What Was I Thinking? (13 December)

Torpedo the Ark: images from posts published on 

13 December (2014-2023)

 

 

Apart from 2012, 2013, 2019, 2020, and 2022, I have published a post on this date on Torpedo the Ark in every year since its inception. And sometimes, it can be instructive to look back and see what one was thinking and how things may have changed since ...

 

 

Carry On Facesitting (13 Dec 2014) 

This perfectly innocent post is, I discover, another now placed behind a sensitive content warning by the censor-morons who police things for Blogger (which has been owned and hosted by Google since 2003): is it something I said in the text, is it the accompanying image, or is it both? 

 

I don't know. And Google will not say: they simply refer you to their community guidelines and then invite you to identify your own wrongdoing, rectify the situation, and then republish the post in the hope that, after an official review, you'll be allowed to keep it up and that it will be freely accessible to readers. 

For the record: the post is fine as is and I do not intend to make any changes to it. It does not advocate facesitting, although, even if it did, this is not a criminal activity and harms no one.

 

Rather, the post simply reported on a good-natured and somewhat comical protest outside Parliament by sex workers, freedom-loving perverts, and various interested and/or sympathetic parties against new legislation that prohibits the depiction of certain kinky (but nonetheless perfectly legal) acts between consenting adults.

 

It amazed me then and amazes me now, that the UK government might spend its time opposing activities such as facesitting - or regulating the size of dildos - on the (spurious) grounds of health and safety. As one of the organisers of the protest pointed out, the new laws are not only anti-queer, but also inherently sexist, as many of the activities discriminated against are ones that afford specifically female pleasure and empowerment. 

 

 

On the Truth of Things (13 Dec 2015) 

 

Whilst conceding that questions concerning politics and psychagogy are philosophically interesting and that one must invariably return to them at some point, for me, back in 2015 - in my object-oriented days - I was more enthralled by those entities that make up an inhuman and non-human universe and encourage the posing of questions that do not always posit Man as the central subject or final solution.

 

In other words - and I still think this now - the beauty and the truth of things is precisely that they exist mind independently and it's a real joy to occasionally write about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens (not to mention bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens), rather than just human ideas and human relations.

 

 

Reflections from a Sickbed (13 Dec 2016) 

 

It strikes me that the depressing thing about a long-term health condition, is that it lowers your expectations of what constitutes a good life; one is suddenly pleased merely to experience a pain-free day.  

On the other hand, convalescence is a vital phenomenon and so sometimes one welcomes being sick, so that one can, as Heidegger would say, return home to oneself and one's destiny - which of course is death (as all being is a being-towards death). 

 

That being the case, it's not surprising that when ill in bed back on December 13th, 2016 my thoughts should turn to the question of how best to dispose of that most accursed of all objects, one's own corpse. After considering several of the main methods, including cremation, inhumation, and immurement, I decided that a Tibetan sky burial - in which one is literally fed to the vultures - was the most attractive option.  

 

 

Kissing Hitler 1: Some Like It Hot / Kissing Hitler 2: Notes on the Führer's Love Life (13 Dec 2017) 

 

Not one, but two posts on the theme of kissing Hitler published on the same day back in 2017 - what was I thinking, indeed! Perhaps there's some truth in Godwin's law after all ...

Although, as a matter of fact, the first post - 'Some Like It Hot' - was more about Tony Curtis (and what it was like to share an on-screen smooch with Marilyn Monroe), than about Hitler as a recipient of amorous affection. 

 

The second post, however, did look somewhat deeper into Hitler's love life - something that has long been subject to critical and clinical analysis, as well as sensational speculation and obscene rumour. I arrived at the conclusion that, ultimately, it was a pity that Hitler wasn't more of a libertine and less of a Nazi; it's always better to make love rather than war, no matter how perversely one may choose to do so.      

 

On Poetry and Plagiarism (With Reference to the Case of Ailey O'Toole) (13 Dec 2018) 

 

The case of the young American poet Ailey O'Toole - which caused a bit of fuss in certain literary circles - still interests me and I still feel that Ms. O'Toole has nothing to apologise for or feel ashamed about and that she was treated poorly by moralists defending bourgeois (and untenable) notions of intellectual property.

 

For the fact remains, very few poets invent neologisms; and even fewer have original thoughts or feelings. They essentially rearrange the words of a shared language and play with the ideas and emotions of the culture to which they belong. It's an art - and it can produce amazing results - but poetry is never a personal or private matter, no matter how idiosyncratic one's writing style. 

 

As Roland Barthes would argue, the poem-as-text is neither representative of a non-linguistic reality, nor expressive of an author's unique being. It's explainable only through other words that are also drawn from a pre-given, internalised dictionary. Every poem is, in a sense, already a copy of a copy of a copy whose origin is forever lost and meaning infinitely deferred. 

 

Wherever she is today - and whatever she's doing - I send Ms. O'Toole kind regards and warm wishes.  

 

 

Notes on the Fetishist (And Other Stories) by Michel Tournier (13 Dec 2020)

 

Michel Tournier was the writer I loved reading most in the winter of 2020-21 and I wrote over twenty posts inspired by (or referencing) his work in this period. 

 

This includes the above post, in which I offered a series of notes on a collection of stories originally published in French under the title Le Coq de Bruyère (1978) and which offered a queer and often disconcerting dip into the world of the sordid supernatural (to borrow the author's own description).  

 

Those who enjoy philosophically-informed fiction that explores the porno-mythic imagination and accelerates what Jonathan Dollimore terms the perverse dynamic, will like this book - and like it a lot. Other readers, who don't enjoy such fiction, probably won't like it so much (but then, such people probably aren't spending time on this blog either). 

 

The Day of the Golden Jackal (13 Dec 2021)

 

I love felines: but I'm not so keen on canids. 

 

That said, I was happy to discover back in December 2021 that the number of golden jackals - small wolf-like animals, about three times the size of a red fox - have been rapidly expanding in number and increasing their range in recent decades. 

