46]. He wants to declare his unity with the cosmos and, in so doing, achieve a certain immortality. 

 

But this dying man's wish is surely the same kind of transcendental egoism that Lawrence elsewhere ridicules in others. He boasts that he is not afraid to feel his own nothingness before the vast void of astronomical space, but, actually, he does seem frit when confronted with reality and ontological hollowness. 

 

However, scared or not, Lawrence at least knows what it is he wants: a release of the imagination in order that it might make him feel stronger and happier. Science doesn’t provide this, he says. At best, it satisfies the intellect by giving us a sun and a moon that are "only thought-forms […] things we know but never feel by experience" [51].

 

This, I have to say, is a bit rich: for so too are the sun and moon given us by astrology only thought-forms - and, arguably, nothing but colourful thought-forms, whereas the sun and moon spoken of within astronomy have some actual basis in material reality.

 

 

III. A Coda on Correlationism

I think it's fair to say that Lawrence's thinking can be characterised by what Quentin Meillassoux terms correlationism. Thus his preference for astrology over astronomy. For Lawrence is not really interested in the stars and planets, so much as he is interested in their relation to him and his relation to them. 

 

In other words, the paradox at the heart of Lawrence's writing is that whilst he rages against modern people for falling out of touch with the living reality of the cosmos, his fundamental concern is with human consciousness and language and he's not even going to try to conceive of the universe as existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking it or not.

 

Perhaps this is why Lawrence instinctively hates what science tells him about the universe, in terms of its size, its age, its formation, etc. Statements, for example, such as the universe is 13.7 billion years old obviously posit a pre-human and non-human cosmos and Lawrence - for all his professed anti-humanism - simply doesn't want (or know how) to think events that are "anterior to the advent of life as well as consciousness".****

 

Ultimately, what Lawrence reveals himself to be in his late work is a subjective idealist; one who desperately wants to belong to a meaningful universe and is incapable of conceding that what science tells us about matter existing independently of man might be true. Indeed, he comes dangerously close at times to resembling one of those religious lunatics who insist that ancient wisdom is true because they feel it to be true and want it to be true. 

 

And that's disappointing to be honest ...

 

 

Notes

 

* D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to The Dragon of the Apocalypse by Frederick Carter', in Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 46. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the text.

 

** To be fair, Lawrence does later qualify this by adding: "But not in the rather silly modern way of horoscopy and telling your fortune by the stars." [51]

*** I agree with Ray Brassier, who argues that nihilism is an important speculative opportunity and an "unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality". See the Preface to Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. xi.

 

**** Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2009), p. 9.

Just to be clear on this important point: it doesn’t matter whether Lawrence chooses to think such events true or false, but the fact that he is completely unconcerned with the modern scientific discourse which describes these events, does, I think, bring shame upon him. As Meillassoux points out, it is this discourse that allows us to have a rational and meaningful debate "about what did or did not exist prior to the emergence of humankind, as well as what might eventually succeed humanity" [ibid., 114]. In other words, it is science - and only science (not myth, religion, or poetry) - that can posit dia-chronic statements and makes dia-chronic knowledge possible (i.e. knowledge of a world without witness). Whether Lawrence likes it or not, no man, god, or sentient being need be on the scene for a mind-independent universe to exist and to carry on just as it has always carried on.

Some of this material has been extracted (and revised) from an essay entitled 'Sun-Struck' published on James Walker's Digital Pilgrimage: click here. The picture of a cosmic-looking D. H. Lawrence used at the top of this post is a detail from an image created by Walker to illustrate the essay as it appeared on his blog.   

Nietzsche Contra Olaf Stapledon on the Death of Man

The nihilist and the transcendental idealist

 

 

Recently, I started exploring the speculative writings of British philosopher and sci-fi author Olaf Stapledon, whose fame rests mostly on two hugely influential works: Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937). 

