Tell Them the Cross is a Tree Again

The Budding of the Cross  

Stephen Alexander (2016)

For Nietzsche, innocence is the power to accept oneself as a mortal creature and to forgive oneself for crimes ranging from scrumping to deicide. Indeed, the innocent human being has the ability also to forget past deeds, past shames, past horrors; to forget, ultimately, that there is anything to forgive.

When man can forget and rise in innocence before the present, then the past has no claim over him. And what is man's self-overcoming if not an overcoming of an historically constructed and determined subjectivity? By liberating himself from the past, he is able to reinvent himself in the present and project himself differently into the future.
 
It's fatal, argues Nietzsche, to be unable to close oneself off from history; just as it's vital that we learn to discriminate and evaluate amongst memories - for this is a sign of a healthy will to power. The stronger an individual or a people, the more history it will be able to recall and assimilate without developing a bad conscience and the less it will be obliged to forget.
 
Nietzsche refers to this as the plastic power of an individual or people. Those who could incorporate the entire historical experience of humanity as their own and endure such would exhibit a plastic power of almost superhuman proportion and would constitute, says Nietzsche, a new nobility "the like of which no age has yet seen or dreamed of". Not only would such a new nobility be innocent, they would be happy.

Nietzsche writes: "if one could burden one’s soul with ... the oldest, the newest, losses, hopes, conquests, and the victories of humanity; if one could finally contain all this in one soul and crowd it into a single feeling - this would surely have to result in a happiness that humanity has not known so far: the happiness of a god full of power and love, full of tears and laughter ..."

This godlike feeling is what Nietzsche understands to be the humaneness of the future.

It seems to me that D. H. Lawrence closely follows Nietzsche here and agrees that it's vital for mankind, having bitten and swallowed the fruit of temptation, to find a way to digest the apple. When this is achieved - when the Old Adam is able to rid himself of belly ache and bad conscience - then, and only then, will man be free to re-enter paradise and the New Eve pick fresh fruit and consort with serpents as she pleases.

Although Lawrence chose to discard the following passage from the final version of The Plumed Serpent, it is particularly pertinent to our discussion here. Ramón tells Kate:

"'Go! Tell them the Cross is a Tree again, and they may eat the fruit if they can reach the branches. Tell them the snake coils in peace around the ankle of Eve, and she no longer tries to bruise his head. The fruit of Knowledge is digested. Now we can plant the core.'"

The symbolism could hardly be clearer: the Cross is a Tree again - i.e. an instrument of torture and sacrifice upon which mankind has been fatally self-divided for two millennia has been transformed back into the sacred Tree of Life. And the fruit of this tree may be eaten, for with the death of God there's no longer any divine law or categorical imperative to prevent us - providing that is that we can reach the branches, which is to say, surpass ourselves as a species, overcoming our old humanity.

As for the second line concerning the relationship between the Eve and the snake, this is telling us that in her new nakedness and innocence the woman has overcome the burden of shame which robbed her and all the world of its joy, and that the serpent of desire has finally been accepted as having its own raison d’être and its own beauty.

In an essay entitled 'The Reality of Peace', Lawrence had some years earlier entered into his own slightly uneasy truce with the serpent:

"I must make my peace with the serpent of abhorrence that is within me. I must own my most secret shame and my most secret shameful desire ... Who am I that I should hold myself above my last or worst desire? My desires are me, they are the beginning of me, my stem and branch and root. ...
      I shall accept all my desires and repudiate none. It will be a sign of bliss in me when I am reconciled with the serpent of my own horror, when I am free from the fascination and the revulsion. For secret fascination is a fearful tyranny. ... The serpent will have his own pure place in me, and I shall be free."

The fruit of knowledge is digested: this means not only can we now move beyond good and evil, but so too can we overcome our obsession with having to know everything in our heads and exert our fanatical will to truth. For now we can plant the core and that means we can be free to experience life directly and come into full being as creatures with bodies, not just minds. And so too can we develop a new culture based on innocence, laughter, and forgetting and a new society in which men are more than well-trained house pets.

