Hanging on the Telephone

Mr Watson - come here - I want to see you ...

These days, when everyone and their dog has a smartphone, the idea that an old-fashioned landline might once have seemed a real novelty and something of a luxury item, seems ludicrous. But, as this Polaroid of my father taken in the early 1970s shows, that's how it was; the installation of a home phone was a big deal; an event, indeed, worth getting dressed up for.

Not that my father cared about new technology or status symbols: we were one of the last households on Harold Hill to get a colour TV or a telephone line and, much to my mother's chagrin, we never did own a car (my father couldn't drive and had no interest in learning).

I'm convinced, therefore, that the posing of this picture was my mother's idea. I very much doubt there was anyone on the other end and struggle to recall an occasion on which my father ever picked up the handset again. And, always worried about the expense, of course my mother didn't allow me or my sister to use it either. The phone was strictly for show and emergencies.   

Perhaps this explains my own reluctance to make or take calls. I wouldn't go so far as to describe my aversion as a phobia, nor do I consider it a form of social anxiety. But, nevertheless, I've always hated conducting a conversation with a distant, disembodied, and virtual voice. Not only do I find it boring, but have what might be termed philosophical issues ... 

Thus, I'm far happier texting or emailing than speaking on the blower - much to the irritation of certain friends (sorry Zed). Indeed, if truth be told, I still very much miss the writing and receiving of letters. The sound of something coming through the letter box is infinitely preferable to the persistent (and intrusive) ringing of a telephone.

(It's worth noting that even Alexander Graham Bell refused to have a dog at home, considering it an unwelcome and unnecessary distraction.)

On Compassion Fatigue

Compassion Fatigue (2014) by Ashley Reaks

As a full-time carer for an elderly parent, 92, with Alzheimer's, I'm intrigued by - and potentially at risk from - secondary traumatic stress (STS), or, as it's commonly known, compassion fatigue; a condition characterized by a gradual hardening of the heart and increased indifference to suffering.

For the fact is, nothing is limitless - not even love - and, sooner or later, everyone involved in providing care for the sick, the vulnerable, the poor, the feckless, or the otherwise needy and dependent, reaches the limits of their patience and concern (even if they are professionally trained to work with such people and cope with traumatic conditions).

It's little wonder then that the highest idealism often results in the most grotesque forms of abuse; for in the end, caring makes sadists of us all ... As does the endless moral insistence by the liberal elite that we in the West should assume responsibility for the entire world.

Arguably, it's not people like Donald Trump and Matteo Salvini who are inuring ordinary people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty, as some suggest. Rather, ironically, it's the bleeding-heart news media that has caused widespread compassion fatigue by constantly broadcasting graphic images of starving children, drowning migrants, and the victims of catastrophic natural events, making us all feel helpless and hopeless and, ultimately, resentful.
      

Desensitised and depressed by global suffering, it's understandable that many people eventually think fuck 'em and look away, deaf to all further cries for help, or appeals to their charity.

And it's this, I think, that explains the rise of populism; figures on the so-called alt-right understand how tired and fed up and anxious and angry people are already feeling, in a way that those on the self-righteous left refuse to. 


Note: this post was partly written in response to an article by the Irish journalist Fintan O'Toole in The Irish Times (26 June, 2018): click here to read online. Many thanks to Simon Solomon for bringing this piece to my attention.

Always Pet a Cat When You Encounter One

The mysterious black cat in my backgarden

It would be easy to mock controversial clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson and his 12 Rules for Life; a work in which he offers a series of 'profound and practical principles' that enable readers to combat the suffering and chaos that is intrinsic to human existence and construct meaningful - though not necessarily happy - lives.

Indeed, John Crace has already provided a magnificent spoof of the above in a digested read which appeared in The Guardian shortly after the book's publication in January of this year. I doubt that I could better this comical critique, which, to his credit, even Peterson found very amusing. Nor am I going to try.

Rather, I'm writing here to praise Peterson, whom I admire and respect - even if I don't necessarily share his moral-political views, or his quest to identify eternal truths and archetypal patterns of behaviour.