 

Apparently, you can now find jackals living, hunting, and howling in many parts of Central and Northeastern Europe and it has been estimated by the IUCN that whilst there may be fewer than 17,000 wolves left in Europe, there are around 117,000 jackals - and the more the merrier, I say, although, of course, all the usual suspects - such as farmers - raise their familiar objections. 

 

Sadly, therefore, these intelligent and sociable animals continue to be hunted in many countries; one can only invoke the great jackal-headed god Anubis to bite off the hands and tear out the throats of those who harm them (some think that capital punishment for deliberate cruelty to animals is a bit extreme, but I'm not one of them). 

 

 

On the Haunting Beauty of Sue Lloyd (13 Dec 2023)

 

Finally, on December 13th last year, I discussed how, as I get older, my desire is increasingly tied to nostalgia and has effectively become a type of spectrophilia; i.e., sexual attraction to ghosts, or, as in my case, the haunting images of dead actresses from the 1960s and '70s. 

 

This includes Sue Lloyd, who guest starred in many much loved English TV shows during this period, but is perhaps best remembered today for her long-running role as as Barbara Hunter (née Brady) in the British soap opera Crossroads.

 

A former dancer and model, Miss Lloyd also appeared in a number of films; performing alongside Michael Caine in The Ipcress File (1965) and Joan Collins in The Stud (1978), for example.  

 

But what I like most about Miss Lloyd is not her acting credentials, but the fact she exuded the kind of dazzling beauty and sexual sophistication of the older woman which excited me as an adolescent and continues to work its magic some 50 years later. 

 

 

Pop-Pop-Pop-Popgun

Andy Warhol: Guns (1981-1982)

The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

 

I. 

 

Longtime readers will recall that I have written about hoplophilia elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark, arguing that you don't have to own a gun or be a member of the shooting fraternity to acknowledge the fetishistic appeal of firearms: like it or not, guns are stylish, guns are cool, and guns are deadly. 

 

In short, guns are sexy and excite many different types of people; from Melanie Blanchard, the morbidly curious young female protagonist in Michel Tournier's 'Death and the Maiden' [1]; to the socially and sexually awkward loan manager Mark Corrigan, played by David Mitchell, in the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show [2].

 

 

II. 

 

Andy Warhol was an artist who understood better than most the fascination of firearms and the important role that guns play within American life and culture. He was also someone who experienced the pain and trauma of being shot and almost killed by a madwoman with a snub-nosed pistol [3] and was haunted by the fact of his own mortality (death being a theme he returned to many times throughout his career).

 

So no suprise that his series of paintings entitled Guns (1981-82) should be as brilliant as it is. 

 

I know that many people still think of Warhol primarily as the artist who painted soup cans and portraits of the rich and famous, but he produced so much more - and so much more interesting - work than this; not least his paintings of guns, knives, skulls, and shadows.

 

Rejecting the idea that his work was a form of social criticism or heavy with symbolic meaning, Warhol allows us to admire his pictures and the objects they depict as beautiful in themselves. And maybe that's the genius of Pop Art.      

 

Notes

 

[1] The short story 'Death and the Maiden' can be found in Michel Tournier, The Fetishist and Other Stories, trans. Barbara Wright (Collins, 1983), pp. 109-128. For my post from December 2020 inspired by the tale, click here.    

[2] See 'Jeremy's Mummy', the fourth episode of the fifth series of the British sitcom Peep Show. Directed by Becky Martin, it first aired on 23 May, 2008. To watch the scenes featuring 'Gunny', please click here. To read my post inspired by the episode (also published in December 2020), click here.

 

[3] On 3 June 1968 the radical feminist writer Valerie Solanas fired at Warhol three times with a .32 calibre pistol. The first two shots missed, but the third hit its target and penetrated multiple organs. Warhol survived the incident - after undergoing five hours of surgery - but was never quite the same again, the shooting having a profound effect on his later life and work. 

 

 

Existentialism is a Disappointment

 

 

I. 

 

We all know Heidegger's magnificent response to Sartre's post-War declaration that l'existentialisme est un humanisme; let's just say he wasn't impressed [a]. But rather less well known is the effect it had on a generation of young French intellectuals who had previously adored the author of L'Être et le néant (1943). 

 

This generation includes Michel Tournier, whose recollection of this time is worth sharing at length as it perfectly illustrates the intense punk rock seriousness with which philosophy was then taken and how sexy and scandalous Sartre's phenomenological ontology appeared to be - before he sold out to humanism ...

 

 

II.  

 

"In the darkest days of the War, some of us, depressed by the oppressive restrictions, formed a small group united by a common idea of philosophy - a narrow, even fanatical idea that might well have gone in hand with tumbrils and the guillotine. I was foolishly about to write that Deleuze had been the 'soul' of this group when suddenly I had a vivid image of the brickbats and howls with which that hated word would have been greeted by the adolescents we were then. [...] In any case, Deleuze did set the tone of the group, and it was he who sustained our ardour." [b]

 

"One day in the autumn of 1943 a meteor of a book fell on to our desks: Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. After a moment's stupor there was a long mulling over [...] the book exuded irresistible power; it was full of exquisite subtleties, encyclopedic, proudly technical, with an intuition of diamondlike simplicity running through it from start to finish. Already the clamour of the anti-philosophical rabble could be heard rising in opposition in the press. [...] We were exultant. Like Socrates's disciples in fourth-century Athens or Hegel's students at Jena in 1805, we had the extraordinary good fortune of seeing a philosophy born before our very eyes." [131]  

 

"On October 28, 1945, Sartre called us together. It was a mob scene. An enormous crowd pressed against the walls of the tiny venue. The exits were blocked by those who had not managed to gain entry [...] and women who fainted had to be piled on a convenient grand piano. The wildly acclaimed lecturer was lifted bodily over the crowd and on to the podium. Such popularity should have alerted us. Already the suspect tag 'existentialism' had been attached to the new system. [...] So what was existentialism? We were soon to find out. Sartre's message could be stated in six words: existentialism is a form of humanism. [...] We were devastated. Our master had retrieved that exhausted old figure of Man, still stinking with sweat and 'inner life', from the rubbish heap where we had left him [...] And everyone applauded." [132]

