Jumping Grace (A Short Verse in the Manner of Michel Houellebecq)

En sautant Grace -

Visiblement belle

Ravie dans son nouveau soutien-gorge de sport

Indifférente à la gravité.

Jumping Grace -

Conspicuously beautiful

Happy in her new sports bra

Unconcerned with gravity.

Thanks to Gedvile Bunikyte for kind permission to use her photograph. 

Thanks to Simon Solomon, Christian Michel and Sophie Stas for help with the translation (into French); any errors or inadequacies are entirely my own. 

Submission (On Christianity, Islam and the European Migrant Crisis)

Cover of the Hungarian edition of 

Michel Houellebecq's novel Soumission (2015)

These are strange times indeed! 

So strange, that one even finds oneself in agreement with Peter Hitchens - yes, the slightly younger, much less lovable brother of Christopher Hitchens - on an increasing number of questions, including the European migrant crisis. 

For he's right, surely, to argue that we in the West will not solve this apparently insoluble problem, or be in a position to help anyone, if we destroy our own continent with its own unique history, culture and system of values in the process, or simply give it away, as he writes, "to complete strangers on an impulse because it makes us feel good about ourselves". 

Unfortunately, Hitchens doesn't examine this emotional spasm gripping the political leaders of Europe, the media, bleeding-heart celebrities, and, apparently, large numbers of the British public who were moved by a single photo. And, of course, the reason he doesn't examine it is because it's rooted precisely in the Christian moral tradition of which he is such a vocal exponent. Thus Hitchens is on tricky ground and his analysis of current events is compromised ultimately by his own faith. 

In other words, what I'm suggesting is that it is our own idealism - particularly the ideal of self-sacrifice - that is at play here; we are still attempting to imitate Christ hanging on the Cross and commit one final auto-da-fé en masse so that we too can whisper with our dying breath and face turned towards heaven consummatum est. 

It is finished; meaning, our time as a people is finally over; we give up, let those who are younger, stronger, more devout, more numerous, have a go at running things. Michel Houellebecq understands this suicidal and sentimental fatigue and how our will to love has effectively undermined our will to survival. In his novel, Soumission (2015), he writes perfectly convincingly of how a near-future France easily transforms into an Islamic society.   

It's a book that Hitchens has read and admires. But, again, I don't think he quite understands the work or sees why it is Europe has adopted this submissive position; how what he describes as weakness and cowardice is, in fact, the result of our corrosive and toxic virtues including: pity, charity, and humility.

The sad and terrifying fact is that we would rather turn the other cheek and love our enemies, even when they want to murder us, than be seen to be unkind or unjust in any way. Just as Jesus died for our sins, we want to die for the sins of others. And so we hold open the gates and meekly smile and clap hands as hundreds of thousands of migrants push past and give thanks to Allah for the soft stupidity of the kuffar. 

          

Notes: 

Peter Hitchens's recent Mail on Sunday piece entitled 'We won't save refugees by destroying our own country' can be read here. 

Michel Houellebecq's novel has been translated into English as Submission, by Lorin Stein, (William Heinemann, 2015). 

Obviously, Nietzsche - not an author I suspect Peter Hitchens has much time for - identified Christianity as more harmful than any vice over a century ago and predicted what would happen to Europeans as a result of adopting this slave morality and attempting to put it into practice. That we have not repudiated this creed once and for all not only does us no credit, but it brings down a curse upon us. And if Islam despises the Christian West, writes Nietzsche, "it is a thousand times right to do so: for Islam presupposes men ..." [The Anti-Christ, section 59.]

Peep Show Proves We're a Long Way from Wuthering Heights

"We're a long way from Wuthering Heights ..."

With this devastating line, Houellebecq refers to the progressive effacement of human relationships and a kind of vital exhaustion - particularly in the bedroom - which characterizes the early 21st century.

Ours is an age in which people continue to fuck and to feign an interest in romance, but their fascination for eroticism is completely artificial and they are, in fact, bored beyond stiffness by the endless orgy in which they find themselves; thus the growing need for pornography, sex toys, and Viagra.

