Showing posts with label lou carrington. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lou carrington. Show all posts

10 Jul 2021

I Had So Much Rather the Centaur Had Slain Hercules ...

"Man's being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, 
at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, 
half immersed in nature, half transcending it." - Ortega y Gasset
 
 
On viewing an (unidentified) artistic representation of Hercules slaying Nessus [1], Lawrence writes: 
 
"I had so much rather the Centaur had slain Hercules, and men had never developed souls. Seems to me they're the greatest ailment humanity ever had." [2] 
 
Whilst we might ponder what the link is between the killing of Nessus and the development of the human soul, I love these two short lines in which Lawrence recognises that the soul is a type of affliction and that mankind might have been happier and more beautiful - like flowers - had we never experimented with the internalisation of cruelty and subjected the flesh to psychology.  
 
One could quote Wilde at this point - or Nietzsche - but let's remind ourselves of Foucault's fascinating take on this question in Discipline and Punish which ends with a killer twist:
 
"It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised [...] This is the historical reality of [the] soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint. This real, non-corporal soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power. On this reality-reference, various concepts have been constructed and domains of analysis carved out: psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness, etc.; on it have been built scientific techniques and discourses, and the moral claims of humanism. But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technical intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of the theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body." [3]
 
In conclusion - and returning to Lawrence - it's obvious that he reads the slaying of the centaur as a triumph of human idealism over instinctive animality and, like Lou Carrington in St Mawr, he dreams of a time to come when men might untame themselves, regain their animal mystery and become-centaur ...  
 
 
Notes
 
[1] In Greek mythology, Nessus, son of Centauros, was killed by Heracles with a poisoned arrow, after the latter saw the former attempt to rape his wife, Deianeira, having carried her across the river Evinos. 
 
[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Paris Letter', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 143.  

[3] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan, (Vintage Books, 1995), pp. 29-30. 


24 May 2019

Personal Love Counts So Little: Further Reflections on the Queer Case of Lou Carrington

Emerald Green Sacred Sex Graffiti (2015)
by Deprise Brescia / fineartamerica.com
 


As torpedophiles will recall, D. H. Lawrence's short novel St. Mawr is the story of a young woman who, having quickly exhausted the limits of love in a conventional (all-too-human) sense, embarks on an affair with a stallion.

However, her search for a form of transpersonal sex doesn't end in the stable. For ultimately, even a relationship with a handsome bay horse doesn't quite meet her needs. She yearns for something else, something bigger, something that can only be found perhaps beneath the radiation of new skies.

Thus it is that Lou ends up living on a small tumble-down ranch near Santa Fe. She hasn't got and doesn't want a man in her life: "She wanted to be still: only that, to be very, very still, and recover her own soul. [...] Even the illusion of the beautiful St. Mawr was gone." [137]

Lou adopts an asexual - almost anti-sexual - position, beyond man and beast, with spooky-erotic elements of spectrophilia:

"Because sex, mere sex, is repellent to me. I will never prostitute myself again. Unless something touches my very spirit, the very quick of me. I will stay alone, just alone. Alone, and give myself only to the unseen presences, serve only the other, unseen presences." [138]

Unable to bear the triviality and superficiality of her human relationships - and finding that even a fling with a horse can only take you so far - Lou decides she will model her life henceforth on that of the Vestal Virgins:

"They were symbolic of herself, of women weary of the embrace of incompetant men, weary, weary, weary of all that, turning to the unseen gods, the unseen spirits, the hidden fire, and devoting herself to that, and that alone. Receiving thence her pacification and her fulfilment." [138-39]

And these unseen presences are manifested in the landscape of her new home; "it seemed to her that the hidden fire was alive and burning in this sky, over the desert, in the mountains. She felt a certain latent holiness in the very atmosphere ..." This despite the tourists in their motor-cars, the "rather dreary Mexicans" and the Indians lurking with "something of a rat-like secretiveness and defeatedness in their bearing" [140].   

The question is: how do you come into touch with the spirit of place? That is to say, how does one polarise oneself with the vital effluence of the environment? It requires, as Lou recognises, submission above all else. One must consent to be seized by a new electricity and undergo a transformation of self - not just psychologically, but physically, as one's bones, blood, and flesh are all subject to a new molecular disposition.

It's a slow and terrible process in which one is essentially violated from behind and below by the destablising malevolence of the world. Loving a man, or a horse, is a piece of cake in comparison. Those environmentalists who, in their naive idealism and anthropocentric conceit, think there's nothing easier or more beautiful than communing with nature are laughably mistaken.

The earthly paradise they dream of is, in reality, inhuman and uncaring; not only does man not exist for it, but neither does a merciful deity watching over man. In the American Southwest: "There is no Almighty loving God. The God there is shaggy as the pine-trees, and horrible as the lightning." [147] Jesus isn't going to help you against the intense savagery of a world that contains mountain lions, pack-rats, porcupines, tumbleweed, and black ants in the kitchen cupboard.    

This is something that Lou, like the woman from New England who owned the ranch before her, will have to learn: that the dark gods and fanged demons to whom she wishes to submit were "grim and invidious and relentless, huger than man, and lower than man" [150].  

