Why I'm Not a Party Animal

Marina Molares The Wild Party (2011)  

flickr.com

 

Party animal (n); a very gregarious and outgoing person 

who enjoys parties and similar social activities.

 

 

I. 

 

Like Dorothy Parker, I hate parties; although they don't bring out the worst in me [a], so much as make me anxious, bored, depressed and long to get away. 

 

In other words, I experience a sense of alienation at social gatherings that are meant to be fun and friendly occasions; a feeling of estrangement from my fellow party goers who are all trying so hard to enjoy themselves. 

 

Like Michel Houellebecq, I can't help asking from the moment I walk into the room: What the hell am I doing with these jerks? [b] 

 

In fact, I would echo and endorse many of the things that the French poet and novelist says about parties. This, for example, seems insightful and true:

 

"The purpose of the party is to make us forget that we are lonely, miserable and doomed to death; in other words, to transform us into animals." [43]

 

According to Houellebecq, that's easily done if you belong to primitive humanity; "it doesn't take much to keep them amused" [43] - some drugs and music and they're off. 

 

In contrast, most Westerners have no sense of party at all: "Profoundly self-conscious, radically alien to others, terrorised by the idea of death, they're quite incapable of achieving any exaltation." [43] 

 

This inability to really let go and party might make them ashamed and resentful, but there's nothing they can do about it; attempts to pass as a party animal are just that - attempts to fool themselves and others.

 

And so, whether gathering simply to have fun, to celebrate an event, or to fuck with strangers, it's all a bit of a sham; no one really believes in what they're doing or in who they're pretending to be. You can see it in the eyes of the participants. 

 

Even at a sex party, it's the same thing; everyone is either thinking about making their excuses to leave, or desperately wants to ask the pretty young thing penetrating them with a strap-on dildo: What are you doing after the orgy? [c]     

 

 

II. 

 

Houellebecq concludes that the best thing to do is probably avoid going to parties altogether - even if this means your social life and reputation as fun-loving will invariably suffer as a result. However, if it becomes absolutely necessary to attend a party, then he has some tips to help you get through it without excess suffering or boredom.

 

These include: drink before as well as during the party, as alcohol (in moderate doses) produces "a socialising and euphoric effect that has no real competition" [46]; always make sure you have booked a taxi to take you home - and always plan to go home alone; never stay too long - a good party is a brief party. 

 

I think my favourite piece of advise, however, is this:

 

"Be aware beforehand that the party will inevitably be a failure. Visualise examples of previous failures. You don't really have to adopt a cynical and jaded attitude. On the contrary, the humble and smiling acceptance of the common disaster makes it possible to achieve this success: to transform a failed party into a moment of pleasant banality." [46]   

 

And, finally, Houellebecq offers this consoling perspective on the subject: "with age, the obligation to go to parties decreases, the inclination towards solitude increases" [46]; i.e., the acceptance of death triumphs.   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] I'm referring here to Parker's poem entitled 'Parties: A Hymn of Hate', which can be found on poets.org: click here. 

 

[b] Michel Houellebecq, 'The Party', in Interventions 2020, trans. Andrew Brown, (Polity Press, 2022), p. 43. Future page references to this text as it appears here will be given directly in the post. This amusing short piece was first published in 20 Ans in 1996. 

 

[c] See Jean Baudrillard, 'After the Orgy', in The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993). 

      I have referred to Baudrillard's idea in numerous posts on Torpedo the Ark over the years; see, for example, this post from 23 October 2015, entitled 'After the Orgy: Rise of the Herbivores'. 

 

 

Michel Houellebecq and Nellie Mackay on the Question of Cloning

 

Singer and songwriter Nellie Mackay 

Poet and novelist Michel Houellebecq 

 

"My oh my, walkin' by 

Who's the apple of my eye?

Why, it's my very own 

Clonie!"

 

I. 

 

Whatever else he might be, Michel Houellebecq is no narcissist: 

 

"I don't love myself. I have little liking for myself, and even less self-esteem; besides, I'm not very interested in myself." [a]

 

It's somewhat surprising, therefore, that he has never regretted being the father of a son whom he loves, and loves more each time he sees in him traits of his own character "manifesting themselves over time, with relentless determinism" [109]. 

 

This repetition  - even of flaws - is a source of profound joy. 

 

On the other hand, however, Houellebecq confesses to be saddened when his son displays the signs of an autonomous personality, in which he doesn't recognise anything of himself. 

 

Far from marvelling at this filial otherness, Houellebecq is forced to realise that a child is only a piss-poor copy or incomplete and weakened replica of himself; one that briefly reminds him of death, from which, he says, he has nothing to gain. 

 

The expression of such feelings is not encouraged in modern philosophy; "these feelings leave no room for progress, for freedom, for individuation, for becoming; they aim at nothing other than the eternal, at the stupid repetition of the same" [110] and are ultimately "nothing other than the ever-active memory of an overwhelming biological instinct" [110].    

 

Not wanting to die - and disappointed by the fact that a child is a far from perfect copy - Houellebecq dreams of the day when he can get himself cloned:

 

"I'll pay whatever price it takes (neither moral imperatives nor financial imperatives have ever weighed heavily against those of reproduction). I'll probably have two or three clones [...] Through my clones, I will have achieved some form of survival - not quite sufficient, but greater than what children would have given me." [110-111]

 

Houellebecq's only concern relates to the fact that the clones will be produced in a jar; it saddens him to think that they'll not be conceived in the old-fashioned manner (via sexual intercourse) and born of a womb: 

 

"Will my little ones, born so far away from the pussy, still have any taste for pussy? I hope so for them, I hope so with all my heart." [111] 

 

But he concedes this is simply nostalgia getting the better of him ...

 

 

II. 

 

Someone else who imagines a time to come in which we'll be able to admire and befriend our own clones, is the brilliant singer-songwriter Nellie Mackay ...

 

In a comic (semi-serious?) track entitled 'Clonie' [b], MacKay tells the tale of a wealthy but lonely and infertile woman who doesn't care what other people might think about shallow gene pools and the ethical issues raised by human cloning. 

 

Bored rich folk like her don't need to conceive a child naturally; they can have a fully-formed clone produced to order with whom they'll be able to share their lives and stroll the 'hood, side-by-side and hand-in-hand.  

 

III.