We simply don't feel or even truly understand what fictional lovers such as Cathy and Heathcliff are said to have felt; their passion has become embarrassing and slightly repulsive. We don't want intense emotional commitment; rather, we prefer to fake our own feelings and simply replay old scenarios whilst lacking in any conviction. For us, sex is all about a nostalgic staging of desire and its dispersal. 

Ultimately, all we'll be left with are the signs and simulations of sex circulating via the media creating a world characterized by what Baudrillard refers to as virtual indifference. This will doubtless have many consequences, including the fact that novels, such as Emily Brontë's classic, will become impossible to read, or even talk about in and on our own terms; as evidenced, for example, in Peep Show series 7, episode 3.

H. P. Lovecraft and the Sordid Topic of Coin

Isabella Rossellini as Lisle von Rhoman in the 1992 dark 

comic fantasy Death Becomes Her, dir. Robert Zemeckis

Sometimes, as Michel Houellebecq points out, it is necessary to fail in life in order that one eventually succeed in one's work as an artist or philosopher. Although, even then, failure in a worldly sense (i.e. absence of any financial reward and complete lack of recognition) doesn't necessarily guarantee results.

For sometimes, opting to remain aloof and outside of the commercial realm - displaying no interest in the sordid topic of coin, no desire to make a name for oneself and practicing as it were a policy of complete non-engagement vis-a-vis mundane realities - carries with it the risk of falling into poverty, apathy, and suicidal despair.  

The writer H. P. Lovecraft provides a good example of someone who was prepared to risk these things and hold out against them. As Houellebecq tells us in his excellent study, Against the World, Against Life, Lovecraft never quite experienced utter destitution, but he was extremely constrained financially and had to always watch every penny. He also kept a small bottle of cyanide at hand - just in case. 

For Lovecraft, it was simply not dignified for a gentleman to worry about money matters "or to express too lively an anxiety where his own interests were concerned". In any case, his writings earned him very little - not that he considered literature a particularly noble pursuit and cared nothing for building a career or readership. He wrote "for the sake of his own pleasure and that of a few friends, without worrying about the public's taste, fashionable themes, of anything else of the kind". 

Obviously, such an individual is afforded no place within the modern world; Lovecraft knew this, but always refused to sell himself. Indeed, he refused even to type his texts and would send editors soiled and crumpled manuscripts; though one might wonder whether such an act doesn't betray at last self-contempt as much as defiant anti-commercialism.  

 

Nevertheless, Lovecraft provides a role model to all of us who hate to ask for payment and prefer simply to give ideas away in the same manner as the sun shines freely to no end and without thought of preserving energy, or securing the morrow. 

And this - along with his aggressive anti-theism and virulent anti-humanism - is another reason to love him.   

Note: lines quoted are from Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, trans. Dorna Khazeni, (Gollancz / Orion Publishing Group, 2008), p. 92.       

Why I Love H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) 

 Photo c.1934 from the Archives of 

Brown University / Associated Press

There are several good reasons to love master of weird fiction H. P. Lovecraft, many of which are presented by Michel Houellebecq in his highly recommended study entitled Against the World, Against Life (2006). 

Primarily, however, it's because of passages such as the following, written in a letter to a friend, in which Lovecraft amusingly sets out his case against religion:

"So far I have seen nothing which could possibly give me the notion that cosmic force is the manifestation of a mind and will like my own infinitely magnified; a potent and purposeful consciousness which deals individually and directly with the miserable denizens of a wretched little flyspeck ... and which singles this putrid excrescence out as the one spot where to send an onlie-begotten Son, whose mission is to redeem those accursed fly-speck inhabiting lice which we call human beings ... It is all so very childish. I cannot help taking exception to a philosophy that would force this rubbish down my throat. 'What have I against religion?' That is what I have against it!"

- H. P. Lovecraft, A Letter on Religion, written to Maurice W. Moe (1918). 

Women Who Hum Are the Hope of the Future

Un Colibri

The troubling thing about living in a fully digital age is that whilst technology has been consummated, men, women and children have all effectively been disqualified; they have lost not only their independence but also their imagination. For who dares to daydream or fantasise when they have movies on demand; who needs to whistle a happy tune when they are connected to an i-Pod which streams non-stop music into their ears? 