 

"That night we gathered in a café to mourn our loss. One of us thought he had found the key to what went wrong in a novel that Sartre had published in 1938 called Nausea. [...] Suddenly it was all too clear [...] Sartre had [... become] the Autodidact. Around the table we were unanimous in our forecasts of disaster [...] And the future seemed to bear us out [...]" [132-33]

 

It should be noted that, looking back over thirty years later, Tournier is prepared to admit that the reaction experienced by himself and his philosophical comrades was probably a bit harsh:

 

"This reaction to Sartre should be taken for what it was: a liquidation of the father by overgrown adolescents afflicted with the awareness that they owed him everything. With hindsight I can see all the juvenile excess in our condemnation." [133]

 

However, Tournier then importantly qualifies this:

 

"Yet I cannot help thinking that it contained a grain of truth. Sartre seems always to have suffered from an excess of moral scruple. Acute fear [...] undeniably diminished his powers and his creative potential. I am convinced that one cannot live a full and healthy life without a minimum of indifference to the woes of others. [...] Sartre's misfortune was that [...] he was a Marxist who was never able to give up the secret ambition of becoming a saint." [133]

 

And with that Tournier sticks the boot into Sartre in an even more brutal manner than Heidegger ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] For those who don't know ... L'existentialisme est un humanisme (1946) is a text by Jean-Paul Sartre, based on a lecture of the same title given in Paris on 29 October 1945. 

      Invited by Jean Beaufret in November 1946 to comment on Sartre's work and the development of existentialism in France, Martin Heidegger composed a response known in English as the Letter on Humanism (revised for publication in 1947). In this text, Heidegger distanced himself from Sartre and dismissed his thought as merely a reversed form of metaphysics which is oblivious to the truth of Being. 

      Those who wish to read a transcript of Sartre's lecture for themselves can do so by clicking here. Heidegger's response is also available as a pdf online or can be found in his Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 2010). My reading of Heidegger's Letter on Humanism can be found here.

 

[b] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), p. 128. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the post. 

      Note that I have very slightly modified the translation by Goldhammer in places. The original French text was published as Le Vent Paraclet (Gallimard, 1977) and readers who (rightly) worry about issues of translation are free to consult this if they wish.       

 

Why Even an Anti-Christ Reads the Bible

Cartoon by Will McPhail

willmcphail.com

 

 

I.

 

Someone asks why it is that for a self-professed anti-Christ and atheist I seem to refer so often to the Bible. And I suppose it's a fair enough question (though I don't much care for the implication that I'm some kind of crypto-theologian).

 

Well, apart from the fact that it is always wise to know what one's enemies believe, the fact is that the Bible continues to play an important cultural role and has crucial significance in the work of many of the authors that I love most. 

 

Writers such as D. H. Lawrence, for example, whose work can be read as a prolonged struggle to (re-)interpret the Good Book in a very different spirit than that sanctioned by the Church. As one critic notes:

 

"His writing, at all stages of his career, contains frequent references to biblical characters and symbols while, even when not invoking any particular passage from the Bible, his language is permeated by the rhythms of the Authorised Version." [1]

 

 

II.

 

Michel Tournier is another writer who, by his own admission, was a great reader of the Bible - a book that he describes as a huge attic in which you can find pretty much everything you may need; a constant source of inspiration.

Like Lawrence, Tournier might also be said to perform a creative misreading of the Bible for his own (perverse) ends:

 

"Impatient with conventionally pious glosses, which are too often likely to support the puritanical status quo which he deplores, he reads the Bible against the grain [...] seeking other and more surprising meanings. Further than this, he will recast a story completely, to change its meaning, like a composer who writes variations on a well-known musical theme. If the variations are memorable, they may for ever affect the way we react to the original melody.

      This (mis)reading of the Bible is thus central to the production of meaning in Tournier's texts and in particular to the ethical and metaphysical reflections they develop." [2]

     

Again, like Lawrence, Tournier takes up the cross (i.e., the religious challenge presented by Jesus to imagine a new way of life), but he doesn't follow the latter; indeed, he loses Christ in order to find himself and his own way of being in the world. 

Both writers offer a disrespectful and disloyal reading of the Bible (some would say blasphemous); they treat it as "a corrupt text which needs to be interpreted and even reformulated" [3] in line with their own inner experience. 

 

Above all, what Lawrence and Tournier both desire is a version of the Bible which reinstates the body as central and "re-establishes the link between spiritual love (agape) and carnal love (eros)" [4].

 

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Lawrence's The Escaped Cock (1929), a short novel which, for me, is the culmination of his work, placing the Christian tradition back within a wider religious context and giving us a Jesus unafraid to come into touch and rejoice in the sensual world.    

 

As David Gascoigne writes (with reference to Tournier's fiction):

"The moral implications of placing the body back at the centre of religion in this way are far-reaching. All human appetites, even the basest, are open to spiritualisation: it is not just the soul, but the whole person which is saved." [5] 

This is the gospel according to D. H. Lawrence and Michel Tournier ... And to fully understand it, you will need to know your Bible ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See T. R. Wright, D. H. Lawrence and the Bible, (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 1.    

[2] David Gascoigne, Michel Tournier, (Berg, 1996), pp. 98-99. 

[3] Ibid., p. 119.

[4] Ibid. 

 

[5] Ibid., p. 120. 

Couscous with Rancid Butter: Thoughts on Charles Fourier

François Marie Charles Fourier 

(1772 - 1837)

 

Le bonheur consiste à avoir de nombreuses passions 

et de nombreux moyens pour les satisfaire. 

 

I. 

 

Antisemitic pervert, feminist, and founder of utopian socialism, Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was - to say the very least - an odd duck. 

 

Nevertheless, he inspired a diverse range of thinkers and writers with a queer politics of desire that portrays heteronormative civilisation as inherently repressive and imagines some kind of libidinal revolution in which we can all be free to not only fuck whom we want, but when we want, where we want, and how we want.  