 

So far, however, I've not been terribly impressed: for no matter how vast the range of material covered by Stapledon - how numerous the ideas or how sensational the imaginative experience offered - there is, as D. H. Lawrence would say, no sense of release. One comes away from his work feeling that one is still trapped within the same old moral-rational universe full of spiritual values and, behind it all, a disembodied consciousness or cosmic supermind.

 

And, even after 2000,000,000 years and eighteen distinct species of human being, when Stapledon decides the game is up and a death sentence can finally be passed on mankind via solar catastrophe, he can't help hoping that we might yet find some way to spunk our essence into the wider galaxy and thus disseminate among the stars the seeds of a new humanity. 

 

And nor can he help coming to the final conclusion: 

 

"Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievment, small, but actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things." [1]

Obviously, as a Nietzschean and as a nihilist, I can't let that pass and I would refer readers (once more) to the little story that Nietzsche tells us:

 

"Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of 'world history', but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die." [2]

 

Nietzsche comments:

 

"One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life." [3]     

 

Push comes to shove, I think Nietzsche is on the money and that Stapledon - like all idealists - is kidding himself. As Ray Brassier notes: 

 

"Nietzsche's 'fable' perfectly distils nihilism's most disquieting suggestion: that from the original emergence of organic sentience to the ultimate extinction of human sapience 'nothing will have happened'. Neither knowing nor feeling, neither living nor dying, amounts to a difference that makes a difference – 'becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing'. [4]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, (Gollancz, 2004), pp. 303-304. 

[2] Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense', in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press, 1979), p. 79.

 

[3] Ibid. 

 

[4] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 205-206. 

 

For a sister post to this one, on visions of the last men in Nietzsche and Stapledon, click here.  

He That Aches With Amorous Love: Lawrence's Critique of Walt Whitman's Idealism

Lawrence's essay on Whitman in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) is more piss-take than critical analysis. Lawrence is particularly mocking of the American poet's claim to be he that aches with amorous love, which he thinks a ludicrous assertion born of the latter's idealism rather than genuine feeling.

Better, says Lawrence, to have a belly-ache, which is at least localised. For man is a limited creature and if he aches with love (i.e. physical longing) it's usually for someone or something specific; such as the girl next door, for example. Only some sort of superhuman being aches with amorous love for the entire universe: "And the danger of the superman is that he is mechanical." [149]  

Whitman insists on some kind of elective affinity between himself and every Tom, Dick and Harry he should ever happen to encounter and relates this to the gravitational pull of the earth: 'Does not all matter, aching, attract all matter? / So the body of me to all I meet or know.' 

In what is, for me, a crucial passage, Lawrence writes:

"What can be more mechanical? The difference between life and matter is that life, living things, living creatures, have the instinct of turning right away from some matter, and of blissfully ignoring the bulk of most matter, and of turning towards only some certain bits of specially selected matter. As for living creatures all hurtling together into one great snowball, why, most very living creatures spend the greater part of their time getting out of sight, smell or sound of the rest of the living creatures. Even bees only cluster on their own queen. And that is sickening enough. Fancy all white humanity clustering on one another like a lump of bees.
      No Walt, you give yourself away. Matter does gravitate, helplessly. But men are tricky-tricksy, and they shy all sorts of ways." [149]  

If Whitman finds himself gravitating towards everyone it's a sign not only of his promiscuous idealism, but of something having gone very wrong with him; the "lonely phallic monster" [150] of his individual and sensual self has either been murdered or mentalised. Or allowed to go all mushy and leak out into the universe.    

Healthy individuals keep themselves to themselves; happy to meet and embrace a few others, but unwilling to touch most people with a barge-pole.

Whitman, however, insists with false exuberance on grasping everyone to his bosom, believing as he does in One Identity as the great desideratum: "Walt becomes in his own person the whole world, the whole universe, the whole eternity of time", until he reaches the supreme state of Allness. Or until, as Lawrence rather cruelly says, he becomes a fat old man bloated with "senile, self-conscious sensuosity" [151].    