Of course, one is reminded when reading Houellebecq or listening to Nellie Mackay, of Jean Baudrillard's work in this area ...

Baudrillard thought of cloning as the extermination of sex and death and the return of humanity to an amoeba-like state of non-individuated being prior to our becoming mortal and discontinuous; what he refers to as the final solution.  

 

In a crucial passage, Baudrillard writes: 

 

"Contrary to everything we ordinarily believe, nature first created immortal beings, and it was only by winning the battle for death that we became the living beings that we are. Blindly, we dream of defeating death and achieving immortality, whereas that is our most tragic destiny, a destiny inscribed in the previous life of our cells." [c] 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Michel Houellebecq, 'Technical Consolation', in Interventions 2020, trans. Andrew Brown, (Polity Press, 2022), p. 109. Future page references will be given directly in the post.

 

[b] Nellie Mackay, 'Clonie', on the astonishing debut studio album Get Away From Me, (Columbia Records, 2004): click here. And for a live version recorded at a TED Talk in 2008, click here.

[c] Jean Baudrillard, 'The Final Solution, or The Revenge of the Immortals', in Impossible Exchange, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 2001), pp. 27-8. Long time readers (with good memories) may recall that I discuss this passage and Baudrillard's thoughts on cloning in a post published back in April 2013: click here. 

      It is interesting - and disappointing - to note that Houellebecq has little or no time for Baudrillard.

 

 

Pot-au-feu

Illustration by Severo Pozzati (1957) 

used to advertise Maggi pot-au-feu beef cubes

 

Venez à moi, vous dont l’estomac crie misère, et je vous restaurerai!

 

 

Although English people are likely to answer frog legs (cuisses de grenouille), snails (escargot), or coq-au-vin if asked to name the French national dish, it is actually pot-au-feu (or boiled beef and carrots, as Harry Champion would have it) [1]. 

 

This hearty stew, made with simple ingredients, seasoned with herbs and thickened with marrowbone, is thought to encapsulate all that is best about Gallic cuisine and, indeed, French culture; i.e., it taps into the same mythology which Roland Barthes discussed with reference to a good steak and a full-bodied red wine [2].

 

Pot-au-feu, in other words, is for the French what a Sunday roast is to the English, or a Big Mac is to an American; character building and identity reaffirming. It's perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the dish has often featured in French literature, with bourgeois novelists keen to promote pot-au-feu as a symbol of the traditional values they feared were being eroded by modernism and political radicalism. 

 

As one commentator reminds us, Flaubert mocks this in Le Château des cœurs (1863): 

 

"A fantasy, set in the 'Kingdom of the Pot-au-feu', its sixth tableau depicts a huge cauldron of the dish being worshipped by a host of adoring bourgeois. The source of all their happiness, it stands for all that the middle classes hold dear: social and political conservatism, base materialism and narrow self-interest. Its influence is also terrifying. When the play's hero, Paul, refuses to taste the stew, he is taken prisoner and thrown into jail. In a final, horrifying twist, the cauldron rises up into the sky, growing ever larger, until it eventually blots out the sun and plunges the city into darkness." [3]

 

In his novel L’Assommoir (1877), Emile Zola also gives a shout out to pot-au-feu as one of life's simplest pleasures; as does Guy de Maupassant in La Parue (1884). 

 

But for Michel Houellebecq [4], one of the best descriptions in French literature of this robust but delicate dish is given by Joris-Karl Huysmans in Là-Bas (1891), where Durtal, a man disgusted by the modern world, lovingly inhales the aroma of "a peppery pot-au-feu, perfumed with a symphony of vegetables, of which the keynote was celery" [5].

 

I suppose this just goes to show that even Satanists enjoy a good stew served with a simple salad and washed down with cider, followed by cheese and wine.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] 'Boiled Beef and Carrots' is a popular music hall song composed by Charles Collins and Fred Murray (1909). The song was made famous by Harry Champion, who sang it as part of his act and later recorded it. The song extols the virtues of a typical Cockney dish over adopting a vegetarian diet and living on the kind of food they give to parrots: click here.  

 

[2] See 'Wine and Milk' and 'Steak and Chips' in Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans Annette Lavers, (The Noonday Press, 1991), pp. 58-61 and 62-64.

      In the first of these pieces, Barthes writes: "Wine is felt by the French nation to be a possession which is its very own, just like its three hundred and sixty types of cheese and its culture. It is a totem-drink ..." [58] And in the second: "Steak is a part of the same sanguine mythology as wine. It is the heart of meat, it is meat in its pure state; and whoever partakes of it assimilates a bull-like strength."[62]

 

[3] Alexander Lee, 'Pot-au-Feu, France's National Dish', History Today, Volume 68, Issue 10 (October 2018). This excellent piece can be read on line: click here. 

[4] See Michel Houellebecq, discussing pot-au-feu as a French ideal in an interview with Marin De Viry and Valérie Toranian. Originally published in the Revue des duex mondes (July, 2015), it can be found in Interventions 2020, trans. Andrew Brown, (Polity Press, 2022), pp. 172-195. 

      As Houellebecq rightly says: "No other dish can boast such a literary past; there's no equivalent for the boeuf bourguignon or the blanquette." [174]

 

[5] Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas (1891), Chapter V. I am quoting from the English translation by Keene Wallace (1928), which is available on line as an ebook thanks to Project Gutenberg: click here. 

      Food is a central concern throughout Huysmans's work; for a discussion of this, see the MA dissertation by Laura Shine, 'De la pitance indigeste au divin pot-au-feu: la quête du bon repas comme thème dans l’œuvre de Joris-Karl Huysmans', (Université de Montréal, 2013): click here. 

Requiem pour un con (Was Jacques Prévert a Jerk?)

Jacques Prévert: Je ne suis pas un con!

 

 

I. 

 

One of the idiomatic expressions that I hate most is: It takes one to know one. 

 

Used by someone who wishes to point out that what they're accused of being is something which also characterises the accuser, it seems a particularly lame form of comeback; the sort of childish retort that only an individual lacking in wit or intelligence would say.    

 

However, I have to admit that when I first read the title of Michel Houellebecq's short piece 'Jacques Prévert is a jerk' [a] this was the first thing that came to mind, and, having now read the text, I'm still not convinced this is a fair thing to call one of France's most celebrated poets and screenwriters. 

 

 

II. 