As victors, then, we travel to Eden home; victors over God and over our own humanity. For too long have we roamed in the land of Nod, that twilight zone of sleep and death, suffering from mad dreams and hallucinations: "'Who sleeps shall wake! Who sleeps shall wake!'" cry the men of Quetzalcoatl. And men shall awaken in the way of the snake; i.e. into earthly, sensual life.

This, then, is how Lawrence develops the Nietzschean project of revaluation in The Plumed Serpent. Via moral transgression, a revolutionary politics of cruelty and the substantiation of religious mystery, Lawrence suggests we can regain an earthly paradise.

Obviously, I now have difficulties with this line of thinking - how could I not in an age of militant Islamofascism? But I thought of all this once more as I sat eating a bunch of grapes last night and reflected on the strange beauty of the stem ... 


See: 

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), IV. 337.

D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 547 and 128.

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 36-8.

A Philosophical Postscript on the Paris Attacks

Diesel the police dog who displayed many of 

the virtues associated with nobility of soul

In the wake of the Paris attacks, political leaders in France and elsewhere wrapped themselves in the tricolore and affirmed a predictable set of values, including Egalité, a revolutionary concept which, as Nietzsche points out, has penetrated deeply into the tissue of modernity, providing the prototype for all our moral theories regarding the universality of so-called human rights.

What these politicians cannot see is that, in practice, this false and fatal idea of equality of all souls has allowed the base and resentment-ridden to challenge every order of rank and thereby effectively undermine the very notion of society. It has thus provided our enemies - including the Islamists - with an explosive weapon against which we have no defense.

But then our Christian idealism has of course rendered the very notion of enmity impossible; we are encouraged to not only regard those who hate us and wish to do us harm as brothers and as equals in the sight of God, but love them and forgive them for their crimes committed against us.

Thus, when asked about those killed in Paris, one commentator and cryptotheologian shamefully masquerading as a philosopher, said we should mourn all those who had died - presumably this includes the bombers and gunmen - as the loss of any life is a tragedy and that no one life is of a greater value than any other.

Thankfully, no one in their right mind really believes this. Indeed, sane people everywhere were more upset by the death of Diesel the police dog than of Abdelhamid Abaaoud and his accomplices in mass murder. What’s more, they recognise something that Christopher Hitchens repeatedly pointed out; namely, that it is not only perverse (and suicidal) to love such people, but ultimately immoral inasmuch as it implies an unwillingness to actively confront and engage with the evil they embody and make manifest.

In sum:

Firstly, there is no equality between souls; not because, as D. H. Lawrence argues, each soul is uniquely different and thus incomparable, but, on the contrary, because each soul is perfectly comparable within an ethical context and some lives clearly lack beauty, lack integrity and lack style in comparison to others.

Secondly, it is our duty - as citizens and as men and women who are interested in the care of the self - to combat and destroy the enemies of civilization and of parrhesia.

ISIS Threaten Sylvania



Detail from ISIS Invade a Sylvanian Picnic (2014)

Part of the series ISIS Threaten Sylvania (2014/15), by Mimsy



ISIS Threaten Sylvania is a series of humourous (yet deadly serious) light-box images created by London-based artist Mimsy, featuring the loveable toy animals who make up the Sylvanian Families universe; rabbits, mice, hedgehogs and other woodland creatures all living in peace and harmony as they happily go about their daily lives. 

Until, that is, armed jihadis show-up and threaten to execute every individual of any species that doesn't submit to their extreme vision of the world.    

It's a piece of political satire, obviously, but the joke is more on us, in our cosy complacency, than it is the Islamists possessed by religious mania.

And the joke has only been intensified after the organizers of the Passion for Freedom exhibition at the Mall Galleries gave in to police pressure to remove the work on the grounds that its inflammatory content might offend Muslim sensibilities, incite religious hatred, and potentially result in violence.    

The police - those well-known guardians of public morality and aesthetic judgement - informed the organizers that if they went ahead with their plans to display the work (which, in their view, had little or no artistic merit), then they would have to pay the £36,000 cost of extra security for the six-day show.    

It's a lot of money; enough at any rate to serve the purpose of effectively blackmailing the organizers and gallery owners into an act of self-censorship. Mimsy, the daughter of a Syrian father whose Jewish family had experienced religious persecution, was discreetly asked to withdraw her work, thereby legitimating it, of course.  