 

It's a politics that I subscribed to at one time and still find vaguely attractive even now, despite living after the orgy in a transsexual world of ambient pornography from which the illusion of desire is absent [1]. 

 

And despite the fact that we never did get the lemonade seas we were promised ... 

 

II. 

In the 20th century, Fourier's seminal importance was widely acknowledged amongst those searching for a form of radical politics outside of the Marxist mainstream; figures including André Breton, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse all sang his praises. 

 

It seems clear that Michel Tournier was also writing (to some extent) under Fourier's influence, adapting the latter's rhetoric of sexual liberation for his own purposes. Like Fourier, Tournier privileges non-reproductive forms of eroticism and sticks up for the sexually deviant and marginalised (those whom the world often thinks of as monstrous). And like Fourier, he decries the social restraints and prescriptive norms that seek to regulate love and penalise pleasure.  

 

As one critic notes, for both of the above, "it is on the experence of the 'deviant' that a tolerant and humane social order must be based" [2]. However, whilst Fourier "provided a fantastic blueprint for the whole enterprise" [3], Tournier left details of this nouveau monde amoureux deliberately vague.

 

One suspects that, like D. H. Lawrence, Tournier realised that his role, as a novelist, is to help bring forth new feelings, not to suggest practical reforms [4]. And one can't help thinking he was probably wise to realise this. For as David Gascoigne reminds us, Fourier's "massive and whimsical elaboration of the structures of his ideal community are often so preposterous and parodical that they subvert systematisation even while mimicking it" [5].      

 

 

III.

 

I think my favourite text on Fourier remains that written by Roland Barthes [6]. It's many years since I read this essay and have doubtless forgotten some of the finer points regarding Fourier as a logothete, but I do recall Barthes opening with some très amusant remarks about couscous served with rancid butter. 

 

According to Barthes, the goal of Fourier's project was quite simple: to remake the world (via an obsessive form of writing) for the sake of pleasure. Never mind justice and equality; it's pleasure that counts for Fourier. And not pleasure conceived in a eudaemonic manner (i.e., as a form of ethical behaviour that produces wellbeing), but sensual pleasure that results in actual happiness and what Fourier terms Harmony.

 

The kind of pleasure we find in amorous freedom, fabulous wealth, and those other delights that are often condemned as forms of vice. Fourier dreamed of a world of fine weather, perfect melons, and little spiced cakes; a world in which one can enjoy the company of lesbians and there is no longer any normality.

 

As Barthes points out, this coexistence of passions isn't simply another form of liberalism and Fourier doesn't wish to unite people in the name of humanism: 

 

"It is not a matter of bringing together everyone with the same mania [...] so that they can be comfortable together and can enchant each other by narcissistically gazing at one another; on the contrary, it is a matter of associating to combine, to contrast. [...] There is no noble demand to 'understand', to 'admit' the passions of others (or to ignore them, indeed). The goal of Harmony is neither to further the conflict (by associating through similitude), nor to reduce it (by sublimating, sweetening, or normalizing the passions), nor yet to transcend it (by 'understanding' the other person), but to exploit it for the greatest pleasure of all and without hindrance to anyone." [7].

Ultimately, I don't quite know what to make of M. Fourier - the original 24-hour party person, for whom no day is ever long enough for all the merry assignations and pleasures it promises ... 

 

Ultimately, his erotic utopia in which everyone fucks forever sounds exhausting and one thinks again of Baudrillard's story of the porn star on set who turns to one of the other actors and asks: What are you doing after the orgy? 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm using concepts developed by Jean Baudrillard. His argument is that signs and images have erased all secrets and ambiguity, making sex transparent and, at best, something that is simply acted out over and over again with a kind of ironic indifference, or a sense of nostalgia. Whilst we might perhaps challenge this, I think it certainly fair to say (as Michel Houellebecq says): We're a long way from Wuthering Heights.

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

     The line from Houellebecq is from his first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), trans. into English as Whatever by Paul Hammond, (Serpents Tail, 1998) and refers to the progressive effacement of human relationships and passions.       

 

[2] and [3] David Gascoigne, Michel Tournier, (Berg, 1996), p. 91.

 

[4] The passage in D. H. Lawrence that I'm thinking of is this one:

 

"As a novelist, I feel it is the change inside the individual which is my real concern. The great social change interests me and troubles me, but it is not my field. I know a change is coming - I know we must have a more generous, more human system, based on the life values and not on the money values. That I know. But what steps to take I don't know. Other men know better."

 

See: 'The State of Funk', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge Universty Press, 2004), p. 221. 

 

[5] David Gascoigne, Michel Tournier, op. cit., pp. 92-93. 

 

[6] Roland Barthes's essay on Fourier can be found in the much underrated study, Sade / Fourier / Loyola, trans. Richard Miller, (University of California Press, 1989), pp. 76-120.  

 

[7] Ibid., pp. 99-100. 

 

 

For another recent post on Fourier, click here.  

Additional Thoughts on Síomón Solomon's 'The Atonement of Lesley Ann'

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego 

by Simeon Solomon (1863)

 

 

I.

 

Síomón Solomon's The Atonement of Lesley Ann (2020) - a theatrical ghost-cum-love story (based on actual events) - continues to haunt my imagination ... [1]

 

After reading and re-reading the script (kindly given to me by the author) over the Christmas and New Year period, it has suddenly triggered thoughts of Stockhausen's seminal work Gesang der Jünglinge (1955-56) [2], which, like Solomon's play, features the voice of a child which it seamlessly integrates with electronic sounds, creating a new (and rather terrifying) listening experience.  

It's possible that Solomon was hoping to create something similar with his use of music and audio effects including police sirens, radio static, and the howling wind of Saddleworth Moor. However, without attending a performance of the work one cannot say how successful he is in this. 

 

 

II.      

 

Gesang der Jünglinge is based on mytho-biblical events described in the Book of Daniel [3], wherein the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar throws three young Jews - Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego [4] - into a super-heated furnace after they refuse to bow down to a giant golden statue made in his image. 

