Sofa So Good: On the Art of Fingering the Furniture (With Reference to D. H. Lawrence's 'The Thimble')

Clifford Hall: Portrait of a Reclining Lady 

(Oil on canvas 48.5 x 59 cm)

 

 

I. 

 

Many people have had sex on a sofa. But only a few establish an erotic relationship with their sofa in the manner of the unnamed 27-year-old woman in D. H. Lawrence's short story 'The Thimble' [a].

 

Usually, the passage in which the woman fondles her sofa, pushing her fingers deep inside, is interpreted as a sign of her sexual frustration and/or unfulfilled sexual desire. And, to be fair, it's true that she hadn't seen her husband for many months - "not since her fortnight's honeymoon with him, and his departure for France" [190] - so perhaps she does have a certain pent up passion.

 

But I like to think that since the honeymoon and his going off to fight, the woman who had "lived and died and come to life again" [190], had also reconfigured her sexuality in a queer new fashion. In other words, I prefer to read Lawrence's text not in terms of what Judith Ruderman calls symbolic masturbation [b], but as an interesting case of objectophilia ...

 

 

II. 

 

It's clear from the beginning of the story that the woman likes nice things. And, although apparently short of money, after renting a small flat in Mayfair - an affluent, upper-class area of London then as now - she fills it with suitable furniture. Only when she has made the flat complete and perfect and is surrounded by many alluring objects, is she satisfied.   

 

Human love, in comparison, has never quite done the trick; she has always remained at some level alone and untouched. And as she awaits the return of her (badly disfigured) husband, she feels a certain cold anxiety. 

 

It's only by putting on her favourite black silk dress and her jewellery that she can feel safe and secure; protected, as it were, by her own finery and fashionable beauty. And it's only by moving her hands "slowly backwards and forwards on the sofa" [194] that she can begin to unwind; "as if the friction of the silk gave her some ease" [194].    

 

But she doesn't stop with simply sliding her hands across the surface of the sofa; she soon progresses to the far more intimate act of digital penetration:

 

"Her right hand came to the end of the sofa and pressed a little into the crack, the meeting between the arm and the sofa bed. Her long white fingers pressed into the fissure, pressed and entered rhythmically, pressed and pressed further and further into the tight depths of the fissure, between the silken, firm upholstery of the old sofa, whilst her mind was in a trance of suspense [...]

      The working, slow, intent fingers pressed deeper and deeper in the fissure of the sofa, pressed and worked their way intently [...] they worked all along, very gradually, along the tight depth of the fissure." [194]

    

In this extraordinary passage, Lawrence gives the practice of couch sex a perverse new twist and makes searching down the back of the settee for loose change (or, as in this case, an old thimble) now seem far less innocent [c].    

 

 

Notes

 

[a] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Thimble', in England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 190-200. All page references given in the post refer to this edition.

      Lawrence wrote 'The Thimble' in October 1915 and it was first published in the American literary magazine Seven Arts (March 1917). The sofa-loving woman, Mrs Hepburn, was based on Lady Cynthia Asquith (large feet and all). 

      As the Japanese Lawrence scholar Gaku Iwai points out in the essay cited below, very few critics pay 'The Thimble' much attention - and, to be fair, even Lawrence grew to dislike it, telling his bibliographer Edward McDonald in 1924 that he would "rather like 'The Thimble' to disappear into oblivion" (see Letters V 104). By this date he had, of course, radically revised and extended the tale into the far better known novella The Ladybird (1921).

      See: Gaku Iwai, 'Wartime Ideology in "The Thimble": A Comparative Study of Popular Wartime Romance and the Anti-romance of D. H. Lawrence', Études Lawrenciennes, 46  (2015): click here to read online.   

 

[b] Judith Ruderman, D. H. Lawrence and the Devouring Mother, (Duke University Press, 1984), p. 76.

 

[c] Readers should note that the story doesn't end here, even if the post does. Lawrence ultimately has to reaffirm the love of man and woman - his whole sexual metaphysic is based on such - thus Mr and Mrs Hepburn are reconciled and reborn into a new life of co-dependence and mutual desire, he throwing the thimble she found "embedded in the depths of the sofa-crack" [194] out of the window.  

 

 

Finally, those who have enjoyed this post might find an earlier post in which I discuss Stéphane Sitayeb's essay on sexualized objects in Lawrence’s short fiction of interest: click here.        

Who Knew (that Maupassant was an Objectophile)?

I.