Lawrence - to his credit - knows that there are many things outside of himself that, in their very otherness, he can never know or assimilate: "But Walt wouldn't have it. He was everything and everything was in him. He drove an automobile with a very fierce headlight, along the track of a fixed idea, through the darkness of this world." [152]

Whitman was a great poet. But the very greatest poets are those who sleep under bushes in the dark and prefer the trackless wildernesses, or the woodpaths, to zooming along the Highway of Love in one direction only. For it becomes a dead end at last, as we'll eventually discover. 

Ultimately, Whitman's major mistake was confusing his own message of sympathy, with Christian moral-idealism: "He didn't follow his Sympathy. Try as he might, he kept on automatically interpreting it as Love, as Charity." [158]

What a shame, says Lawrence, that Whitman didn't see that sympathy is a form of compassion, i.e.,  feeling with rather than feeling for, and has nothing to do with identifying (or merging) with others in the name of solidarity, social justice, and self-sacrifice.

In other words, sympathy means "partaking of the passion" [159] which inspires the other; it doesn't mean that their experience, their pain, their struggle, is yours. It means lending support where and when you can, but without trying to walk in shoes (or wear headscarves) that don't belong to you. 

For sympathy also means drawing limits, even to love, and preserving integrity: Love what the soul loves; hate what the soul hates; be compassionate, but don't be an indiscriminate. And remember: it's better to display starry indifference, than sentimental stupidity and false feeling. 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman', Studies in Classic American Literature (Final Version, 1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 148-61. 

See also the Intermediate Version (1919) of the Whitman study in the above edition, pp. 358-69, and the 1921-22 version which appears as Appendix V, pp. 401-17. In many respects, these versions are more interestingly complex, although Lawrence's argument remains the same: Whitman is the best modern example of the great triumph into infinitude. 

Lawrentian Reflections on the Birth of Baby Mia

Baby Mia (born 12 Nov 2018)

Following my Nietzschean Reflections on the Birth of Baby Mia, I was informed by a concerned correspondent that, in denying human status to newborn babies, I'm not only tacitly supporting abortion, but opening the door to infanticide. 

I don't agree with this: nor quite follow the logic of the argument. After all, a flower also lacks moral agency, but I don't wish to nip it in the bud. It has its own unique being, even if it lacks what theologians call a soul. In fact, for me - as for Wilde - the beauty of a flower resides precisely in its impersonality and amorality.

Similarly, the great fascination and delight of a newborn baby lies in the fact that although it has emerged bloody and womb-soaked in the world, it doesn't yet belong to the world and hasn't been codified as human (allzumenschliche). It is, rather, just a little bundle of innocence and becoming; a monster of chaos without form.          

Thus, when holding baby Mia, I feel the stirring of strange feelings that come, as Lawrence says, from out of the dark and which one scarcely knows how to acknowledge. Almost it's a kind of terror - certainly it goes beyond mere avuncular affection.

Her inhuman cries seem to echo within oneself, reminding one that life fundamentally involves sorrow and suffering and blind rage. For although babies can make us smile, they're tragic figures who don't even have control of their own bowels or bladders.

To watch these tiny living objects lying naked and so utterly helpless and vulnerable "in a world of hard surfaces and varying altitudes", makes one anxious for their safety. No wonder their mothers not only want to enfold them in love, but wrap them in cotton wool so as to protect their soft round heads and fragile tiny limbs.

But babies are pretty resilient things: and, truth be told, they are at more risk from maternal love than they are from the world at large. For maternal love has become a perverted form of benevolent bullying, worked almost entirely from the will.

And as she proceeds to spin "a hateful sticky web of permanent forbearance, gentleness, [and] hushedness" around her naturally passionate babe-in-arms, the ideal mother invariably undermines the future wellbeing - both physically and mentally - of the child. 

If you want to save the children, then save them from their mothers and leave them to be young creatures, not persons.

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 197.

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 92-3. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), Section VI. 

Reflections on the Georgia Guidestones

Georgia Guidestones 

Photo by Gina Eric (2014)

I.

The Georgia Guidestones is, arguably, the world's ugliest monument.