 

Miraculously, they are unharmed and are heard singing praises to God who has sent an angel to protect them from the flames, transforming their intense heat into a cool dawn breeze [5]. Naturally astounded by what he has witnessed, Nebuchadnezzar commands his people to henceforth worship Yahweh, God of the Jews, and he appoints the three holy youths to high office. 

 

 

III.

 

According to Michel Tournier, it was Gesang der Jünglinge that he repeatedly listened to whilst writing Le Roi des aulnes (1970) [6] - not Schubert's Erlkönig (1815) as many might imagine - and he explains that his novel and Stockhausen's composition share a similar terrible logic that requires the sacrifice (or murder) of small children and the presence of an ogre ...

 

If you listen to Gesang der Jünglinge, says Tournier, what is most striking is that only pre-pubescent voices can be heard and that the joyful and triumphant end of the Bible story is of no interest whatsoever to Stockhausen:  

 

"He keeps only the sound of crystalline voices rising out of the torture of the flames. Bodies tortured in the fire are represented by voices tortured in a thousand ways by sophisticated electronic devices. Voices? In fact there is only one voice, electronically multiplied by repeated recording overdubbed upon itself; the child sings in chorus with himself. Children, torture from which there is no escape, a single voice overdubbed upon itself - in all these ways Stockhausen's piece resembles The Erl-King." [7]   

 

And in these ways also both the above works feel strangely present in The Atonement of Lesley Ann ...

 

Notes

 

[1] For an earlier post written on this work by Síomón Solomon, please click here. And for further thoughts, click here.

 

[2] Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge ('Song of the Youths') brought together the two (previously opposing) worlds of German elektronische Musik and the French musique concrète. Those who wish to listen to the astonishing result, can click here.  

 

[3] See the Book of Daniel, 3: click here for the King James Version of the story or here for the New International Version. 

 

It is generally accepted amongst modern scholars that the Book of Daniel originated as a collection of stories among the Jewish community in Babylon and Mesopotamia in the Persian and early Hellenistic periods (5th to 3rd centuries BCE), expanded by the visions of chapters 7-12 in the Maccabean era (mid-2nd century). It is also agreed that Daniel is a legendary rather than a purely historical figure.   

 

[4] These are the Babylonian (or Chaldean) names that the three Jewish children were given; their original Hebrew names were Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. 

 

[5] In Christian interpretations of this story, the angel is in fact Jesus and he is depicted in icongraphy with a cross upon his halo. The story thus has great significance for members of the Christian faith.

 

[6] Michel Tournier, Le Roi des aulnes (Éditions Gallimard, 1970). Translated into English as The Erl-King, by Barbara Bray, (Atlantic Books, 2014).   

 

[7] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), pp. 104-05. Note, I have slightly modified the translation from the original French text, Le vent Paraclet, (Éditions Gallimard, 1977). 

On Initiating Youth into the Democracy of Touch

Some youths playing football as imagined by D. H. Lawrence 

in a water colour entitled Spring (1929)

 

 

When D. H. Lawrence writes of the inspiration of touch, he is clearly thinking of how desire invests the lives of adult men and women, involving as it does, amongst other things, "the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love" [1].

 

Nevertheless, this former school teacher was vitally interested in the education of the young and would doubtless have wanted to see children and adolescents initiated (or groomed) into his phallic-utopian new order, so that from an early age they too might learn to substantiate the mystery of touch and form a direct relationship with all things. 

 

The fact that children and adolescents are often denied intimacy with one another is something that also concerned the French author Michel Tournier. Like Lawrence, he argued that youngsters should be allowed (and, indeed, encouraged to experience) physical contact with the bodies of others and that our primary human need is for touch. 

 

Before eyebrows could be raised, however, and accusations begin to fly, Tournier quickly added:

 

"When I speak of physical contact, I mean of course something far more vast and more primitive than erotic games and sexual relations, which are merely a special case." [2]

 

Tournier was also keen to counter those who think that by giving children toys or pet animals to play with we can conveniently sublimate their desire for the forming of close physical and emotional bonds:

 

"Everyone likes to say that young children like to play with dolls and teddy bears, and sometimes they are permitted to play with small animals. It is also commonly said, however, that dogs like bones. The truth is that dogs gnaw on bones when they have nothing else, but you can take my word for it, they would prefer a good cut of steak or a nice veal cutlet. As for children, it is quite simply a dreadful thing that we toss them dolls and animals in order to assuage their need for a warm, living body. Of course sailors on long voyages sometimes avail themselves of inflatable rubber females, and lonely shepherds in the mountains have been known to mount a lamb or goat. But children are neither sailors nor shepherds and do not lack for human company. Their distress is the invention of a fiercely anti-physical society, of a mutilating, castrating culture, and there is no question that many character disorders, violent outbursts, and cases of juvenile drug addiction are consequences of the physical desert into which the child and adolescent are customarily banished in our society." [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Version 2 of Lady Chatterley's Lover, in The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 323. 

 

[2] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Albert Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), p. 15.

[3] Ibid., pp. 16-17. 

 

 

Michel Tournier on Education 2: Erotic Religiosity

It is not enough to love the young; 

they must know that they are loved - St. Don Bosco

 

 

I. 

 

I closed part one of this post [click here] mourning the fact that only rarely in an age of remote learning do teachers and their students form those close bonds that were common when education was about initiation in the old aristocratic sense of the term (i.e. becoming a good human being and member of society), rather than instruction in the modern bourgeois sense (i.e., becoming someone with the skills and knowledge valued by employers).

 

Perhaps, I tentatively suggested, we need to radically rethink the question of education and reintroduce an element of erotic religiosity back into the classroom; whether this be modelled on classical Greek lines, Loyola's order of Jesuits, or even upon Lawrentian lines in terms of the democracy of touch, is something that would obviously have to be discussed carefully and at length [a].

 

 

II.

 

The French writer Michel Tournier seems to favour the Catholic model, if only because this is the one with which he is most familiar. 