Whether she does learn - and whether she finds that something bigger that she desires (and which she conceives in terms of sacred sexuality) - isn't something we can say for sure, as Lawrence ends the story of Lou Carrington at this point, concluding with a little speech from the latter to her mother, in which she insists on her determination to henceforth keep herself to herself:

"'There's something else for me, mother. There's something else even that loves me and wants me. I can't tell you what it is. It's a spirit. And it's here, on this ranch. It's here, in this landscape. It's something more real to me than men are, and it soothes me, and it holds me up. I don't know what it is, definitely. It's something wild, that will hurt me sometimes and will wear me down sometimes. I know it. But it's something big, bigger than men, bigger than people, bigger than religion. It's something to do with wild America. And it's something to do with me. It's a mission, if you like [...] to keep myself for the spirit that is wild, and has waited so long here: even waited for such as me. Now I've come! Now I'm here. Now I am where I want to be: with the spirit that wants me. And that's how it is. [...] And it doesn't want to save me either. It needs me. It craves for me. And to it, my sex is deep and sacred, deeper than I am [...] It saves me from cheapness, mother. And even you could never do that for me.'" [155]


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'St. Mawr', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).  

For the earlier post in which I discuss Lou Carrington's affair with St. Mawr, click here.

For a post in which I discuss Lawrence's understanding of the spirit of place, click here

22 Sept 2018

D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Cioran on Man's Becoming-Animal

Helmo: from the Bêtes de Mode series (2006)


I. Becoming All the Animals in Turn. 

Sick and tired of well-domesticated modern men like her husband, the female protagonist of Lawrence's short novel St. Mawr (1925), ponders if there mayn't be something else to marvel at in men besides "'mind and cleverness, or niceness or cleanness'" and that perhaps this something else is animality

Her mother, however, is unconvinced by this idea and imagines that her daughter secretly desires a caveman to club her over the head and carry her away. Angered that her suggestion has been misinterpreted as a vulgar rape fantasy, Lou responds:

"'Don't be silly, mother. That's much more your subconscious line, you admirer of Mind! I don't consider the caveman is a real human animal at all. He's a brute, a degenerate. A pure animal man would be as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath. [...] He'd be all the animals in turn, instead of one, fixed automatic thing, which he is now, grinding on the nerves."

Mrs. Witt, unnerved by this, argues that whatever else such a combination of man and beast would be, he'd certainly be dangerous. Lou, angry now with her mother, replies that be that as it may, she'd still rather live in a world of animal-men that one full of tame and humble half-men who are merely sentimental and spiteful.     


II. Not to Be a Man Anymore

Of course, D. H. Lawrence isn't the only writer to dream of man's becoming-animal, or, indeed, becoming-plant. So too does the French-Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran. In his first book, for example, published just ten years after Lawrence's St. Mawr, he writes these rather lovely lines:

"I am not proud to be a man, because I know only too well what it is to be a man. [...] If I could, I would choose every day another form, plant or animal, I would be all the flowers one by one: weed, thistle or rose [...] Let me live the life of every species , wildly and un-self-consciously, let me try out the entire spectrum of nature, let me change gracefully, discreetly, as if it were the most natural procedure."

But it's important to note that Cioran isn't looking to escape from or abandon his humanity once and for all, so much as to make it seem a newly attractive option once more:

"Only a cosmic adventure of this kind, a series of metamorphoses in the plant and animal realms, would reawaken in me the desire to become Man again."    


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'St. Mawr', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 59-62, and E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 68-69. 

Note: Helmo is a French design studio established by Thomas Couderc and Clément Vauchez. In the Bêtes de Mode project, they collaborated with Thomas Dimetto to produce a series of double-exposure photographs of man and beast, exhibited at the Galeries Lafayette, Paris, (2006). To see more of these images, click here

Readers interested in a sister post to this one on DHL and EMC and the question of becoming-ash, should click here


19 Nov 2015

Dog Bites: On the Question of Man and Animal (and the Becoming-Animal of Man)

Photo by Eija-Liisa Ahtila from the eight part series 
of images entitled Dog Bites (1992-97)


Like Lou Carrington, I’ve always believed there must be something else to marvel at in humanity besides a clever mind and a nice, clean face and that we might term this something else animality.

And like Lou, I’ve always hoped that were we to conduct what Nietzsche terms a reverse experiment and resurrect the wild beast within us, then we might produce a type of man who would be “as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath”.

But now I’m not so sure about the desirability of this: for clearly there are dangers involved in the process of man’s becoming-animal and no one really wants to see werewolves prowling the streets.

Nor, for that matter, do I think it an attractive prospect to live like a dog, as Diogenes liked to live and as was central to the ancient philosophical practice of Cynicism. I don’t want to shit in the street or copulate in full view of others; don’t want to drink rainwater, growl at strangers, or eat raw meat. Like incest, these provocative acts might be perfectly natural and constitute secret pleasures, but they should only be indulged in with extreme caution.

In other words, unlike the ancient Cynics - and unlike some of the more militant of the animal rights activists and environmentalists campaigning in our own time - I don’t wish to tie the principle of the true life exclusively to the domain of Nature and thus reject all social convention and civilized restraint.

Our humanity may well be something that needs to be reformulated and eventually overcome, but it remains nevertheless a magnificent accomplishment; one that was achieved only after a huge amount of suffering over an immense period of time.

Thus, to adopt a model of behaviour based upon that of our own animality (or, rather, what we imagine the latter to be) simply so we might lick our own balls in public and thereby scandalise those who pride themselves on all that distinguishes them as human beings, seems to me profoundly mistaken.


Notes

Lou Carrington is a character in D. H. Lawrence’s short novel St. Mawr. See St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). The line quoted is on p. 61.

For an interesting interpretation of the bios kunikos and why the Cynics prided themselves on living such see Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 242-43.