Erected in 1980 in Elbert County, Georgia, it is best described as stupidity in stone, with prehistoric pretensions of grandeur and intellectual pretensions of philosophical profundity. It's the sort of thing that only idiots would find impressive. Yoko Ono, for example, praised it as a stirring call to rational thinking.

The monument consists of a central slab with four others arranged around it in, apparently, astronomical alignment and a capstone to top things off. A set of guidelines is inscribed on the structure in eight different languages, including English, Spanish, Swahili, and Chinese. There's also a brief message inscribed at the top of the structure in more ancient scripts, including Classical Greek and Sanskrit.     

The anonymity of those responsible for the Guidestones - as well as the content of their message for mankind - has ensured the monument attracts controversy and gives rise to all kinds of crazy conspiracy theory (I want the Guidestones smashed, but not because I believe them to be of a deep Satanic origin).

In the summer of 1979, an individual using the pseudonym of Robert C. Christian commissioned the work on behalf of a small group of loyal Americans. Serving as a compass, calendar and clock, the monument is intended to withstand even catastrophic future events. But I'm hopeful that it will one day simply be bulldozed or blown up - much like the Buddhas of Bamiyan - without any undue fuss.

It's already been defaced with paint and had various pieces of graffiti written over it. Whether this was by art critics, iconoclasts, or individuals objecting to the New World Order, I don't know.         

II.

So what, then, are the ten great politico-moral principles of the Georgia Guidestones ...

Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.

Guide reproduction wisely - improving fitness and diversity.

Unite humanity with a living new language.

Rule passion - faith - tradition - and all things with tempered reason.

Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.

Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.

Avoid petty laws and useless officials.

Balance personal rights with social duties.

Prize truth - beauty - love - seeking harmony with the infinite.

Be not a cancer on the earth - leave room for nature.

Without wanting to sound too much like PC Plod, what is there to say other than move along - nothing to see here. For it's essentially the same old utopian bullshit, combining ideas of population control, eugenics, eco-fascism, world government, and Platonic Ideals of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. We've been experimenting along these same lines - with mixed results at best - for the past 250 years or so.

And so we really don't need the explanatory tablet (complete with punctuation errors and spelling mistakes) set alongside the stones to tell us what's being affirmed here: an Age of Reason founded upon genocide; for in order to maintain humanity under 500,000,000 we would need to first exterminate around seven billion people presently living.

The only real mystery here is this: why do so many idealists - acting in the name of Love, Nature and Reason - always fantasise about killing people?*

* To be fair, many commentators argue that the Guidestones are intended as a blue-print for a post-apocalyptic world and that they envision the best way to rebuild a devastated civilization. In other words, the suggestion to keep humanity's number below half-a-billion was made on the assumption that a nuclear war had already reduced mankind below this figure.

Lose This Skin: Thoughts on Theodore Roethke's Epidermal Macabre

Juan de Valverde de Hamusco: 

La anatomia del corpo humano (1556)

According to D. H. Lawrence, Whitman was the great American poet-pioneer; the first to smash the old moral conception of man in which the body is conceived as but a shoddy and temporary container for some kind of ghostly essence; the first to seize the soul by the scruff of the neck and insist on her corporeal nature.   

This, for Lawrence, is crucial because he believes that the key to achieving what the Greeks termed εὐδαιμονία is "remaining inside your own skin, and living inside your own skin, and not pretending you're any bigger than you are."

Nietzsche also insists that man's self-overcoming does not correspond to the rapturous possibility of transcendence. The overman is not more spiritual, but more animal; complete with teeth, guts and genitals and all those things which idealists are embarrassed by and hope to see shrivel away. 

So, what's a reader of Lawrence and Nietzsche to make of the following poem by Theodore Roethke:


Epidermal Macabre

Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes -
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.

Initially, one is triggered - as people now like to say - by the narrator's physical self-loathing and his desire to make an ecstatic break from his own biology, conceived in terms of clothing that conceals true being in all its naked immateriality and innocence.