 

In his autobiography [b], he tells us that the two schools that occupy a special place in his memory among the dozen or so he attended in the course of a "chaotic scholastic career" [47], were both religious institutions; Saint Erembert's in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Saint Francis's School in Alençon. Each were far more successful than their secular counterparts "in preserving the initiatory aspects of education" [47].

 

Tournier explains what it was about Catholicism that particularly appealed to his youthful self and how this inclined him in later years towards the study of philosophy:

 

"The Catholic religion, with its rituals, holy days, theology, and mythology, served as a marvelous emotional counterweight to mathematics and the natural sciences, a counterweight without which the child or adolescent is afflicted by a sense of dryness and aridity. In any case, I cannot separate my memory of the theology [...] from the sumptuousness of ritual. Dunce that I was, I found in religious history and catechism an anticipation of what I later discovered in metaphysics: concrete speculation inextricably intertwined with powerful and brilliant imagery. For metaphysics is nothing other than the rigour of mathematics wedded to the richness of poetry." [47]   

Not that Tournier was smitten with other aspects of Catholicism: "I had little use for the bludgeon of dogma or for the zombie-like obedience and faith of the humble." [47] This is probably why he became a novelist and not a priest. He appreciated the fact that the Church initiated the child into a world that was both spiritual and sensual; a world that granted access to all - not just members of the nobility - to poetry, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture.

Alas, the institutionalised clergy also has another face, hideous, hypocritical, and hateful ...

"Having lost its temporal power, the Church signed on as handmaiden to the most constricted, conservative element of the bourgeoisie, whose interests and ideas it ardently adopted as its own. It continued to draw its teachings from the Gospel, but from the words of the Pharisees rather than those of Jesus. In other words, it began to preach respect for social hierarchies, money, and power as well as hatred of sexuality." [48-49] 

For Tournier, it's simple: in teaching a false morality (conservative and anti-erotic), the Church cannot possibly initiate the young into the good life. In a manner similar to D. H. Lawrence, he dreams of a Jesus fully resurrected in the flesh:

 

"Fear of the flesh has made the crucifix - a corpse nailed to two pieces of wood - the centre of Catholic worship in preference to all other Christian symbols [...] The Church has resolutely set its face against the dogma of resurrection in the flesh and attempts to ignore the fact that whenever Jesus encountered sexuality - even in the antisocial forms of prostitution and adultery - he defended it against the wrath of the Pharisees. [...] Prudes are ugly and impute their own ugliness to love, but when they spit on it, they spit on themselves. Loved and celebrated in those we love, the flesh is as radiant as that of Jesus on Mount Tabor." [49-50] [c]

 

Tournier continues:

 

"Sumptuous, subtle, and erotic - such is the initiatory Church of which I dream when I think back on how my childhood might have been. I thank my stars that the Church that actually raised me only partially betrayed that ideal." [50]

 

Sadly, those days are now remote - Tournier was born almost a hundred years ago (in 1924) - and secular education has pretty much triumphed:

 

"The revolution begun by the men of the Enlightenment is now complete. Emotional bonds, personal and possibly erotic relationships, pose no further danger of polluting the aseptic atmosphere of the classroom. Education, cleansed of every last vestige of initiation, has been reduced to nothing more than a dispenser of useful and saleable knowledge. Already computers are taking the place of teachers [...]" [50]     

But still the heart beats and the flesh quivers ... And tomorrow is another day ...

 

Notes

 

[a] I am aware of the danger that initiation can collapse into indoctrination and that models of pedagogy that flirt with ideals of pederasty can often serve as an apologetics for the sexual abuse of minors. In replacing modern teachers with tutors and mentors who care about more than exam results, we don't want to end up appointing orgres to the classroom (or even dangerous women like Miss Brodie). 

      On the other hand, if you banish the warm and magical aspect of education entirely from the official curriculum and prohibit all forms of amorous relations in the classroom, then you can be certain they will develop elsewhere and often in guises you wouldn't anticipate.    

         

[b] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989). All page references given in the post refer to this work. 

 

[c] As Deleuze notes: "A certain number of 'visionaries' have opposed Christ as an amorous person to Christianity as a mortuary enterprise." See 'Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos', in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, (Verso, 1998), p. 37.  

Michel Tournier on Education 1: Initiation contra Instruction

Ivor Fox: The Initiation (c. 1950) 

Oil on board 

 

 

I've asked it before and I'll ask it again: What is education all about? 

 

I don't think government ministers or even those working in the teaching profession can answer this question with any real confidence. Thus it is that we have to turn to our philosophers and writers to find an answer ...

 

D. H. Lawrence, for example, made a bold attempt to address this question in a long essay entitled 'Education of the People' (1920); an important text that I have discussed elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark [a]. 

 

More recently, the French author Michel Tournier had a crack in his intellectual autobiography, Le Vent Paraclet (1977), arguing that education can be thought either in terms of initiation or instruction:

"Education in the broad sense of the word prepares a child to enter society and to occupy his place in it. In all times and places it appears to come in two forms, one moral, emotional, indeed magical, the other purely intellectual and rational. The first is called initiation, the second instruction. [...]

      Of course these two components of education assume many guises, and their importance varies. My view is quite simply that, historically, the relative importance of initiation has been diminishing compared with that of instruction and that for some time now this has passed the point of being harmful." [b]

 

Beginning in the eighteenth century, says Tournier, there was a bourgeois-Romantic attack launched upon the classical, aristocratic model of education "dispensed primarily by the Jesuit schools" [44]. Such a model was said to lack relevance in the age of commerce, industry, science and technology. What's the point of a man knowing about Ancient Athens and Rome, if he is incapable of earning his living in the modern world?    