As the clinical sexologist Amy Marsh rightly points out, whilst objectum sexuality is often regarded as a relatively recent phenomenon, it actually possesses a much longer cultural history, as revealed, for example, in classic works of literature, such as Victor Hugo's queer gothic novel of 1831, Notre-Dame de Paris, in which Quasimodo is as passionately attached to the bells of the cathedral, as he is to the beautiful sixteen-year-old gypsy girl Esmeralda: 

"He loved them, caressed them, talked to them, understood them. From the carillon in the steeple of the transept to the great bell over the doorway, they all shared his love." [1]

However, I think my favourite instance of objectophilia in 19th-century French literature occurs in Maupassant's short story Qui sait? (1890) ... [2]


II.

In this tale, the anonymous narrator - confined in a psychiatric unit - confesses that he has always been something of a loner, but possessing no particular animosity towards his fellow human beings: 

"I have always lived alone because of a certain creeping unease I feel in the presence of other people. I don't know how to explain it. I am not averse to seeing people [...] but if I feel they have been near me for any prolonged period of time, even the closest begin to get so much on my nerves that I have this overwhelming, increasingly urgent desire to see them gone or to go off and be by myself.
      It is actually more than a desire. It is a real need, something absolutely essential to me." [275-76]

I used to believe, like the narrator, that there must be many thousands of people who feel this way. But, actually, it turns out that most people don't; they are perfectly content, rather, with being part of a vast, seething mass of humanity. It's only a rare few souls, for example, who cannot travel on a rush hour tube, or step into a crowded lift; and only a queer type of person who finds solitude blissful, rather than a huge, unremitting burden to bear.  

Similarly, despite the narrator's insistence on the perfectly normal nature of his (introverted and solipsistic) psychology, it's actually very unusual - or what we might even term perverse - to become emotionally and/or erotically attached to inanimate objects. (It should be noted that I use the term perverse here without any negative connotation or moral judgement attached.)

The narrator informs his readers:

"My house has, or had, become a world in which I lived a solitary yet active life, surrounded by familiar objects, furniture and bibelots as lovable to me as human faces. Little by little I filled my house with these things and I lived in their midst as happily as in the arms of a beloved woman whose warm, familiar embrace has become a prerequisite to a calm, untroubled existence." [277]

That's very lovely, I think. Unfortunately, the tale takes a bizarre twist when the beloved objects stage a revolt and abandon the amorous subject by one night marching out of his house, whilst he watches with astonishment from the garden:

"What I could now hear was the extraordinary sound of steps coming down the stairway and on to the parquet and the carpets - the sound not of shoes or of human footwear but the clatter of wooden and iron crutches clashing like cymbals, or so it seemed. Suddenly, what should I see waddling over the threshold of my own room but the big armchair in which I used to read. It came out into the garden. Others from the drawing room followed it and were followed in turn by low settees crawling crocodile-like along on their squat little legs. All my other chairs leapt out like goats, with footstools lolloping alongside.
      You can imagine what I felt like! I slid behind some shrubbery and remained crouching there watching the procession continue to pass by, for they were all leaving, one after the other, quickly or slowly, according to size and weight. My piano, my full-size grand piano galloped wildly past me with a musical murmur in its flank; the smallest objects such as hairbrushes and crystal chandelier droplets crawled like ants on the ground accompanied by glass goblets on which the moonlight cast little glow-worms of phosphorescence; curtains, hangings, tapestries spread like pools and stretched out octopus-like tentacles of fabric as they swam past. My desk hove into view, a rare eighteenth-century piece now containing some photographs and all the letters tracing the sad history of my painful love-life. 

      I suddenly lost my fear. I threw myself on it and held it down as if it had been a [...] woman attempting to flee. However, there was no stopping it and despite all my angry efforts I could not even slow down its inexorable progress. In my desperate struggle against this appalling power I was thrown to the ground, then rolled over and dragged along the gravel. In no time, the rest of the furniture [...] began to trample all over me, bruising my legs in the process. When I let go of the desk the rest of the pieces careered over my body as a cavalry charge mows down a fallen rider." [279-80] 

Talk about revenge of the object ...! Is there anything else even remotely like this in all literature?

The tale's English translator, Siân Miles, reminds us that the French composer Paul Dukas used the idea of a "mysterious and threatening proliferation of avenging objects" [3] in his symphonic poem L'apprenti sorcier (1897) and that Bret Easton Ellis also incorporated a scene into American Psycho (1991) in which Patrick Bateman is stalked by an anthropomorphised park bench, but that's really about it (I think, though would love to know of further examples). 


Notes

[1] These lines from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, translated by  Walter J. Cobb (Signet Classics, 1964), are quoted by Amy Marsh in her article 'Love Among the Objectum Sexuals', in the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, (Vol. 13, 1 March, 2010): click here.