However, even the narrator - and, for convenience's sake, let's call him Roethke - recognises that such mad metaphysical exhibitionism in which one strips oneself of flesh and bone until one effectively becomes untouchable, invisible, and non-existent, is indelicate; i.e. not only insensitive, but also slightly indecent.

Further, whilst Roethke's hatred for his epidermal dress and the rags of his own anatomy is so profound that he considers willingly dispensing not only with his modesty but all vital feeling, he's honest enough to acknowledge that in death there's no liberation of the soul. All that remains is a decomposing corpse; that incarnadine and carnal ghost that refuses to disappear into thin air.

Noble spirit, Roethke concedes, is entirely dependent upon - is an epiphenomenal effect of - base matter. And just as truth needs to be concealed behind lies and illusions in order to remain true, spirit needs to be wrapped in flesh.

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman', in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 161. 

Theodore Roethke, 'Epidermal Macabre', from the debut collection Open House (1941). See The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, (Anchor Books, 1975).

Musical bonus: The Clash, 'Lose This Skin', from the album Sandinista! (CBS, 1980); written and with vocals by Tymon Dogg: click here. 


Thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting a post on this poem.

On the Politics of the Female Nipple

Bella Hadid shows how to free the nipple in style

Photo: Getty Images for Dior (2017)

I.

It's true that both men and women have nipples. But the female nipple isn't merely a physiological fact; it's also the site of culture, politics and socially constructed meaning.

For whilst the male nipple is just as sensitive to certain stimuli and can also be erotically aroused, it isn't subject to the same pornographic fascination or taboo within our culture. The male nipple can be freely displayed in a way that the female nipple cannot.

The latter has, therefore, been hidden away since the Victorian era and its public exposure is still considered immodest, if not criminally indecent; perhaps not on the beaches of Europe or in the British tabloids, but certainly in the United States where female toplessness is far more regulated and the glimpse of a nipple, even for a split second, can cause a moral panic (readers will recall the case of Janet Jackson performing at the Super Bowl in 2004).   

Facebook and other social media companies have thus struggled with the problem posed by the female nipple. Wanting to be seen to share community standards concerning nudity and sexually explicit material, they nevertheless don't want to be viewed as sexist for upholding an antiquated form of gender discrimination that allows images of male but not female nipples.

II.

An ongoing campaign, Free the Nipple, has gained a good deal of attention and celebrity support since it was launched by filmmaker Lina Esco in 2012. Campaigners argue that it should be legally and culturally acceptable for women to bare their breasts in public; that it is a form of injustice that allows men to go topless, but not women.      

Of course, there's a naivety in this campaign and the related topfreedom movement - as there always is in such campaigns and movements which never seem to consider the law of unintended (or unforeseen) consequences.

Consider, for example, what happens when famous singers, actresses and models jump on board and start posting images of their perfect breasts and super-perky nipples. It doesn't result in a great leap forward for womankind; it leads, unfortunately, to greater insecurity and a new trend in plastic surgery - so-called designer nipples.

For it turns out that many women don't want to free their nipples; at least not straight away. They want first to have botox fillers injected into their areola so that their nipples might look like those of their favourite celebrities. Only when they have permanently erect-looking and symmetrical on-trend nipples do they feel confident enough to wear sheer dresses or see-through tops and make themselves subject to the world's gaze.

Thus, ironically, an attempt to emancipate women, make them proud of their bodies and further equality, ends in lining the pockets of already very rich and invariably male cosmetic surgeons. Idealism, it seems, always collapses into gross materialism; for such is the evil genius of the world.   

Note: To read an earlier post on the female nipple, click here.

On the Romantic Conception of Childhood

Suffer little children and forbid them not - 

for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven

I.

If there's one child in modern philosophy and literature who should have been aborted, it's Jean-Jacques Rousseau's fictional offspring Émile (1762). For this immaculate conception fatally shapes the ideal of childhood not just in the Romantic and Victorian period, but well into the twentieth century.