 

Just to be clear: I'm not a devoted reader of M. Prévert, nor particularly knowledgeable about his life. But I do like some of the verses in Paroles (1946), particularly 'Déjeuner du matin' - Il a mis le café / Dans la tasse ...etc. [b] 

 

That certain intellectuals often looked down on Prévert (and his sentimentalité as they saw it) only makes me admire him a little bit more. As does the fact that he infuriated André Breton, by describing him as the high priest or pope of Surrealism after the latter expelled him from the group for not taking art seriously enough.    

 

Further, Prévert should be admired for writing against the collaborationist Vichy government during the War years, helping Jewish friends, and relaying messages for members of the Resistance, whilst never belonging to any political party himself, or feeling the need to posture like some of his contemporaries who trumpeted their own activities and commitments.    

 

 

III.

 

So, what exactly is Houllebecq's problem with Prévert? 

 

Well, in a nutshell, he seems to resent the latter's enormous success and blame him for the "repulsive poetic realism" which "continues to wreak havoc" upon French cinema. 

 

Houellebecq writes:

 

"Jacques Prévert is someone whose poems you learn at school. It turns out that he loved flowers, birds, the neighbourhoods of old Paris, etc. He felt that love blossomed in an atmosphere of freedom [...] He wore a cap and smoked Gauloises [...] Also, he was the one who wrote the screenplay for Quai des brumes, Portes de la nuit, etc. He also wrote the screenplay for Les Enfants du paradis, considered to be his masterpiece. All of these are so many good reasons for hating Jacques Prévert - especially if you read the scripts that Antonin Artaud was writing at the same time, which were never filmed."       

 

Nor does Houellebecq care for the optimism which Prévert displays in his work; "faith in the future, and a certain amount of bullshit" which is, he says, boundlessly stupid and nauseating at times. Better off, he suggests, embracing Emil Cioran's pessimism. 

 

Push comes to shove, I don't disagree with this, but that needn't prevent one from listening to Yves Montand sing 'Les Feuilles mortes'. For as even Houellebecq concedes, we all need something to relax to ...    

 

And if Prévert's lyrics are a bit sickly sweet and his pun-ridden poetry mediocre - "so much so that one sometimes feels a sort of shame when reading it" - surely that just makes him a bad writer, not necessarily un con as Houellebecq says. However, the latter is insistent on this point and so I shall give him the last word:     

"If Prévert is a bad poet, this is mainly because his vision of the world is commonplace, superficial and false. It was already false in his own time; today its inanity is so glaring that the entire work seems to be the expansion of one gigantic cliché. On the philosophical and political level, Jacques Prévert is above all a libertarian; in other words, basically an idiot."

Notes

 

[a] This text by Michel Houellebecq was first published as 'Jacques Prévert est un con' in Lettres françaises, No. 22 (July 1992). I am using the English translation by Andrew Brown that appears in Interventions 2020, (Polity Press, 2022), pp. 1-3, even though I'm not entirely happy with the translation of the French term con with the (American-sounding) word jerk. 

 

[b] The English version of this poem, 'Breakfast', can be found in Jacques Prévert, Paroles, trans. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, (City Lights Publishers, 2001). Or click here to read on hellopoetry.com 

 

 

Musical bonus number one: Serge Gainsbourg, 'La Chanson de Prévert', from the album L'Étonnant Serge Gainsbourg (1961).       One of Gainsbourg's most popular songs, it was inspired by 'Les Feuilles mortes', written by Jacques Prévert and Joseph Kosma, for the film Les Portes de la nuit (dir. Marcel Carné, 1946). Click here for the 2014 remastered version.

 

Musical bonus number two: Serge Gainsbourg, 'Requiem pour un con', released as a single in 1968 from the soundtrack to the film Le Pacha (dir. Georges Lautner, 1968), it caused a good deal of fuss at the time, with censors judging the lyrics obscene and scandalous. 

      There's no reason to imagine that the track was inspired by Jacques Prévert, but the title of Michel Houellebecq's critique of the latter obvioulsy makes one think of this song. Click here for the original '68 version and/or here for the 1991 remix.    

 

 

Ce billet a été écrit avec l'aide de Sophie Stas à qui je suis reconnaissant. 

 

 

Reflections on The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han (Part 1: From Melancholia to Bare Life)

The MIT Press (2017)

 

 

I. 

 

Neue deutsche Denke are a bit like buses; you wait ages for one to come along, then two or three arrive on the scene. Byung-Chul Han is one such thinker; part of a generation that also includes, for example, Markus Gabriel [a] and Armen Avanessian [b]. 

 

Han is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin and is (according to his publishers) one of the most widely read theorists writing today, both inside and outside the Academy; the author of over twenty books, including (in English) The Burnout Society (2015), Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (2017), and The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering (2017).

 

But the text I wish to discuss here is an essay on love entitled The Agony of Eros (2017), in which he argues that to be dead to love is to be dead to thought itself ...

II. 

 

The Agony of Eros comes with a foreword by Alain Badiou, whom, readers will recall, published his own little book on love - Éloge de l'amour - in 2009, in which he argued (after Rimbaud) that love needs re-inventing as an opportunity - not for pleasure, so much as for a new form of self and (communist) society; for love provides one possible source of resistance to the obscenity of the market. [c]   

 

I have to say, for me, attaching this foreword is mistaken. Han doesn't need a formal blessing from Badiou, the old man of French philosophy, and doesn't need his text to be vouched for by someone who uses the phrase true love three times in the space of a single page and insists that this authentic form of experience is an affirmation of alterity and a radical refusal of the norms of globalised capitalism. 

 

I mean, come on ...! Reading this almost makes me immediately put the book down. I'm sure Badiou sincerely clings to such fantasy, but I'm hoping Han is going to offer a slightly more sophisticated take on the topic - though I already have my doubts, if, indeed, it's true that he essentially offers a strong reading of the former's own political thesis concerning the revolutionary potential of love.  

 

Anyway, let's find out ... Note that the chapter titles given in bold are Han's own.

 

 

III.

 

Melancholia

 

The crisis of love - taken as a given - is not due, argues Han, to greater freedom and unlimited possibilities, but to an "erosion of the Other [...] occurring in all spheres of life", along with its corollary, the increasing "narcissification of the Self" [d].