[2] Guy de Maupassant, 'Who Knows?', A Parisian Affair and Other Stories, trans, Siân Miles, (Penguin Books, 2004). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.

[3] Siân Miles, Notes to 'Who Knows?', by Guy de Maupassant, in A Parisian Affair and Other Stories, ibid., p. 320. Miles mistakenly claims that Dukas composed his work twenty-five years earlier than Maupassant wrote his short story, but, as a matter of fact, he only completed it in 1897, i.e., seven years after Qui sait? was first published. The Sorcerer's Apprentice, as it is known in English, was, of course, based on Goethe's poem Der Zauberlehrling written in 1797. 

Those interested in knowing more about the role of objects in fiction and the manner in which inanimate things infiltrate our desires, fantasies, and concepts of self, might find Babette Bärbel Tischleder's The Literary Life of Things (Campus Verlag, 2014) worth reading. I agree with the book's central argument that one of the most important things about literary texts is that they "encourage us to see our practical, emotional, and imaginary engagement with the nonhuman environment in modes that resist any clear-cut distinction of subjects and objects, the physical and the metaphysical, the animate and the inanimate" [18]. 

The Queer Case of Barry Jeans (aka The Menace)

One of the most charismatic - and yet also least vital - characters in literature is Barry Jeans, aka The Menace: Daphne du Maurier's movie heart-throb: "someone with wide shoulders and no hips" who, like most tough guys, doesn't say much or betray any hint of emotion. Women around the world adored the little scar on the side of his temple "that suggested a brush with a rhino or a knife thrown in a Shanghai joint [...] But above all it was the mouth, firm and decisive above that square jaw with the cleft in the chin, which maddened millions".

Commentators often discuss his apparent asexuality: the fact that he felt no interest in making love to women - including his wife - and would never dream of making a pass at a beautiful broad. This becomes starkly evident when Barry is taken by his all-male entourage, known as the boys, to Poncho beach, in order to revive his libido. Unfortunately, not even a parade of naked teens or the young lovelies at the Silver Slipper can do the trick; all Barry can think about is having his porridge. 

But what many readers of the tale fail to pick up on is the reason for Barry's lack of interest in conventional pleasures of the flesh: the fact that he prefers to direct his tenderness towards objects rather than human beings, with a special fascination for cars and sail-boats. In other words, The Menace is an objectum sexual and once one has discovered the seductive charm of inanimate objects, then, as du Maurier writes: "It makes ordinary romance seem so trivial." 

Thus, it's not his lost love Pinkie and her rice puddling that rekindles Barry's fire and gets his Force rating up from a G to an A, it's the fact that, knowing his erotic penchant for furnishings as well as modes of transport, she takes him back to her apartment and "made him lie down on the settee in the living room and take his ease" [my italics].   

I'm reading this idiomatic expression as a euphemism for masturbate and I think the piece of newspaper she gives him "so that he did not spoil the new covers" is not intended to go under his feet. While she made him some breakfast in the kitchen, Barry stretched out his long legs and "settled himself more comfortably on the cushions".

Yes, he enjoys looking at Pinkie's photos of her family and reminiscing about the past. But it's the opportunity to romance the settee with her blessing (and perhaps even with her watching) that really moves and excites him: "'I can't tell you, Pinkie,' he said, 'what this has meant to me.'" Before leaving and giving her a perfunctory kiss goodbye, Barry washes (the semen off) his hands.

Obviously, this is a speculative and rather queer reading of the tale by du Maurier. But it's not, as we have seen, one without some textual support - and nor is it one I feel she'd be shocked by or unhappy with. 

Note: the image, by Chester Gould, is of Dick Tracy, but it's how I imagine The Menace would also look from du Maurier's description of him. 

See: Daphne du Maurier, 'The Menace', in The Breaking Point, (Virago Press, 2009), pp. 200-39. All lines quoted are from this edition. 

I have written several recent posts on tales from The Breaking Point - click here and here, for example. I have also written previously on objectum sexuality and encourage readers interested in this topic to click on the appropriate label.    

Siderodromophilia (A Post for Valentine's Day)

The Simpsons (S4/E15): 

Lisa's card to Ralph

I've written elsewhere on this blog about objectum sexuality with reference to the fascinating case of Erika Eiffel [click here]. But I don't believe I've specifically mentioned the love of trains, or siderodromophilia as it is known amongst those who are in the know.

So, since it's Valentine's Day - and since I'm always happy to discuss fetishistic forms of desire and kinky romantic attachment (which may or may not incude an erotic component) - I thought I'd get on board with this topic here and now, giving locomotive lovers their fifteen minutes of critical attention.