Indeed, in some quarters, there is still an ideal insistence on the essential moral superiority of an individual child over the collective corruption of adulthood. To grow up - I was recently informed - is to fall into complacent mediocrity, accepting of your own limitations and all the evils of the world (i.e. to grow up, is to give up).

Those who believe this - whether they know it or not - are giving credence to the opening li(n)e of Rousseau's book which asserts that each and every child is perfect at the point of their divine creation - Rousseau rejects the notion of Original Sin - but quickly degenerates within a social system designed to erode their natural goodness.   

According to Voltaire, when not fantasising about the noble savage, Rousseau likes to imagine himself as part-educator, part wet nurse to an infantalised humanity. 


II.

Thanks, then, to Rousseau and his novelistic treatise Émile, from around the middle of the 18th century many cultivated and otherwise perfectly intelligent people began to view childhood in a more sentimental light; i.e., as an authentic state of innocence and freedom.

The traditional idea - that children were born sinful and therefore required moral instruction and setting on the path to righteousness with discipline and punishment - was thrown out with the bath water. Perhaps, it was argued, what children really needed was love and affection. And perhaps they should be encouraged to express themselves and develop their healthy instincts and natural creativity.

If Rousseau was right, then, it was hoped, his method of education would preserve the special attributes of childhood and this would result in well-adjusted adults and model citizens.     


III.

Rousseau's ideas rapidly crossed the Channel - Émile was first published in English in 1763 - and disseminated by Romantic poets, including Blake and Wordsworth, who fully bought into the idea of childhood as something blessed. After all, hadn't Jesus told his disciples that in order to enter God's Kingdom they too had to become as children [Matthew 18: 1-5].

This new idealised version of childhood became (and remained) an immensely powerful myth; in all kinds of literature and art, the innocence and purity - and, yes, even the supposed wisdom - of the pre-pubescent was promoted as something that adults should cherish and learn from. Children, it was now thought, were not only our future, they were our salvation too - And a little child shall lead them!

But, of course, these weren't actual children - snot-nosed brats who like to pull the wings off flies - they were, rather, imaginative representations. Even artworks that appeared realistic were underpinned by cultural understandings of childhood and reflected the values and desires of the artist; usually male, usually upper-middle class, and with little knowledge of children living outside the nursery and no direct experience of what day-to-day childcare involved - Nanny takes care of all that.

IV.

By the mid-19th century, the so-called Cult of Childhood arguably reached its nauseating and slightly pervy peak. Lewis Carroll, for example, wasn't simply content to celebrate the childhood of Alice Liddell and her sisters in his writing (and nude photography), but liked to confess his longing to return to a state of infancy himself. A poem entitled 'Solitude' closes with the following lines:

I’d give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life’s decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer-day.

Now, it's one thing to gaze upon the world with childlike wonder - and perhaps the struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play. But it's another thing for a man to actually want to be a child and give an obscene literal rendering to Christ's words. This, says Lawrence, is an extreme form of decadence; a sheer relaxation and letting go of all adult pride and responsibility. 


V.

When not dreaming of regression like Lewis Carroll, there were other men, with darker fantasies, conceiving of ways in which adolescence could be deferred and children kept in a state of eternal childhood. Thus it is that in some of the best-read and most-loved Victorian fantasies we discover a sinister tendency for child characters to die and thus, in this way, remain forever young.

So it is we arrive at a fatal conclusion: idealism ends in murder - for each man kills the thing he loves most. This is why child worship is a form of cruelty and abuse. Place a child on a pedestal, fetishise their virgin purity, and you'll soon find you've built a sacrificial altar ...

See: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom, (Basic Books, 1979).

Becoming-Other (Part 1): The Case of Boglarka Balogh

Seven types of digital blackface produced by Boglarka Balogh 

(with the assistance of graphic artist Csaba Szábó)

boredpanda.com

I'm sure that some readers will recall the amusing case of Boglarka Balogh, the blonde, blue-eyed Hungarian idealist, who naively published a series of self-portraits in which she had digitally transposed her own facial features on to those of seven African tribal women, instantly provoking a furious online reaction. 