Despite being acutely aware of the danger of speaking out against Islamofascism, Mimsy has bravely declared that she has no intention of pandering to such, or attempting to justify her darkly funny work. Clearly, as Jonathan Jones has noted, if we cannot laugh at IS then the terrorists and black clad puppets of intolerance have already won.

Thus the suppression of these images - as of so many other images and texts - is not only absurd and cowardly, but sinister: "To let fear of bigots and maniacs rule our art galleries is a betrayal of the civilisation we claim to uphold."    

Notes

Those  interested in knowing more about the artist Mimsy and seeing further images from ISIS Threaten Sylvania should click here.

Those interested in reading Jonathan Jones's Guardian review of ISIS Threaten Sylvania should click here.

In Solidarity with the Bloggers of Bangladesh

Avijit Roy and his wife Rafida Ahmed Bonya 

Facebook photo (2012)

Three members of an Islamist terror group have been arrested this week in Bangladesh, in connection with the brutal murders of secular bloggers Avijit Roy and Ananta Bijoy Das in separate incidents earlier this year.

Two other bloggers, also said to have insulted Islam with their atheism, have also been killed in Bangladesh in recent months: Niloy Chatterjee and Washiqur Rahman. 

I didn't know any of these writers personally and can't claim to be familiar with their work. I may not even share their politics and values. But, like many others, I feel it's right to protest their deaths, honour their lives, and send condolences to their families and friends - particularly, Roy's wife, Rafida Ahmed Bonya, also a blogger, who was seriously injured in the attack that left her husband lying dead on a street in Dhaka (the city of his birth, and where his father had taught physics at the university). 

The couple, who had US citizenship, had returned to Dhaka in February for a brief visit in order to attend the city's annual book fair. They were leaving one of the events when they were ambushed by a group of young men carrying meat cleavers. 

Roy was the author of several books in Bengali dealing with subjects guaranteed to enrage religious fundamentalists of all stripes. His two most recent works, translated into English as The Philosophy of Disbelief (2011) and The Virus of Faith (2014), give a good indication of his interests and the Dawkins-Dennett inspired perspective from which he passionately argued the case for secularism (something enshrined as one of the four founding principles of the Bangladeshi state, although this seems to be increasingly forgotten or ignored by the Muslim majority).      

I would encourage readers of this blog to read these works as I intend to. 

Je ne suis pas Charlie

Stephane Charbonnier 

1967 - 2015

The vile and sentimental murder of the journalists and illustrators who worked for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has shocked many people - though not those of us who vividly remember the events surrounding the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in 2005; or recall the shooting and attempted beheading of Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, the year before.   

Predictably, all the usual apologists for transpolitical terror and sympathizers with the Islamist cause have attempted to justify what happened in Paris. But equally galling is the manner in which many have echoed Je suis Charlie - more of a hollow slogan, rather than a meaningful gesture of solidarity.

The fact is other individuals, other publications, other news organizations etc., whilst defending in principle the notion of free speech, have not done so in practice. Rather, in practice, they have acted with a mixture of cowardice and hypocrisy - refusing, for example, to republish or broadcast the works that have (it's claimed) incited such hatred and religious madness.  

They say they are acting responsibly as good liberals should and choosing not to fan the flames or further offend Muslim sensibilities, but, really, they are just scared and prepared to compromise and self-censor in a manner that the radical activists of Charlie Hebdo - including its bravely defiant Editor, Stephane Charbonnier - absolutely refused to do. That's what made the latter heroic; they were prepared to put their lives on the line in a manner that most of us - to our shame - are not. 

I'm not Charlie - but neither are the majority who mouth the slogan even as they seek to appease the enemies of secular society and the values of the West in the name of multiculturalism and a desire to avoid trouble at all costs.      

Qué Barbaridad

Flag of the Islamic State 
(formerly known as ISIS or ISIL)

One of Nietzsche's concerns in his later writings is with the question of how a stronger species of man might arise from out of modernity, which he regards as a form of corruption. A people possessing the ability and the desire to impose themselves upon others can, he says, grow up only out of terrible and violent beginnings. And so he awaits those he terms the new barbarians ...