 

Now, that might be so, but it's hardly a new or original observation. D. H. Lawrence was saying much the same thing a hundred years ago [e]. And, without referring directly to his work, Han acknowledges his indebtedness to Jean Baudrillard by adopting the phrase l'enfer du même to describe the situation we now find ourselves in [f].        

 

We need to escape from this hell of the same and encounter the atopic Other in all their negativity, otherwise we are are heading for depression, says Han. But this escape might not be a particularly pleasant experience; for it seems that "only an apocalypse can liberate - indeed, redeem - us from the hell of the same, and lead us toward the Other." [3] 

 

To which one might ask: Is it really worth it?  

 

All this talk of healing and cleansing via a disastrous event, a terrible experience, or a sacrifice of the self, makes one wonder whether Han's been watching too many films by Lars von Trier and listening to too many operas by Richard Wagner [g].

 

Do we really want to reinvoke "the proximity of eros and death" [5] in order to liberate ourselves from narcissistic captivity? Does it really require courage to dream of the lovely Ophelia, surrounded by fallen flowers, "drifting in the water with her mouth half open - her gaze lost in the beyond, like a saint or a lover" [6], or is it not simply plunging back into the same old Romantic (and Christian moral) idealism whose formula reads: salvation via catastrophic fatality ...? 

 

Over to you on this one Síomón ... 

 

   

Being Able Not to Be Able

 

Han says we are living in a neoliberal achievement society dominated by the can-do frame of mind; one in which citizens are self-motivated and self-exploiting. Foucault thought this an improvement upon disciplinary society and in his later work adopted a sympathetic attitude towards neoliberalism and the civil liberty it allows. 

 

But Han disagrees and thinks Foucault naive in his uncritical assumptions and failure to notice "the structure of violence and coercion underwriting the neoliberal dictum of freedom" [10]. Neoliberal freedom is the freedom of auto-exploitation and the will to achieve ends with the subject wearing themselves out.     

 

Han wants people to recognise their limitations; to see that love is a relationship "situated beyond achievement, performance, and ability" and ultimately finds expression "as a kind of failure" [11] and certainly not as sexual success. Indeed, Han seems to look to a time that is after the orgy when we revalue "dignity, decency, and propriety" [13] as methods of maintaining distance and thus preserving otherness. 

 

A time that is also post social media. For by means of social media, "we seek to bring the Other as near as possible, to close any distance [...] to create proximity" [13]. But this simply results in "making the Other disappear" [13]. In other words - and in words that Heidegger might have approved of - the total abolition of remoteness "does not produce nearness so much as it abolishes it" [13] [h]. 

 

So, the best thing lovers can do is keep apart - in every sense - and realise that love is not about enjoyment or the generation of pleasant feelings; nor is it about "inconsequential emotion and arousal" [13]. It is, rather,  "something that wounds or incites passion" [14] and often ends with injury.

 

I have to admit, I rather admire this model of love with built in negativity; "nourished by what doesn't yet exist" [16]. I'm all for secrecy, silence, and seduction rather than the guarateed satisfaction of needs. Indeed, I've been writing in favour of delayed gratification and the deferral of pleasure for years: click here, for example.        

 

Bare Life

 

The negative model of love, conceived in terms of injury and transformation, is, says Han, in danger of disappearing completely thanks to love's "increasing positivization and domestication" [18]. We no longer fall in love and risk madness, but enter into a relationship of mutual consent in which we are allowed to stay the same and seek only "the confirmation of oneself in the Other" [18].

 

Love has become a mixture of hedonistic calculation and stress relief; lacking all transcendence and transgression, there is nothing fatal (or even dangerous) in it. The modern day lover prefers bourgeois good health over "sovereignty and freedom" [19]. For Han, this is not the good life as the ancient Greeks conceived of it, but threadbare existence; life of comfort and convenience; the sort of life longed for by the Letzter Mensch who invented happiness. 

 

Again, I smile at all this as it reminds me of what I was writing a decade ago - in the essays collected in Erotomania (2010), for example. But I don't believe I ever arrived at the (neo-Hegelian) conclusion that "Love is an absolute end unto itself." [22] Probably that's because I always remember Lawrence saying that whilst in love one must give, one must never give oneself away and that it was all too easy to die for love - the hard thing being to live for it. 

 

Of course, Han is talking of death in a psycho-symbolic rather than a biological sense and he is thinking of Bataille when he insists that "The negativity of death is essential to erotic experience" [25]. Which, again, might be the case, but it all seems so overblown and old hat - as Houellebecq would say: "We're a long way from Wuthering Heights ..." [i]  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Markus Gabriel is a German philosopher and writer based at the University of Bonn. He regards himself as a thinker in the post-Kantian tradition concerned with metaontology and metametaphysics. Gabriel has spoken out against government measures taken in Europe during the coronavirus pandemic, believing them to be unjustified and a step on the road towards a cyber dictatorship (or virocracy). 

      See: Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism, (Bloomsbury, 2013).

 

[b] Armen Avanessian is an Austrian philosopher, artist, and theorist who has held fellowships in the German departments of Columbia and Yale University. His work on speculative realism and accelerationism in art and philosophy has found a wide audience beyond academia. His concept of hyperstition also designates a method for the actualization in the present of ideas or fictions from the future. 

      See: Hyperstition (2015) a documentary film on time, narrative, philosophy and theory by Christopher Roth in collaboration with Armen Avanessian: click here for a trailer on Vimeo.   

 

[c] See In Praise of Love, by Alain Badiou (with Nicholas Truong), trans. Peter Bush, (Serpent's Tail, 2012). 

[d] Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Love, trans. Erik Butler, (The MIT Press, 2017), p. 3. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the main text. 

[e] See for example what Lawrence writes in his 'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 329-336. 

      These lines give a good idea of how Lawrence anticipates Byung-Chul Han and the French theory he relies upon:

      "Humanity, society has a picture of itself, and lives accordingly. The individual likewise has a private picture of himself, which fits into the big picture. In this picture he is a little absolute [...]

      Even sex, today, is only part of the picture. Men and women alike, when they are being sexual, are only acting up. They are living according to the picture. If there is any dynamic, it is that of self-interest. [...] It is inevitable  when you live according to the picture, that you seek only yourself in sex. Because the picture is your own image of yourself: your idea of yourself. [...] The true self, in sex, would seek a meeting, would seek to meet the other. This would be the true flow [...] what I would call the human consciousness, in contrast to the social, or image consciousness. 