The project was intended to raise awareness of the difficulties faced by such women and to celebrate their unique beauty and cultural diversity. But Balogh, a human rights lawyer and journalist, was swiftly - often brutally - informed that, despite her good intentions, the images were offensive, degrading, and narcissistic.

It seems no matter how woke you may be - and no matter how skilled you are with the latest photo editing software - blackface is never acceptable and white people should stay in their own lane.

Not wanting to add insult to injury, Balogh made no reply to her critics and removed her work from the Bored Panda blog on which she'd posted it (though not before it had already received over 130,000 views), advising everyone to keep calm and love all humanity.

Obviously, such advice is inadequate as well as nauseating. But how then should one respond to this case and the issues raised? The answer, I think, has to do with a queer form of alien sympathy and the poetic imagination. And we can discover why by turning to the work of D. H. Lawrence ...

Click here to read part 2 of this post.

Sailing to Byzantium (Notes on Yeats and the Singularity)

William Butler Yeats by Tricia Danby

deviantart.com

Written in 1926, when Yeats was 61 and starting to feel his age, the poem 'Sailing to Byzantium' was published two years later in a collection entitled The Tower (1928).

Composed of four stanzas, each arranged into eight ten-syllable lines with a traditional rhyming scheme (a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c) of Italian origin much favoured by poets who go in for a mock-heroic effect - not that Yeats didn't take himself and his work very seriously indeed - it describes the metaphorical journey of a man musing on his own mortality and attempting to imagine a vision of eternal life that might provide him with posthumous hope.     

In other words, given the problem of a heart sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal, Yeats looks to art for a solution, speculating that he might be able to escape his paltry body and transfer his soul into some non-natural form - such as that of a mechanical golden bird, that sits in a fake golden tree and sings about the mysteries of time.

This quest for immortality is, for Yeats, at the heart of all spiritual yearning; a yearning that becomes increasingly acute - and increasingly desperate - with age.

What's interesting - to me at least - is not that Yeats openly expresses his contempt for imperfect nature, which, in his mind, is full of ugliness and prone to decay; for that's common among idealists who despise the softness and (sinfulness) of the flesh. It's the fact, rather, that he's equally explicit in his positing of the artificial object as superior to the natural entity in every sense, including, the aesthetico-spiritual.

Ultimately, his is a material idealism of things, including golden birds, not an immaterial idealism of disembodied minds. And his dream is of being gathered into the artifice - not the reality or truth - of eternity. Once his soul has been released from nature, he wants it to be reincarnated in a man-made object.

I thought of Yeats whilst reading an interview with Ray Kurzweil, the American author, computer whizz, and Google's director of engineering. Kurzweil is a public advocate of artificial intelligence and transhumanism who eagerly awaits the singularity - i.e., the moment when mankind fuses with its own technology, finally securing immortality and a new Byzantium; albeit a scientific utopia wherein the knowledge drive is triumphant, rather than poetic fancy.     

If Yeats fantasized about becoming a toy bird, Kurzweil hopes to have his consciousness downloaded onto his laptop and eventually transferred back to his cryogenically preserved and technologically enhanced body, which will be all ready and waiting in its vat of liquid nitrogen at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Arizona.

Both of the visions described here are anathema to me; not only as a Lawrentian, but also as a Wildean. For like the latter, I too hope that if I am to be reincarnated one day it will be as a flower - no soul but perfectly beautiful.

And for that to happen, I need to be buried in the dark soil and allowed to decompose; returned to nature, not released from it; returned to death, which, as Nietzsche says, is a return to the actual, not projected into some virtual future founded upon techno-idealism and dreams of becoming-machine. 


See: W. B. Yeats, 'Sailing to Byzantium', in The Collected Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran, (Scribner, revised paperback edition, 1996). Click here to read on the Poetry Foundation website.

On Ecosexuality

Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle

Here Come the Ecosexuals

For those of you who don't know, Elizabeth Stephens is an interdisciplinary artist, activist and academic whose work explores themes of sexuality, gender, and politics.