"Behind these indictments (echoes of which can still be heard today in strictures against the teaching of Latin and Greek) lies a lack of understanding that comes close to bad faith. The critics pretend that the Jesuits' instruction was intended to equip the child with the knowledge needed to become a merchant, manufacturer, sailor, or government official. Had that been its purpose, it would have indeed fallen far short of its goal! But to begin with, the Jesuits were educating young aristocrats, who did not need to become scholars in order to succeed. High birth was enough. But they were also supposed to be human beings, and the education they were offered was supposed to help them toward that end. Here we touch on the crux of the misunderstanding that arose in this period between the 'ancients' and the 'moderns'. For the aristocrat, the child was not a full-fledged human being. He was a little animal, dirty, vicious, and stupid, on the whole rather contemptible. Education was supposed to make him presentable. The Jesuits were concerned not with enriching the child's mind and preparing him for a career but with shaping his moral being. Toward that end they caused him to live in a wholly unreal world in which people spoke only Latin [...] In other words, initiation was much more important than instruction in this version of education. But the moderns had no notion what this initiation was all about, and they actively opposed it. For them, the child was not wicked but simply uninformed. His mind was a blank page upon which knowledge had to be inscribed. Whereas the only ambition of earlier educators was to conduct the child from an animal state to a human one, the moderns wished to enrich his mind with science and technology, tools with which to make his fortune ..." [45-46]  

I don't know if this is true or not, but I find this passage fascinating. As I do the one which follows: 

"This crisis, which began in the eighteenth century, appears to have been a turning point in the history of education, as moral initiation gradually lost out to practical instruction. Since that time, the initiatory function of education has steadily diminished, and we are now witnessing the elimination of the few vestiges that remain. First to go was corporal punishment, which established a sadomasochistic bond between teachers and pupils, followed by religious instruction and confession, which established a similar bond at a spiritual level. More recently, Greek, Latin, philosophy, and literature have been stricken from the curriculum as obviously superfluous nonsense. All traces of humanity must be eliminated from the classroom so that the 'heartless teacher' [...] can inoculate his students exclusively with knowledge deemed to be of practical use." [46-47]

This final line is particularly resonant in an age in which schools are repeatedly (and now almost routinely) closed on the pretext of a virus presently doing the rounds, and more and more teaching is done remotely via a screen - or online, as we like to say. 

 

"Only rarely and with a feeling of illicitness" [47], says Tournier, do students and teachers now form close relations and, in some cases, life-long bonds of friendship. 

 

Perhaps, therefore, we need to radically rethink the question of education and - dare one say it - introduce an erotico-religious (or initiatory) element back into the classroom ... An idea I will develop in part two of this post: click here.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambrdge University Press, 1988), pp.85-166. 

      

Recent posts on Torpedo the Ark that discuss this essay include 'Back to School in the Age of Coronavirus' and 'Education, Education, Education à la D. H. Lawrence'.

 

[2] Michel Tournier, Le Vent Paraclet, (Éditions Gallimard, 1977). I am quoting here, obviously, from the English edition, translated as The Wind Spirit by Arthur Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), p. 43. Following page references to this text will be given directly in the post.     

I Don't Care if Monday's Blue ...

(John Hopkins University Press, 1997)

 

I.

 

Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (1967) is a novel by French writer Michel Tournier [a]. A philosophically-informed retelling of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), it subverts the original narrative and, according to Deleuze, "traces a genesis of perversion" [b]. 

 

Crusoe's attempt to transform his little island into a regular, well-organised home-from-home - "like one of those great tidy cupboards" [8] full of lavender-scented linen - fails when he discovers, thanks to his relationship with Friday, that there are other ways of living than those valued within white European society. 

 

Whether these ways are more natural, more authentic, or more vital, is, of course, open to debate. Personally, I'm not sure I buy into this anti-civilisation line any longer and doubt that there's all that much to learn from primitive peoples. And besides, I cannot gather at the drum any longer in good faith [c] and have no wish to wallow in the mire, roll in the damp warmth of my own excrement, or engage in savage acts of ritual atrocity. I'm not even interested in skinning a goat and making a wind harp from its dried entrails. 

 

For just as you don't reach the body without organs and its plane of consistency by wildly destratifying, sometimes it's preferable to exercise caution and remain all too human, than become-other or become-animal just for the fun of it. As Deleuze and Guattari were always at pains to point out, staying organized, signified, subjected so that you may still respond to the dominant reality, is not the worst thing in the world [d].      

 

Certain anarchists think we can do away with rules and regulations - just as certain gymnosophists think we can dispense with clothes. But as Crusoe discovers, keeping up appearances and forming habits of behaviour, are "sovereign remedies against the demoralizing effects of solitude" [76] - although later he abandons his old ways for a kind of solar pantheism. 

 

 

II.

 

Friday appears about half-way through the novel and Crusoe's first instinct is to shoot him as he flees his Araucanian captors before they make a sacrifice of him, by chopping up his body and burning it. 

 

Pursued by two men, Friday is running directly towards the spot in which Crusoe has been hiding and observing events on the beach, presenting the latter with a moral problem:

 

"If he shot down one of the pursuers he might rouse the whole tribe against him. On the other hand, if he shot the sacrificial victim it might be interpreted as a supernatural act, the intervention of an outraged divinity. He had to take one side or the other, being indifferent to both, and prudence counseled that he should support the stronger. He aimed at the breast of the fugitive, who was now very close ... [135].

 

Unfortunately, Tenn the dog decides to leap up and divert Crusoe's aim. And so Friday is saved and it was "the first of the pursuers who staggered and fell to the ground. The man behind him stopped, bent over the dying body, stared blankly for a moment at the trees, and finally turned and fled wildly back to his companions." [135]

 

And so, purely by accident, Crusoe ends up with a "naked and panic-stricken black man" [135] pressing his forehead to the ground and placing the foot of a "bearded and armed white man, clad in goatskin and a bonet of fur, accoutered with the trappings of three thousand years of Western civilization" [135] on his neck.     

 

Now, no one in their right mind wants a slave: the responsibility of being a master is exhausting and quickly makes one ill-tempered and often cruel. It's bad enough having any kind of dependent - a child, an elderly parent, a pet cat, but a slave offering total submission is just too much trouble. And so, Crusoe makes a big mistake taking on Friday. 