For one thing, he's very intelligent and very articulate. He also seems to be courageous; a man prepared to take a stand and fight for what he feels to be right, no matter who this might upset or offend. I also think he's good-looking and that always helps. But what really won me over was an experience I had a few days ago with a black cat that came into the garden ...      

She was very friendly and clearly wanted to be stroked; so much so, that she even followed me from the garden into the kitchen, where she allowed herself to be petted (and fed) by the Little Greek. Even my mother - who doesn't feel comfortable around cats or much like animals in general - was charmed by this beautiful stranger who had come visit from out of nowhere and bring a few moments of joy. 

And so, it seems that Peterson's Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one, is worth serious consideration.

I certainly agree that it's often the smallest of things and the briefest of moments that seem to matter most in life - i.e., those redemptive elements of being that spontaneously arise when we least expect them amidst all the relentless horror and suffering and banality of everday existence. Peterson's right: you have to enjoy these soul-sustaining things and opportunities when you can.

Of course, just because he's right here, it doesn't automatically validate or legitimise his other eleven points. But I'll leave it to others, however, to assess the truth value of propositions that include Stand up straight (Rule 1) and Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world (Rule 6).   

See:

Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, (Allen Lane, 2018). Click here to watch Peterson discuss Rule 12 concerning the cat with Dave Rubin.

John Crace, '12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B Peterson - digested read', The Guardian (28 Jan. 2018): click here.

Fresh Air Contra Central Heating

I remember being introduced from an early age to something my mother called fresh air and which she seemed to hold in the highest possible regard, as if, for her, a cold draught signified the veritable presence of the Holy Spirit. She would fling open the bedroom windows and the back door - whatever the weather, whatever the temperature - as if fulfilling a daily religious duty. 

In this way, I learnt to equate being healthy and being righteous with exposure to a cool breeze blowing down the back of my neck and quickly grew to hate warm, stuffy rooms with windows closed and the radiators turned up high.  

Later, this obsession with ventilation was reinforced by a neo-primitive form of pagan vitalism. Like Lawrence, I resented all those things - such as central heating and double glazing - that intervened between me and what I thought of as life; the naked forces of the latter being something that had to be experienced directly in order to be authentic. 

This meant, for example, that when a large hole appeared in the roof of the house in which I was living in Leeds, I saw it as an opportunity to admire the stars in the night sky and allow in a little more fresh air, rather than as something in need of urgent repair. Eventually, the bathroom ceiling fell through and I remember sitting in a tub amused as snowflakes fell upon the soap suds.             

But this, of course, was a long time ago and I've since tempered my ascetic idealism and learned to accept many of the conveniences provided by the modern world. It turns out that having frozen fingers doesn't make you a better writer after all and the demand for fresh air can itself become a stale obsession.  

Indeed, even Lawrence discovered during his final days spent living in the South of France that there's something to be said for indoor plumbing after all. For as his biographer David Ellis reminds us, Lawrence was obliged due to ill health to make a number of compromises:

"Central heating was a major concession on his part. Only a few years before, he had been sarcastic about those who turned up the radiator [...] For them, he had felt, there was no vivid relationship with the living universe; they had allowed technology to intervene between themselves and physical reality, numbing and atrophying their senses."       

The son of a miner, Lawrence loved the magical glow of a coal fire; but not the suffocating false heat provided by pipes.

Not, that is, until failing health eroded such long held principles and prejudices, just as mild-mannered middle-age destroyed such in my case (although, in my heart, I still maintain a degree of kontempt for those who happily conform to an easy life founded upon those words beginning with the letter C ... Comfort ... Convenience ... and yes, even Christmas). 

See: David Ellis, Death and the Author, (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 6. 

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.

Picture at the Top of the Stairs

Perhaps not surprisingly, my mother doesn't remember where, when, or even why she came into possession of the above print by 20thC French landscape painter Georges Robin. All she knows is that she's had it since her early married days - perhaps it was even a wedding gift - and that it has hung on the landing for over sixty years.

As a painting, with its lovely soft colours, it has a simple charm I suppose. But as an object that has hung on the wall at the top of the stairs for my entire life, I loathe it. For, like Lawrence, whilst I'm perfectly happy to regard pictures as a crucial element of interior decoration, I have a problem with "some mediocre thing left over from the past, that hangs on the wall just because we've got it, and it must go somewhere".