      But today, all is image consciousness. Sex does not exist, there is only sexuality. And sexuality is merely a greedy, blind self-seeking. Self-seeking is the real motive of sexuality. And therefore, since the thing sought is the same, the self, the mode of seeking is not very important. Heterosexual, homosexual, narcistic, normal, or incest, it is all the same thing." [335]     

 

[f] L'enfer du même is poorly translated by Erik Butler as 'inferno of the same', which - apart from sounding like some cheesy disco - thereby misses the fact that Baudrillard was explicitly playing on Sartre's famous phrase L'enfer, c'est les autres, commonly translated into English as 'Hell is other people'. I have therefore modified Butler's translation in this post. 

      Those interested to know more, should see Baudrillard's essay 'The Hell of the Same', in The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993).  

[g] Han's first chapter is essentially an interpretation of von Trier's Melancholia (2011); a film inspired by a depressive episode which prominently features music from the prelude to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.  

[h] See my post of 22 September, 2021: On the Question of Distance and Proximity. 

[i] Michel Houellebecq, Whatever, trans. Paul Hammond, (Serpent's Tail, 1998). 

      With this brilliant line, from his debut novel, Houellebecq refers to the progressive effacement of human relationships and a kind of vital exhaustion which characterizes the early 21st century. And he does so twenty years before Byung-Chul Han picks up the idea and runs with it. 

 

This post continues in part two - from Porn to The End of Theory - which can be read by clicking here. 

Schopenhauer and the Sea Turtles

An Indonesian sea turtle and a 19th century German philosopher

As everyone knows, Schopenhauer thought the world a manifestation not of God, but of will. And by will he meant a blind impulse or force which is not only not divine in origin, but might best be characterised as demonic.

And life? Well, life too, according to Schopenhauer, is a manifestation of a hungry will, concerned only with its own continuation. Thus, we witness innumerable species and individual organisms caught up in an endless feeding frenzy in order to survive and reproduce others of their kind. 

In order to convey the pointless horror of this scenario, Schopenhauer famously tells the tale of an explorer in Indonesia who comes across an immense area littered with bones. At first, he thought it an ancient battlefield, but soon realised that what he had discovered were, in fact, the skeletons of large sea turtles that had come ashore in order to lay their eggs.

Unfortunately, in so doing the turtles frequently fall prey to wild dogs "which combine their efforts to tip them onto their backs, tear off the lower carapace and the small scales on their bellies, and devour them alive".

Not that the dogs get to enjoy their meal in peace for very long: for often a tiger will be attracted to the scene and will then prey on them in turn. This scene, an incessant struggle full of prolonged suffering and violence, repeatedly played out across millennia, will only end, says Schopenhauer, when "the crust of the planet again bursts open".

It is not only absurd, it is atrocious. And yet it is this way that the will - expressed as a will to life - objectifies itself.

As Michel Houellebecq amusingly suggests, this passage from The World as Will and Representation should be dedicated to those animal lovers and ecologists who imagine that the earth would be some kind of paradise if only mankind were to stop interfering or vanish altogether.

See:

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, ed. and trans Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway, (Cambridge University Press, 2010). The lines quoted are found in Vol. 2, Ch. 28.

Michel Houellebecq, In the Presence of Schopenhauer, trans. Andrew Brown, (Polity Press, 2020), Ch. 3, pp. 32-33. For Houellebecq, Schopenhauer's passage on the turtles is "one of those that can provoke a stupefaction, a final coming to awareness, like a lightning crystallization of the scattered feelings left in us by the experience of life ..." 
 

Notes

Without even addressing Schopenhauer's metaphysical philosophy, he was wrong on at least one point in the above. For whilst wild dogs may still feed on sea turtles, there are no longer any tigers on Java to worry about; they became extinct in the 1970s. It didn't require the end of the world, therefore, to break this feeding cycle, simply an expansion of rice-growing humanity: the population increasing from 28 million at the beginning of the 20th century, to 85 million by 1975. Ancient forest, meanwhile, which still covered a quarter of the island in the 1930s, had by this date shrunk to just 8% and existed only in small patches, unsuitable to sustain a tiger population. 

Portrait of Schopenhauer by Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl (c.1815).

In the Presence of Michel Houellebecq in the Presence of Schopenhauer

Front cover of the Polity Press edition (2020)

designed by Adam Renvoize

I.

The fact that Michel Houellebecq loves Schopenhauer and that the latter has had a profound and enduring influence on the former's own work reinforces my view that French literature and theory is almost wholly dependent upon a reading (and often radical interpretation) of German philosophy.

That's not a criticism, or an attempt to denigrate the suppleness and courtly charm of French writing, just an observable fact. Certainly, as Michel Onfray has demonstrated, the whole of Houellebecq's oeuvre can be understood in terms first set out in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung two centuries ago, a text described by Houellebecq as "the most important book in the world" [2].

As Agathe Novak-Lechevalier notes:

"In both cases, suffering is taken for granted, and there is the same pessimism, the same conception of style, and even the same central  emphasis on compassion as the general basis for ethics; we also find the same salvific character of aesthetic contemplation, and the same impossibility of 'being at home' in the world." [xii]

Although I've never been quite as passionate about Schopenhauer as Houellebecq, I accept that "even if you ultimately find yourself in disagreement with him, you cannot fail to be deeply grateful to him" [4-5].

But then, as a Nietzschean, I would say that; for although Nietzsche stages a decisive break from Schopenhauer, it remains, nevertheless a break from Schopenhauer and not from Hegel or Schelling, for example. Schopenhauer, as Nick Land says, provides Nietzsche - and those who come after him, including Freud - with a philosophical tap-root.

It's surprising, therefore, and a little disappointing, to find Houellebecq confessing his hostility for Nietzsche: "I found his philosophy immoral and repulsive, but his intellectual power impressed me. I would have liked to destroy Nietzscheanism, to tear it down to its very foundations, but I did not know how to do so; intellectually, I was floored." [2]

Eventually, Houellebecq finds someone to take him beyond both his nemesis Nietzsche and his hero Schopenhauer - Auguste Comte; "gradually, with a kind of disappointed enthusiasm, I became a positivist" [3-4]. Which is, perhaps, something that happens to us all when we leave childhood behind, and wake up ...

II.