All siderodromophiles are, to a greater or lesser extent, physically excited by trains; be they life-sized engines or Hornby scale models; powered by steam or electricity; stationary or rattling along the tracks.

Some are aroused simply by images of trains, or films featuring trains - such as The Lady Vanishes (1938) or Murder on the Orient Express (1974). Others like to be actual passengers and achieve sexual gratification by fucking in a private compartment, or, rather less salubriously, in one of the toilets. As one siderodromophile of my acquaintance told me:

"Travelling in style and comfort on a sleeper train - with or without a partner - is always a highly sexual experience thanks to the gentle back-and-forth rocking motion and the clickety-clack sound of the wheels on the tracks. Who needs the Mile High Club?"

We should, I suppose, also mention those who get their thrills via non-consensual acts on trains, such as rubbing up against fellow passengers or indecently exposing themselves. Arguably, however, frottage - like exhibitionism - deserves to be analysed as a practice in and on its own terms and shouldn't be seen as in anyway an essential component of siderodromophilia.  

Finally, it's important to point out that this particular paraphilia is as old as the history of trains themselves - that it's certainly not something peculiar to our age. Thus, for example, we discover that the decadent anti-hero of Huysmans's magnificent novel À Rebours - published in 1884 - is, amongst other things, something of a siderodromophile.

Women, he concedes, are a natural wonder who possess "the most perfect and original beauty". But, having said that, there's nothing anywhere on this earth to compare to the dazzling and outstanding beauty of the two locomotives that have caught his eye:

"One of these ... is an adorable blonde with a shrill voice, a long slender body imprisoned in a shiny brass corset ... whose extraordinary grace can be quite terrifying when she stiffens her muscles of steel, sends the sweat pouring down her steaming flanks, sets her elegant wheels spinning in their wide circles and hurtles away, full of life, at the head of an express train.
      The other ... is a strapping saturnine brunette given to uttering raucous, gutteral cries, with a thick-set figure encased in armour-plating of cast iron; a monstrous creature with her dishevelled mane of black smoke and her six wheels coupled together low down, she gives an indication of her fantastic strength when, with an effort that shakes the very earth, she slowly and deliberately drags along her heavy train of goods-wagons."    

Des Esseintes concludes:

"It is beyond question that, among all the fair, delicate beauties and all the dark, majestic charmers of the human race, no such superb examples of comely grace and terrifying force are to be found ..."

The irony is, that, as a homotextual whose pleasure is derived from fine writing, even though I don't have the slightest interest in trains, I find these passages extremely arousing ... 

Happy Valentine's Day to lovers everywhere in all their splendidly queer difference!  

See: Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick, (Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 23-24. 

Surprise musical bonus: click here.  

Why Loving the Alien Doesn't Quite Do It For Captain James T. Kirk

Kirk points out to Shahna where his one true love lies ...

It's often said that many perverts are fans of Star Trek and, having just watched several episodes from the original series, I can well imagine that to be the case. For one thing, female crew members aboard the Enterprise dress in a provocative manner designed to excite fetishists and inspire thoughts of lust in space.

And, for another, in the figure of Captain James T. Kirk as played by William Shatner, perverts surely recognise one of their own; a polyamorous exophile who behaves like an intergalactic sex fiend, cruising from planet to planet and playing with the affections of an assortment of nubile lovelies, before beaming up and flying off at warp speed, permanent smirk on face. 

Kirk's inability or refusal to form meaningful, long-term relationships with women is seen by some as a sure sign of misogyny, or, indeed, psychopathology. But it could just be that his heart lies elsewhere; not with Mr. Spock - as fantasised in often explicit homoerotic fan fiction - but to his beloved starship.

It's the Enterprise that is the real object of his desire and his single great obsession, providing what Ellen Ladowsky laughably describes as "a non-human, inanimate detour for evading anxieties belonging to genuine intimacy".

Nothing and no one can come between Jim and NCC-1701: Deela, Queen of the Scalosians, Marta, the green-skinned Orion seductress, and Shahna, the Triskelion slave girl with her big hair and silver bondage outfit, each provide a very pleasant distraction.

But loving the alien just doesn't quite do it for Kirk; a man who needs to feel the throb of powerful engines and experience the thrill of firing photon torpedoes; whose greatest joy lies in commanding a spacecraft and exploring strange new worlds of desire, seeking out new and unusual ways of loving, and boldly going where no man has gone before ...

See: Ellen Ladowsky, 'Pedophilia and Star Trek', HuffPost, (Aug 18, 2005 - updated May 25, 2011).