And, like Lawrence, I do think it necessary to destroy old things that rob a home of freshness. Spring cleaning isn't enough; it takes more than a good dust and polish to stop a home feeling stale and oppressive. We must actively renew the household, just as we must freshen up our wardrobe from time to time. For a home, says Lawrence, is only a greater garment subject to changing fashions.

Of course, it's not only fashions that change - we change too "in the slow metamorphosis of time" and our homes should reflect this fact; changing as we change. Some things - beds, wardrobes and other items of heavy furniture - might last us for decades, but decorative items, including wall pictures as well as cushions and curtains, should change far more frequently; for it is inevitable that these objects will begin to become stale after a couple of years.

This is particularly important for people who, like the English, spend so much time indoors; "our interiors must live, must change, must have their seasons of fading and renewing, must come alive to fit the new moods, the new sensations, the new selves that come to pass in us with the changing years", writes Lawrence.

He continues: "Dead and dull permanency in the home, dreary sameness, is a form of inertia ... very harmful to the modern nature, which is in a state of flux, sensitive to its surroundings far more than we really know."

And pictures - be they original paintings, prints, posters, or photographs - "are in some way the key to the atmosphere of a room". Leave up drab images and it really doesn't matter how gay the colour of your curtains. The only solution is to burn them - frames and all!  

Having said that, I don't, of course, have the heart to take down the only picture my mother has ever owned; something that must have fascinated and delighted her as a young woman starting married life in a home of her own.

And besides, even dead things can still give a posthumous sentimental pleasure - something which Lawrence undervalues I think, subscribing as he does to a form of inflammatory aesthetic vitalism in which the living moment is everything and nostalgia counts for nothing. 


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Pictures on the Wall', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Non est Consummatum

She's done it again.
My mother: Lady Lazarus.
Back from the hospital, back from the brink.

A sort of slow-walking miracle,
With skin as dry as a Nazi lampshade.
Still smiling with a full set of teeth.

If dying is an art like everything else,
Then it's one like cooking she does exceptionally badly,
Suspended in a grey twilight of forgetfulness.

Note: I have obviously sampled Sylvia Plath's magnificent poem 'Lady Lazarus', first published (posthumously) in Ariel (Faber and Faber, 1965). Although this has been done without permission, I hope it shows my affection and admiration for Plath whose writing so often provides inspiration and, indeed, solace in times of crisis.      

Outsider Art and Beyond

 D. Hall: Teddy, ballpoint pen on paper, (2015)

The phrase outsider art was coined by critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English translation for the French term art brut invented by Jean Dubuffet to describe works created outside the boundaries of official culture by those who are often socially marginalized, such as those suffering with mental illness, for example.

Those labelled as outsider artists are typically self-taught and there is often a naive beauty or innocence to their work, which compensates for lack of technique or sophistication. Usually, outsider artists have no contact with the mainstream art world and make no attempt to exhibit or establish careers. In many cases their work, born of solitude and isolation, is discovered - if at all - posthumously and thus makes money only for others; outsider art having now become a successful marketing category within the art world, despite Dubuffet's hope that it would prove immune to this process.

Interest in the art of those who exhibit extreme states of neuro-cognitive disorder and diversity - as well as young children, native peoples, and animals - is, of course, nothing new. Modernism might almost be said to be nothing other than the brilliant (sometimes cynical, often ironic and subversive) imitation and assimilation of such work, rich in unconventional ideas, fantasy, and expressive power. It's certainly true that many important figures associated with the avant-garde were fascinated and inspired by madness and primitivism (and that some had their own very real mental health issues to deal with).   

This interest in outsider practices among modern artists must, of course, be seen as part of a larger project; one that Nietzsche terms the revaluation of all values. Not that my mother, who is ninety and living with Alzheimer's, cares anything about any of this. She just doesn't know what else to do when alone and frightened and unable now to read the paper or follow her favourite programmes on TV other than pick up a pen and draw little pictures of familiar objects and faces.

And I don't think she's ever used the word art in her life or grasps it as a concept; her relation to art can hardly even be described as one of exteriority. In a sense, she's on the outside of that which is outside art and I have no idea what we might call that space ...    