Having said that, Houellebecq admits that he rarely reads Comte; and never with that simple, immediate pleasure he gets from Schopenhauer. He also attempts to demonstrate, via a selection of favourite passages, "why Schopenhauer's intellectual attitude remains [...] a model for any future philosopher" [4].

Of course, Schopenhauer has long been a favourite amongst artists and writers (a fact which has often undermined his status amongst philosophers). For Schopenhauer dares to speak about those things many philosophers think either unknowable or unworthy of serious reflection; such as love, for example.

What's more, he does so - as Houellebecq reminds us - from an aesthetic perspective, thereby entering the field of "novelists, musicians and sculptors" [12]. Schopenhauer knows how to look at things attentively, allowing his entire consciousness be filled with 'the peaceful contemplation of a directly present natural object' - which is in itself something of an art (and the origin of all art, according to Houellebecq).

The artist, in other words, isn't simply one who makes things; he's one who loses himself in things. In other words, contemplation is the key and the artist "is always someone who might just as well do nothing but immerse himself contentedly in the world and in the vague daydream associated with it" [16].

The essential difference, argues Houellebecq, between the poet and the non-poet, is that the former "alone among grown-up men, retains a faculty of pure perception which is usually only met in childhood, madness, or in the subject matter of dreams" [17]. This form of intuition, born of contemplation that is free from all conscious thought or desire, is central to Schopenhauer's philosophy and is "as far removed from classicism as from romanticism" [24].

That may or may not be true, but the question is how far does Houellebecq buy into this neo-Buddhist bullshit? One might have assumed his later reading of Comte would have alerted him to the constant danger of falling back into metaphysics (including such an artisten metaphysik as Schopenhauer's, ever reliant upon metaphors borrowed from the world of theatre).

Perhaps if Houellebecq had (re-)examined Nietzsche's break with Schopenhauer (and, indeed, Nietzsche's rejection of his own early work, still written under the spell of the latter and of Wagner), he'd have produced a more interesting study than the one given us in this abandoned commentary - conceived primarily as a homage - from 2005, which remained unpublished until 2017 and probably would never have seen the light of day were it not written by (arguably) France's greatest living novelist.   

Ultimately, as Novak-Lechevalier rightly says, the book is valuable not for what it tells us about Schopenhauer, but for what it tells us about Houellebecq and his concerns:

"Little by little, the analysis emancipates itself from the letter of the [Schopenhauerian] text, and what we find is the outline of an investigation into the problems posed by splatter films and the representation of pornography in art, a criticism of the philosophies of the absurd, and, a little further on, a reflection on the emergence of urban poetry, the transformations of twentieth-century art, and the 'tragedy of banality' which 'remains to be written'." [xiii]

Thus, in this way, the book is an intensely personal exercise that reveals a number of distinctly Houellebecquian obsessions.


See: Michel Houellebecq, In the Presence of Schopenhauer, Preface by Agathe Novak-Lechevalier, trans. Andrew Brown, (Polity Press, 2020). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.

Genki: Reflections on the Work of Daikichi Amano

Photo from Human Nature (2012) by Daikichi Amano

daikichiamano.com

Torpedophiles with a good memory might recall that I have previously written about a form of pornography known as tentacle erotica which originated with a famous design by Hokusai called The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (1814): click here. 

Two-centuries on and this dream has been obscenely realised in the work of the photographer and video artist Daikichi Amano - described wittily (if not entirely accurately) by Marilyn Manson as a combination of Jean Cocteau and Jacques Cousteau. 

Other fans of Amano's imagery include the recently appointed chief creative officer at Burberry, Riccardo Tisci, who previously spent a dozen years at Givenchy, unfolding his sensual, romantic, sometimes rather gothic vision, and, perhaps less surprisingly, the filmmaker Gaspar Noé, whose work is often associated with the New French Extremity and analysed in terms of a particularly visceral and sexually violent cinéma du corps.

It might be noted that Michel Houellebecq also refers to Amano in his latest novel, Serotonin (2019). However, as the narrator-protagonist, Labrouste, describes one video of a Japanese girl holding the tentacles of an octopus coming out of a toilet bowl with her teeth as the most disgusting thing he's ever seen, it's uncertain as to whether Houellebecq's a fan of naked girls covered in eels, worms, and insects, or fucking the denizens of the deep. 

Personally, I'm more than happy for Amano to explore his own dark fears and fantasies, fusing the human body with the natural world and finding new grotesque forms of beauty rooted in the mythology of traditional Japanese culture and the iconography of contemporary Japanese eroticism.

The problem is, thanks to I'm a Celebrity ... I find it difficult to take the work very seriously (the thought of Ant and Dec sniggering in the background is fatal to one's amorous interest).  

Michel Houellebecq: Serotonin

Front cover of the English hardback edition

William Heinemann (2019)

In the end, even your favourite writers let you down. And so Michel Houellebecq and his new novel Serotonin ...

Maybe he's tired of producing fiction; maybe success makes lazy. Or maybe his porno-nihilistic schtick is prone to some kind of law of diminishing returns. I don't know. But I do know this is a pretty feeble addition to what remains an impressive body of work and whilst the narrator-protagonist, Labrouste, needed his small, white anti-depressant pills to prevent him from dying of sadness, I felt in need of something to stop me from drifting off with boredom at times as a reader.

Ultimately, the problem with creating unsympathetic characters is that they're, well, unsympathetic - so they had better have something interesting to tell us and I'm really not sure that Labrouste does; unless, that is, one is interested in the commercial availability of hummus in French supermarkets (pretty good); the fate of French dairy farming in a globalised economy (pretty dire); the condition of his cock (mostly flaccid, which is unfortunate as this seems to be the core of his being).     

Having said that, there are plenty of things to enjoy in the novel. For example, I like the casual references to Heidegger, Bataille, and Blanchot, as if everyone will be familiar with these names dropped as easily as the names of high-end fashion brands and types of French cheese. 

I also like the fact that the Japanese photograper and video artist Daikichi Amano is given a mention and can imagine many readers quickly googling the name to see if he's real or just a fictional character made up by Houellebecq (in the context of the novel, of course, he's both). Considering Yuzu's fascination with Amano's work, it's surprising that her zoosexual adventures were confined to canines.