Baudrillard refers to this as a form of existential unemployment and fears that the obsolescence of our species is racing towards a terminal phase in which our fate will no longer be in our own hands, but determined exclusively by machines to which we have transferred decision-making in a symbolic act of capitulation:

"In the end, human beings will only have been an infantile illness of an integral technological reality that has become such a given that we are no longer aware of it ... This revolution is not economic or political. It is an anthropological and metaphysical one. And it is the final revolution - there is nothing beyond it. In a way, it is the end of history, although not in the sense of a dialectical surpassing, rather as the beginning of a world without humans."

- Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2010), p. 80. 

This pessimistic conclusion contrasts starkly with the laughable idealism of those who retain their faith in the future and believe in the unlimited morphological adaptability of our species and its becoming-cyborg. Faced with an obvious inferiority to their own smart phones, transhumanists accept voluntary servitude; rather than disappear altogether, they choose to be biologically engineered and cloned. In other words, ashamed of their own mortal imperfection, the machine-ticklers are prepared to make themselves sexless and loveless; beings who pass through life knowing nothing of joy or sorrow and whose nights are no longer shaken by terror or ecstasy.  

At this point, as Nietzsche would say, I cannot suppress a sigh and one small hope; a hope that there might still be others in this world like the young French woman I met recently who, when sitting quietly and contentedly in the corner of a book-filled room, thinking her own thoughts, almost inaudibly started to hum ...          

Wuthering Heights

No coward soul is mine / No trembler in the world's storm-startled sphere

"We're a long way from Wuthering Heights," as Michel Houellebecq rightly points out. Nevertheless, it remains one of the few truly great works of fiction and continues to implicate its readers in what Bataille calls the crime of literature and by which he refers to the fact that writing has a complicity with evil. For what literature reveals is the possibility of a form of sovereignty that does not negate or exclude morality, but which demands a hyper-morality existing beyond biblical injunction. 

What Charlotte regrets as the immature and immoderate faults in her sister Emily's novel are in fact what lend it such savage beauty and potency. And what is so admirable about the younger sister is that she has the courage to allow the demon to speak directly in her poetry and prose; Charlotte prefers to gently but firmly place her hand over the demon's mouth so that she may at all times speak for him. 

Thus Charlotte, when editing the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, not only changes the paragraphing and punctuation in an attempt to regularize Emily's idiosyncratic style, she also seeks to impose an element of contrived and conventional humanity into the work at the expense of that which is uniquely and diabolically inspired.  

Thankfully, the perversity, the cruelty, the madness, and the morbidity that characterize the novel continue to shine through and Wuthering Heights remains one of those books that readers weary of the narrow limitations imposed by moral or literary convention (not to mention interfering siblings) will continue to find of much value. Emily's understanding of love - based not on worldly personal experience, but impersonal inner intensity - not only linked sex to death, but suggested that each of these contained the essential truth of the other. Her novel thus illustrates the basic premise underlying authors such as Sade and Bataille: eroticism is the affirmation of life all the way to its fatal conclusion.

It is this disconcerting truth that lies at the heart of Wuthering Heights and which gives it an affinity with the great works of Greek tragedy; all of which ultimately concern the violation of the Law (be it divine, human, or natural in origin). Emily dreams of a sacred and transgressive form of violence via which lovers might regain paradise (or childhood innocence). If this was promised by Romantic literature in general, it is Wuthering Heights which most powerfully shows us the full horror of atonement and the tragic character of life (it bleeds, it suffers, it dies, it returns). This may not make it a holy book in a religious sense, but it certainly makes it a great work of art.

Revenge of the Immortals

One of the more controversial ideas that Baudrillard put forward was the final solution, by which he referred to the extermination of sex and death and the return of humanity to a desexualized, non-individuated state of being prior to our becoming mortal and discontinuous.

Thanks to recent scientific advances, this dream of becoming-amoeba, or, as it is more commonly called, cloning, is no longer simply the stuff of fiction or neo-Platonic fantasy. There seems to be a general acceptance of the fact that we are about to be replaced either by machines, or a new species which will be sexless and immortal. No one seems particularly troubled by the prospect of a transhuman future and, ironically, whilst we speak endlessly about the right to life, it is the right to death that is being taken from us. 