 

His second big mistake is trying to reform Friday and teach him all the white man's tricks; how to plough and sow, milk goats, make cheese, soft-boil eggs, trap vermin, dig ditches, wear clothes, etc. For Friday, with the slave's natural insolence, simply laughs at his his sober-minded mentor and undermines his authority on every occasion.      

 

Ultimately, he ruins everything that it had taken Crusoe years to build - literally stopping the clocks and blowing everything sky-high with gunpowder. And it was all so predictable. Friday causes Crusoe grave concern from the off: "Not merely did he fail to fit harmoniously into the system, but, an alien presence, he even threatened to destroy it." [156] 

 

But Crusoe simply can't bring himself to do what he needs to do in order to preserve the fragile victory of order over chaos that he had accomplised - not even after Friday fucks Speranza and produces mandrakes of his own from this illicit union. In fact, it's following this that Crusoe has a moment of biblical-inspired revelation:

 

"For the first time I asked myself if I had not sinned gravely against Charity in seeking by every means to compel Friday to submit to the laws of the cultivated island, since in doing so I proclaimed my preference, over my coloured brother, for the earth shaped by my own hands." [160] 

 

It's this kind of Christian moral stupidity that undermines all mastery. Crusoe forces himself to conceal his vexation, swallow his pride, and henceforth learn to love Friday, forgiving him his ways even when they are profoundly shocking (such as his cruel indifference to the suffering of animals): "For the first time he questioned his white man's sensibilities" [163] and values.  

 

Of course, there are moments when Crusoe pulls himself together and he feels nothing but rage and hatred as he thinks of "the ravages caused by Friday in the smooth functioning of the island, the ruined crops, the wasted stores, and scattered herds; the vermin that multiplied and prospered, the tools that were broken or mislaid" [164]. Friday even steals his tobacco. 

 

Sometimes, Crusoe dreams of Friday's death; be it the result of natural causes, accident, or foul play. But at other times, the new Robinson adores Friday's physical beauty and delights in his nakedness; he observed with a passionate interest "Friday's every act and their effect upon himself, which seemed to lead toward an astonishing metamorphosis" [182]. 

 

Crusoe lets his hair grow into long tangled locks and, encouraged by Friday, he goes naked in the sun until his flesh takes on a deep, golden-copper colour. He has effectively gone native - or become-minoritarian as some might say [e]. 

 

That's certainly a goal for those who want it and Crusoe is clearly proud of the great change he has undergone via his relationship with Friday - "Under his influence [...] I have travelled the road of a long and painful metamorphosis" [210] - but, for me, it holds no appeal: I don't care if Monday's blue, I have no wish to become-Friday ...

  

III. 

 

The irony, of course, is that Friday jumps at the first opportunity to get off the island and abandon Crusoe; he does everything he can to ingratiate himself with the crew of the Whitebird so that he is taken aboard and transported to England. 

 

In other words, he knows where his best interests lie; in the very civilisation that Crusoe rejects. Having said that, Tournier will later make it clear that he thinks this a grave mistake on Friday's part; a decision that will mark his downfall. 

 

For, according to Tournier, unsmiling Europeans live in "glass cages of reserve, coldness, and self-containment" [f] and have an obsessive distrust of the flesh. Thus, a happy-go-lucky aeolian spirit like Friday will never find a home amongst such people ...     

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The English edition of this work which I'll be referring to and quoting from throughout this post is simply entitled Friday, trans. Norman Denny, (John Hopkins University Press, 1997).    

[b] Gilles Deleuze, letter to Jean Piel (27 August, 1966), in Letters and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2020), p. 31. Deleuze will later describe Tournier's work as a great novel - a view shared by l'Académie française which awarded it the Grand Prix du roman in 1967.

 

[c] Despite his fascination (and, indeed, identification) with primitive cultures, D. H. Lawrence came precisely to this conclusion. In the essay 'Indians and an Englishman', he writes: 

 

"The voice out of the far-off time was not for my ears. It's language was unknown to me. And I did not wish to know. [...] It was not for me, and I knew it. Nor had I any curiosity to understand. The soul is as old as the oldest day, and has its own hushed echoes, its own far-off tribal understandings sunk and incorporated. We do not need to live the past over again. Our darkest tissues are twisted in this old tribal experience, our warmest blood came out of the old tribal fire. And they vibrate still in answer, our blood, our tissue. But me, the conscious me, I have gone a long road since then. [...]

      I don't want to live again the tribal mysteries my blood has lived long since. I don't want to know as I have known, in the tribal exclusiveness. [...] I know my derivation. I was born of no virgin, of no Holy Ghost. Ah no, these old men telling the tribal tale were my fathers. [...]  But I stand on the far edge of their fire light [...] My way is my own, old red father; I can't cluster at the drum any more." 

 

See Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 119-120. Critics will doubtless point out that this model of human cultural evolution subscribed to by Lawrence - advancing from dark-skinned tribal society to white-skinned modernity - is certainly questionable (if not inherently racist).    

 

[d] See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996), pp. 160-61.  

[e] I have written about Crusoe's becoming-minoritarian via his relationship with Friday in an earlier post. See 'On the Sex Life of Robinson Crusoe 3: Becoming the Perverted Sun Angel' [click here]. 

[f] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), p. 185.

      Later, in this same work, Tournier reveals that he had wanted to dedicate his novel "to all of France's immigrant workers, to those silent masses of Fridays shipped to Europe from the third world [...] on whom our society depends". And, just in case his political sympathies (and self-loathing) weren't already clear enough, he adds: "Our affluent society relies on these people; it has set its fat white buttocks down on their brown bodies and reduced them to absolute silence [...] They are a muzzled but vital population, a barely tolerated yet totally indispensable part of our society, and the only genuine proletariat that exists ..." Ibid., p. 197

      For a counterview to this way of thinking, see Pascal Bruckner's The Tears of the White Man, trans. William R. Beer, (Free Press/Macmillan, 1986) and/or The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, trans. Steven Rendell, (Princeton University Press, 2010). For my take on the latter text, click here.