Fascinating too the central conceit of one day just walking away from one's old life; of severing all connections with family and friends and voluntarily going missing. A transgressive act - but not a criminal one (in either France or the UK) and Houellebecq / Labrouste is right to register his surprise:

"It was startling that, in a country where individual liberties had tended to shrink, legislation was preserving this one, which was fundamental - in my eyes even more fundamental, and philosopically more troubling, than suicide." [47]

If only for sentences like this, Serotonin is worth reading and it's always nice to be reminded that in less than a day one can erase or reconfigure one's entire life. Nice, too, to discover that two people can be buried in the same coffin.  
 

As for Labrouste's observations on love and sexual politics as played out between men and women, these didn't much interest - despite being placed within a Platonic-Kantian context to do with human perfection via the loving fusion of two into one and the attainment of mutual respect. That said, this passage is one that caught my attention as a xenophile:

"I had carnal knowledge of girls from different countries, and had come to the conclusion that love can only develop on the basis of a certain difference, that like never falls in love with like, and in practice many  differences may come into play: an extreme difference in age, as we know, can give rise to unimaginably violent passions; racial difference remains effective; and even mere national and linguistic difference should not be scorned." [81-2] 

This is true, I think, and is a truth long recognised and exploited within the pornographic imagination. I'm not sure that the lines that follow are also true, but they are certainly worthy of consideration:

"It is bad for those who love each other to speak the same language, it is bad for them to truly understand one another, to be able to communicate through words, because the vocation of the word is not to create love but to engender division and hatred, the word separates as it produces, while a semi-formless, semi-linguistic babble [...] creates the basis for unconditional and enduring love." [82]

When not reminiscing about lost loves and slowly coming to the realisation that it's the past and not the future that engulfs and eventually kills us, Labrouste likes to express his affection for cows and spy with binoculars on a German paedophile; "basically I think I would have liked to be a cop, insinuating myself into people's lives, penetrating their secrets" [184] ... A cop, or a novelist.  

He also tries (unsuccessfully) to counsel an old college friend, Aymeric, a farmer who, like many others, has fallen on hard times and is angry about it to the point of taking up arms. It's at this point in the novel that Houellebecq once again shows his uncanny ability to tap into the spirit of the times; anticipating the gilets jaunes movement and its rage against free trade, liberal elitism, and their own feelings of impotence and loss.

Suddenly, as James Lasdun notes in his review, "the book's seemingly haphazard elements begin working together" and Houellebecq no longer disappoints ...

He could (perhaps should) have ended the novel with Aymeric's violent suicide and the fatal confrontation between farmers and the security police (CRS). But Houellebecq writes on for another 75 pages or so, as Labrouste stalks an old girlfriend (Camille) in the hope that he and she might get back together and find the happiness they deserve.

First, however, he plans to murder her four-year-old son: "the first action of a male mammal when he conquers a female is to destroy all her previous offspring to ensure the pre-eminence of his genotype" [265]. Of course, not being a stag or a Brazillian macaque - or even an early human - Labrouste can't go through with it; instead, he collapses into terminal sorrow and self-pity (though, to be fair, his cortisol levels are as high as his testosterone levels are low).           

In the end, there's nothing for him to do but get fat and watch TV: "I was now at the stage where the ageing animal, wounded and aware of being fatally injured, seeks a den in which to end its life." [291]

What worries me - after 1,285 days in Essex exile and already being ten years older than Labrouste - is the thought that I'm also at this stage; will I too suddenly have a desire to read The Magic Mountain and reach the Proustian conclusion that what matters most in this life is not social or cultural activity, nor intellectual stimulation, but young wet pussies?
 

Notes

Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin, trans. Shaun Whiteside, (William Heinemann, 2019).

James Lasdun, 'Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq review - a vision of degraded masculinity', The Guardian (20 Sept 2019): click here to read online.

In Memory of Joris-Karl Huysmans (and His Bejewelled Tortoise)

Caricature of J-K Huysmans (1885)

To be honest, I increasingly find that I have to be in a very particular frame of mind to read 19th-century French authors such as Joris-Karl Huysmans who are a little too Symbolist, too Decadent and too Catholic for my tastes. One really has no wish to end up at the foot of the Cross, be it inverted or upright and I find elements of his philosophy - much influenced by Schopenhauer - highly suspect; suggestive as they are of weakness, rather than a more Nietzschean pessimism of strength. 

However, as Huysmans and I share the same star sign making us astrological kin - and as today happens to be the 170th anniversary of his birth - I thought I might say something in memory of this idiosyncratic writer, notorious for writing against the grain and against nature ...

The first thing that needs to be said is that Huysmans was clever - very clever. And I'm with Eliot on this question: the essential requirement of all good writing - be it prose or poetry - is intelligence. An inspired idiot is unfortunately still an idiot and inspiration won't compensate for (or disguise) a lack of learning and quick-wittedness for long. L'éternelle bêtise de l'humanité was not surprisingly one of Huysmans's pet peeves. 

His first major publication was a collection of prose poems, Le drageoir aux épices (1874), strongly influenced by Baudelaire. This was followed by a novel, Marthe, Histoire d'une fille (1876), which brought him to the attention of Émile Zola. His next works were similar in style: realistic and rather grim depictions of life in Paris.

Again, to be honest, you'd have to have a great passion for French literature or a scholarly interest like the middle-aged protagonist of Houellebecq's Submission (2015), to bother with these books. But on the other hand, his scandalous novel of 1884, À rebours, is a must read - if only for the bejewelled tortoise in chapter four. 

And that's particularly so for lovers of Oscar Wilde; for this poisonous tale of the aristocratic aesthete Jean des Esseintes - a man who rejects both the natural order and bourgeois society and attempts to live exclusively in a perversely sensual yet highly artificial world of his own invention - greatly influenced The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).

Amusingly - though not for poor Constance - Wilde first read À rebours whilst on honeymoon in Paris and it immediately became for him what it was also for Paul Valéry and, many years later, the punk singer Richard Hell - a bible and bedside favourite.       

See:

Michel Houellebecq, Submission, trans. Lorin Stein, (William Heinemann, 2015). 

Joris-Karl Huysmans, trans. Robert Baldick, (Penguin Books, 2003).

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, (Penguin Books, 2003).

To read an excellent essay by Adam Leith Gollner on 'What Houellebecq Learned from Huysmans', in The New Yorker (12 November, 2015), click here. 

For an interesting note on À rebours and its influence on Oscar Wilde, visit the British Library website: click here. 