In Praise of Nivea: The Snow-White Miracle Cream

Although the ingredients for Nivea Creme are openly available on the Beiersdorf website and are little different from other commercial hand and body lotions - Aqua, Paraffinum Liquidum, Cera Microcristallina, Glycerin, Lanolin Alcohol (Eucerit®), Paraffin, Panthenol, Decyl Oleate, Octyldodecanol, Aluminum Stearates, Citric Acid, Magnesium Sulfate, Magnesium Stearate, Parfum, Limonene, Geraniol, Hydroxycitronellal, Linalool, Citronellol, Benzyl Benzoate, Cinnamyl Alcohol - the precise formulation (i.e. how these things are uniquely combined) has remained a company secret for over a hundred years.

I know that such secrecy worries some people and fuels the widespread suspicion (bordering on paranoia) surrounding both the cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries. I am also aware that those eco-ascetics who favour strictly organic beauty products developed by tribal peoples in the rain forests of Borneo, for example, or simply wish to splash cold water on their faces, insist that many of the above ingredients have damaging environmental and/or health effects.

One such critic, for example, writing in The Ecologist, expressed his dismay with what goes into a jar of Nivea and repeatedly played on the concerns of his readership by stressing the terms irritants and sensitizers (i.e. chemicals that, with repeated exposure, may trigger allergic reactions), and, of course, the C-word: carcinogens (i.e. potentially cancer-causing substances). 

Parafinnum liquidum, for instance, is a cheap and easy to manufacture form of mineral oil that acts as a emollient that penetrates the skin and produces a temporary moisturizing effect. But the above critic argued that it destroys the skin's natural oils and thus results ultimately in dryness. Having used the product for many years, I know the former to be true - but I've no idea whether the latter is true, for the writer provides no evidence to back-up his claim. Nor do I know if the synthetic fragrances used in Nivea, such as limonene, linalool, and citonellol can cause eye-irritation, trigger asthma attacks, produce tumours and reproductive abnormalities. They do smell nice, however.  

The point is this: we may not need to use skin creams or perfumes or expensive shampoos, but these things make happy and allow us to dream and have more importance in our lives than we might imagine; which is why it is, I think, that my mother - who is 88 and who, thanks to dementia, has lost her appetite for food, her memories of the past, and even her desire to step out of the house - still insists on applying a generous amount of Nivea Creme each evening before bedtime, in order to keep her face and hands soft and young-looking, just as she has always done. 

That's the beauty of beauty products and the magic of cosmetics and why, for me, Nivea is a snow-white miracle cream; as much of a gift of the German genius, in its own way, as the poetry of Rilke, the music of Wagner, or the philosophy of Nietzsche. 

A Thanatological Fragment

First she decided she no longer wanted to go out. Then she decided she no longer wanted to get up. Finally, in death, decision making was no longer an issue and her house-bound, bed-bound days gave way to a period of violent decomposition during which the religious-minded believe souls to be heaven-bound, when really it's merely a return of hydro-carbon atoms to the material world, having broken free from their imprisonment in a particular life-form. 

Whether we like it or not, matter is always struggling to escape essence and to abandon vital complexity; always seeking to return to a state of inanimate simplicity. Our bodies have no loyalty to their own organization or substance; they continually decay and race towards catastrophe (we call this ageing). 

But we shouldn't reify death, nor confuse the fact of our own individual death with non-being. At most, death might be seen as a temporary pause or refreshment before the inevitable return to what Nick Land describes as the compulsive dissipation of life. This sounds a bit like mysticism, but science will confirm that organisms are so vigorously recycled at death that every atom we possess will have already been part of many millions of earlier living (and non-living) things. 

Thus, whilst there is no personal survival of death - the self is destroyed and not simply transformed or spirited away from the scene of the crime at the last instance - we do house and reincarnate the atomic souls of the dead. This is why death is always our affair and why, ultimately, Nietzsche was right to say that being alive is simply a very rare and unusual way of being dead. 

I thought this in 2006 and I still think it now: I find it helps as I watch my mother, who is 88, and recently diagnosed with dementia, slip away ...