In a crucial passage, Baudrillard notes: 

"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."

     - Impossible Exchange, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 2001), pp. 27-8

Relating his theories of evolution and cloning not only to the history of Western metaphysics, but also to modern sexual politics, Baudrillard argues that by dissociating erotic activity from procreation and reproduction from sex, fucking is increasingly regarded as a useless function; just as gender differences become irrelevant. 

Death too, it seems, is fated to become a useless function and, in the longer term, something inconceivable. Perhaps the time will come when the beings who come after us will try to understand something of our joys and sorrows by simulating a virtual experience of mortality; perhaps they will long nostalgically for nights shaken with terror and ecstasy and for what Houellebecq terms the possibility of an island.   

Passion Ends in Fashion

Michel Houellebecq is right: We're a long way from Wuthering Heights. 

Our obsession with love and the forming of human relationships is today evidence only of a certain loyalty to the past. All our feelings are completely artificial and our nights are "no longer shaken by terror or ecstasy". Sex is a form of nostalgia.

After the naked excess of the orgy - which was all about bodies and organs and gross acts of penetration - there comes the masked ball in which desire for the flesh has been replaced by a passion for fashion and dressing-up has become more exciting than stripping-off. We can witness this in our popular culture and I would suggest that Carrie Bradshaw tells us a good deal more about ourselves today than Cathy Earnshaw.

For whilst her significantly older friend, Samantha, still faithfully subscribes to the myth of sex and sexual liberation, Carrie - despite the residual romanticism of her character - is keenly aware that a finely crafted pair of shoes is likely to last longer and bring more satisfaction than a relationship with a man. 

Ultimately, even Mr Big can't compete against Manolo Blahnik and you can't help wondering whether Carrie didn't marry the former simply so she might wear the Something Blue satin shoes designed by the latter ...?    

Houellebecq Variations

I'm not really a poet, even if I'm interested in the possibilities and limits of language. Nor am I a qualified translator. 

And so the verses that follow should probably best be thought of as idiosyncratic transformations and deformations of the original poems written by Michel Houellebecq and published in the 1996 collection, Le Sens du Combat. 

I post them here only because I wish to bring greater attention to Houellebecq as a poet in the English-speaking world and in the belief that any embarrassment they might cause will be mine alone.

[Untitled]

Whenever she saw me she'd push her pelvis in my direction
And say with suggestive irony: 'It's kind of you to come ...'
I'd glance vaguely at the curve of her breasts
And then leave. My office was bare.

Last thing Friday I would bin the old files only to
Receive an identical work-load on Monday.
And I liked her very much: she was pitiful; as a piece
Of secretarial meat she had passed her use by date.

She lived somewhere or other near Cheptainville
With a red-haired child and some video tapes.
She was unaware of the rumblings of the city
And on Saturday nights she rented porn films.

She typed the mail and I liked her face:
She very much wanted to be down on her knees.
She was thirty-five or maybe fifty,
She journeyed towards death without concern for her age.


Differentiation, Rue d'Avron

Scattered across the table like droppings are all
The usual signs of life: soiled tissues, spare keys,
And elements of despair reminding me that you
Were once desirable.

Sunday shrouded the local chippy and the bars
Full of immigrants with the same stickiness.
We strolled for a while, happy, before returning home
So as not to know, preferring to stare at one another.

You stripped naked in front of the sink and
If your face lacked the taut beauty of Botox,
Still your body remained firm and seemed to
Cry: 'Look at me! I'm still in one piece -

My limbs are still attached and death hasn't yet
Closed my eyes like those of my brother.
You taught me the meaning of prayer,
Look at me, look! Fix your eyes on my flesh!'


[Untitled]

A sun-exposed soul is threatened
By coastal waves that crash and
Reawaken the dull ache of
Underlying pain.

What would we do without the sun?
Grief, nausea, suffering and all of
Life's stupidities vanish beneath it.

The blue of noon purrs with the
Bliss of physical inertia; the joy
Of death and forgetfulness as
Eyes close in sensitive sleep.

Pitiless, the sea stretches
Like a rousing animal; this
Universe has no law.

What would we do without the sun?