For a related post to this one that reflects more closely on the bejewelled tortoise, click here.

Thanks to Thom Bonneville for suggesting this post.

Reflections on The Strange Death of Europe: A Book For Thinking, Nothing Else

Bloomsbury (2017)

Douglas Murray's new book, The Strange Death of Europe, addresses very contemporary concerns to do with immigration, identity and Islam. But it's in some ways a rather old-fashioned read, as one might expect from a neoconservative who continues a long (peculiarly German) tradition of cultural pessimism - Oswald Spengler anyone? 

Far from being an incendiary text full of urgency and the visionary promise of a future beyond the ruins, it's a nostalgic, somewhat lugubrious work oscillating between world-weariness on the one hand and a sense of loss on the other; less angry call to arms, more solemn eulogy. But perhaps that's its strength and what distinguishes Murray's work from that of far-right nationalists; he's not demanding that Europe awake! but suggesting that Europeans take time to quietly reflect and, in so doing, rediscover not just old forms, but find new feelings.

Never going so far as to renounce entirely the need for action, Murray nevertheless understands the importance of engaging in what Nietzsche terms invisible activities and which Heidegger relates to a notion of transcendence (the human capacity to reshape and revalue the world via an essential form of contemplation).

In other words, The Strange Death of Europe is a book for thinking, nothing else.

Thus, whilst Murray discusses in detail the large-scale events unfolding all around us and clearly indicates the problems these events bring in their wake, he wisely refrains from offering any final solutions. Critics who pour scorn on the book for failing to provide such answers have missed the point.

Similarly, when they laugh at Murray's suggestion that the fate of Europe might depend on our attitude towards church buildings, they fail to grasp what he means is that our singularity as Europeans is made manifest in our art and architecture. And, of course, in our literature; one of the nicely surprising sections of Murray's book is his discussion of the novelist Michel Houellebecq.    

Having said this, there are aspects of Murray's book that disappoint. For example, whilst I broadly accept his political analysis of postmodern Europe, I don't find what Lyotard termed incredulity toward metanarratives paralysing in the way Murray suggests. Nor do I feel ravaged by decades of deconstruction and desperate to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Although an atheist, one gets the impression that Murray is moving towards the Heideggerean conclusion that, ultimately, only a god can save us. But if only he stopped thinking nihilism in such dramatic nineteenth-century terms and playing the crypto-theologian, Murray might recognise that our loss of faith and inability to act with absolute certainty paradoxically signifies our spiritual superiority to all fanatics and fundamentalists who daren't ever doubt or deviate from scripture.

For me, it's infinitely preferable to live in a secular society that delights in shallowness and gay insincerity, than in a theocratic society plumbing the depths of religious stupidity. In order to counter Islamism, we need to become more ironic and irreverent, not less. And a little bit more Greek; superficial out of profundity.          

On the Difficulty of Death for Old Ladies

Tony Luciani: Internal Reflection,
 from  Mamma: In the Meantime (2016)
(A series of photos and paintings featuring his 93-year-old mother, Elia.)

The comic actor, Steve Martin, once conceded that he'd never made a great movie. But, he went on to say, he had made several films that contained genuinely great scenes. I think something similar might be said about the verse of Michel Houellebecq; no really great poems, but many that contain genuinely great lines. 

Those critics who characterise his work as callow and clichéd, or dismiss it as insipid and ineffectual, are not so much mistaken as beside the point. For these things, of necessity, belong to a body of work that is bold enough and big enough to incorporate them; a form of writing that affirms what Nietzsche terms a general economy of the whole.

In other words, the secret of really interesting poetry, like Houellebecq's, is not the fact that it contains powerful and original elements, but that it's unafraid to make mistakes and display its weaknesses. Further, it parades intertextual indebtedness with pride and invites readers to hear echoes of other authors.
        

But this post isn't intended to be a defence of Houellebecq as an artist, nor a comprehensive review of his new dual-language selection of poems entitled Unreconciled. Rather, I want simply to indicate how some of Houellebecq's reflections on old women approaching death resonate with my own observations and experience ...

Death is difficult for old ladies who are too rich, says Houellebecq, referring to the kind of women who own antique furniture and wind up in cemeteries: Surrounded by cypresses and plastic shrubs. But, actually, death is often difficult for many women - even those whom he calls the council-flat old / Who imagine till the end that they are loved and wind up at the crematorium: In a little cabinet with a white label.

For many women - particularly mothers - simply refuse to let go and die. Men, as a rule, die sooner and with less fuss, less bitterness; they know when the game is up and they'll be best off out of it, as my father would say. Women - particularly mothers - aim to stay for as long as possible in their sordid bedrooms where they keep little objects tucked in their wardrobes - the insides of which reveal just how cruel and how futile life can be.

On and on these undying women persist; watching TV without quite catching what is said (despite the increased volume) and eating their meals without appetite (despite the added salt); growing older and increasingly feeble in mind and body: You see clearly the nothingness awaiting them / Especially in the morning when they rise, pale, / And moan for their first cup of tea.

In a very moving couple of stanzas, worth quoting in the original French, Houellebecq writes:

Les vieux savant pleurer avec un bruit minime,
Ils oublient les pensées et ils oblient les gestes
Ils ne rient plus beaucoup, et tout ce qui leur reste
Au bout de de quelques mois, avant la phase ultime,

Ce sont quelques paroles, presque tourjours les mêmes:
Merci je n'ai pas faim, mon fils viendra dimanche,
Je sens mes intestins, mon fils viendra quand même.
Et le fils n'est pas là, et leurs mains presque blanches.

This is mostly true and, sadly, often the case. Though, not wanting to be defined as a son by my absence, I'm doing what I can to provide care and ensure my mother doesn't become just another unloved body dying without mystery. It's hard work though; depressing, tiring, frustrating, boring, etc.

But so are many jobs and at least caring affords me the opportunity to listen to the little birds in the garden and read poetry on my birthday ...  


See: Michel Houellebecq, Unreconciled: Poems 1991-2013, trans. Gavin Bowd, (William Heinemann, 2017). All the lines quoted, in full or part, are Bowd's translations from the French and are taken from three untitled poems, pp. 29-33. 

For those interested in the work of Tony Luciani, click here to access his website, or here for information about his exhibition, Mamma: In the Meantime, at the Loch Gallery, Toronto, Canada.