Former prostitute and porn star Annie Sprinkle, meanwhile, played an important role in the sex positive feminist movement during the 1980s and has since built up over thirty-five years of experience in erotically charged entertainment, education, and performance art. 

Today, Sprinkle and her partner Stephens are committed to queering the environmental movement and to this end have declared themselves to be ecosexuals. They have also written an ecosex manifesto and established a new field of research and aesthetic practice called sex ecology.

Central to their philosophy is the notion of replacing the metaphor of Earth Mother with that of Earth Lover, in the hope that this might "entice people to develop a more mutual, pleasurable, sustainable, and less destructive relationship with the environment". This means not only treating the Earth with kindness and respect, but also engaging in libidinal relationships with the material world; hugging trees, caressing rocks, being pleasured by waterfalls, etc.

Now, you might be thinking at this point that, as someone who has written enthusiastically on floraphilia, I would happily and unconditionally offer my support to Stephens and Sprinkle - but you'd be mistaken. Unfortunately, I have a number of problems with their project, but these might, for the sake of convenience, be boiled down to just two: firstly, I don't share their idealism and, secondly, I don't like the way they attempt to impose a unified and recognisable sexual identity upon a diverse range of paraphilias and polymorphously perverse practices.

Let's examine each of these points in a bit more detail ...   

1. Like many others before them, including nature worshipping Romantics and blood and soil loving Nazis, Stephens and Sprinkle quickly fall into idealism and, related to this, anthropocentric conceit as they project their own egos (their own politics, their own prejudices, their own peccadilloes) into everything; not just the Earth, but the Sun, the Moon and the Stars to boot. Their ecosexuality is thoroughly - and disappointingly - allzumenschliche.

They would do well, in my view, to learn from Lawrence on this, who, with reference to the case of Thomas Hardy, warns that to try and subject the earth to your own idealism always ends badly - not least of all for you as an idealist. He writes:

"What happens when you idealize the soil, the mother-earth, and really go back to it? Then with overwhelming conviction it is borne in upon you ... that the whole scheme of things is against you. The whole massive rolling of natural fate is coming down on you like a slow glacier, to crush you to extinction. As an idealist.
      Thomas Hardy's pessimism is an absolutely true finding. It is the absolutely true statement of the idealist's last realization, as he wrestles with the bitter soil of beloved mother-earth. He loves her, loves her, loves her. And she just entangles and crushes him like a slow Laocoön snake. The idealist must perish, says mother-earth. ...
      You can't idealize mother-earth. You can try. You can even succeed. But succeeding, you succumb. She will have no pure idealist sons [or, in this case, daughters]. None.
      If you are a child of mother-earth, you must learn to discard your ideal self ... as you discard your clothes at night."

Put simply, the Earth doesn't want to nourish you like a child nor accept you as a lover or spouse; it is massively and monstrously indifferent to your existence and your longings.

2. One of the joys of floraphilia is that it's a paraphilia and not a legitimised form of love; the prefix para implying not only that it exists alongside the latter, but that it's abnormal. And that's how I like it and want it to remain. To be pollen-amorous is to allow one's desire to free float on the passing breeze; it is to become-flower, which is to say, beautiful and soulless. It's not about constructing some new form of sexual identity and of tethering the latter to an essential truth.

Foucault, of course, brilliantly analysed the dangers and disadvantages of this with reference to the birth of the modern homosexual, arguing that homosexuality only "appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species" subject to an entirely new discursive regime.

I'm sure Stephens and Sprinkle are aware of all this and so it surprises me to say the least that they insist on positing ecosexuality as a primary drive and identity, or some sort of ontological category into which all other sexual positionings - GLBTQI - can ultimately be collapsed (because we are all natural beings and all sex is ecosex).

I wish them well, but I also wish they'd exercise a little more philosophical caution and nuance ...       


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Dana's "Two Years before the Mast"', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1998). 

Readers interested in knowing more about the work of Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle and reading their ecosex manifesto can visit: sexecology.org

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