But just as the Nazis were not those whom he anticipated and called forth, neither are the militants of the Islamic State - presently fueling chaos and committing a series of grotesque atrocities across Syria and Iraq. For whilst these jihadis may display some of the traits that Nietzsche admired, they nevertheless remain barbarians of the depths, rather than those who come from the heights and who, like Prometheus, bring something genuinely new into the world.

Unfortunately, their asceticism remains tied to a spirit of revenge and is born of sickness and inferiority, rather than a union of spiritual superiority, well-being, and an excess of strength. For all their sincerity and violent enthusiasm, they're essentially decadents full of all the same modern vices - such as an addiction to modern technology and social media - as the rest of us. This is why when, not praying or fighting, they seem to spend most of their time tweeting, or posting vile images on YouTube and Facebook.

 

Ultimately, if holy war can be the source of stimulation in a mankind grown soft via the resurrection of the most savage energies "in the shape of the long-buried dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages", it can do no more than this. Significant change requires something else. Not something bigger or more catastrophic, but, on the contrary, something much more modest; something requiring not just cruelty, but the exercise of great caution.

Ultimately, we will reflect on the attempt by these Islamofascists to trigger a revaluation of values as Nietzsche looked back on the French Revolution; i.e. as nothing more than "a pathetic and bloody piece of quackery". They might inspire believers with their neo-archaic fantasy of a global caliphate, but, the attempt to reterritorialize upon the ruins of a despotic state machine and fragments of a seventh century Arabic text is, thankfully, doomed to failure.     

Notes:

For Nietzsche's thinking on the question of barbarism and the new barbarians, see, for example, notes 868, 899 and 900 in The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, (Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 464-65, 478-79. 

The line quoted from Nietzsche in paragraph four is from Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 8. 463, p. 169.

The line quoted from Nietzsche in paragraph five is from Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), V. 534, pp. 211-12. 

For a more extensive discussion of this topic see my study of Nietzschean and post-Nietzschean politics, Outside the Gate, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), particularly part three.

Hello Dolly: On the Life and Work of Hans Bellmer

Hans Bellmer: Die Puppe (1936)

Despite the recent creations of the Chapman Brothers in this line, it seems to me that the dolls of German artist Hans Bellmer, constructed and photographed during the 1930s, still retain a greater power to disturb; they are somehow less comical and more creepy, more uncanny.

Opposed as he was to Hitler, Bellmer determined to make no work that could be appropriated by the Nazis or which might be interpreted in any way as supportive of fascist aesthetics. Thus his dolls, with their deformed and mutated bodies arranged in provocative poses, were consciously designed to challenge the prevailing idea of what constituted Aryan beauty and physical perfection.

This is not to deny, however, other sources of inspiration for his dolls project, both artistic and personal, including his love of pubescent girls and his pygmalionism. But it was undoubtedly his politics as much as his perversity which eventually brought him to the attention of the Nazis, who classified his work in a category designated degenerate art - i.e., work which insulted German sensibility and attempted to corrupt or confuse the forms of nature. To be fair, that's exactly what Bellmer wanted to do.

Forced to flee to France in 1938, Bellmer was welcomed with open arms by the Surrealists who had already published photographs of his dolls several years earlier. Briefly imprisoned as a German national during the early months of the war, he later aided the French Resistance during the occupation by making fake passports.  

Choosing to remain in France after the war, Bellmer lived in Paris until his death in 1975. Although he made no more dolls, he continued working into the 1960s, creating sexually explicit drawings, photographs, paintings and prints (mostly of young girls). Bellmer said of his own work during this period that it constituted an attempt to produce images that it would be impossible to think or describe in words.  

His place in 20th century art history is secured and his cultural influence has not been insignificant.

One final note: in 2006, the Whitechapel Gallery removed twelve of Bellmer's works from a retrospective exhibition. Ostensibly on the grounds of spacial consideration, the rumour persists that the action was due to the organizers concern that the pieces might be particularly offensive to the local Muslim population. Again, to be fair, Bellmer's work doubtless would upset Islamofascists for much the same reasons and in much the same manner as it did the Nazis, but one sincerely hopes there is no truth in this story ...