Note: Deela, played by Kathie Browne, appears in season 3, episode 11, entitled 'Wink of an Eye'; Marta, played by Yvonne Craig (better known as Batgirl), appears in season 3, episode 14, entitled 'Whom Gods Destroy'; and Shahna, played by Angelique Pettyjohn, appears in season 2, episode 16, entitled 'The Gamesters of Triskelion'.

Added punk bonus: Spizzenergi - Where's Captain Kirk?

Rough Trade, (1979)

 

How Bridges Love the Gap Between Objects

For many objectophiles, as for many Heideggereans, bridges remain privileged structures. Whilst they are not dwelling places, nevertheless they exist in the domain of our dwelling and we have great admiration and affection for them as buildings: buildings that are determined by dwelling and retain dwelling as a goal. Which means the following:

"The bridge ... does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. ... It brings stream and bank and land into each other's neighbourhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream."

- Heidegger, 'Building Dwelling Thinking', Basic Writings, (Routledge, 1993), p. 354

More than this, the bridge allows the waters that flow beneath it to do so beneath the heavens and for the men who cross it to do so before the gods; whether we explicitly think of their presence and give thanks, or whether we care only about crossing from A-B. The bridge, as Heidegger writes, "gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals" [355].

It is this gathering of the fourfold that constitutes the thingness of the bridge and which stops it from simply being a human construction serving a purely mundane purpose. Now, obviously, most people continue to think of the bridge primarily as something with functional convenience; and, after that, perhaps as some kind of symbol. I know that and have to accept it. However, to those rare men and women who are attuned to objects as things (and who perhaps take them as their lovers), the bridge is never just a mere bridge and it is always more than just a symbol: it's a gathering - and it's also a location. 

For just as the banks of the river do not exist prior to the bridge, neither does the location. As Heidegger notes:

"Before the bridge stands, there are of course many spots along the stream that can be occupied by something. One of them proves to be a locale, and does so because of the bridge. Thus the bridge does not first come to a locale to stand in it; rather, a locale comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge." [356] 

Similarly, the bridge doesn't take up space; on the contrary, just as it determines locales, so too does it allow for spaces. Building is the creation and joining of spaces and just as love bridges the gap between objects, so do bridges love the space between things.   

How Love Bridges the Gap Between Objects

Even when, in a gesture of democratic ontological realism, you accept that all objects can be posited on the same plane of existence, with no one object determining the being of any other object, still the problem remains of the essential gulf that exists between things.

Which is why the forming of relationships in a world of withdrawn and autonomous objects, each with their own unique powers and capacities, is not easy; it requires that all things discover a way in which to translate one another across the void that separates them. 

But translation is not the same as representation. Human subjects qua subjects might metaphysically relate to the world by attempting to form truthful representations of reality, but this all-too-human way of knowing things doesn't really interest me; even if it has been the central concern of philosophy since Descartes. I tend to agree with Levi Bryant that questions concerning objects are misconceived if they are turned into purely epistemological ones of how we might know them. 

In other words, philosophy must be more than a type of anthropocentric conceit and posthumanism, if there is ever to be such a thing, must begin with the admission that subjects are objects and that human being is not a privileged category to which everything can and must be referred. Further, it must be acknowledged that the gulf between us and other objects is not something uniquely significant; that there is equally such a gap between, for example, a pineapple and a knife, as there is between us and items of cutlery.

Thus, as I say above, all things need to find a way to translate one another, or relate across the ontological divide - which is something of an art, something of a science, and something of a mystery. How do objects translate other objects, especially when all objects remain constitutively withdrawn not only from one another but from themselves? 

The answer, perhaps, is via a form of onto-erotics, or what Baudrillard terms in an somewhat different context, the seductiveness of things. For withdrawal is never total and entities as entities always manifest and expose themselves to a greater or lesser degree; they like to tease one another with the staging of their appearance-as-disappearance. Objects, if you will, are like those lovers who know how to delight us with their presence and then torment us with their absence. Timothy Morton describes them as 'strange strangers' whose existence we can never anticipate and being we can never fully know.

Philosophical theories of ontological immanence and weird realism might help us to better translate these strange strangers by remaining open to the possibilities of seduction and surprise, but so too do we need our poets and our objectophiles to help us proliferate unnatural alliances and establish a democracy of touch between entities of all kinds (be they dead or alive, natural or artificial, actual or virtual). Ultimately, existence is fucked into being.

Behind the Red Fence

Objectum-Sexuality Internationale

Objectum Sexuality continues to fascinate me. In no small part, this is because I find human subjects ever-more boring and tiresome. One increasingly realises that happiness is to be found in the love that transcends humanity; the love of things that sparkle with their own thingly glamour. This might include objects that belong to the natural world, such as flowers and heavenly bodies, but it also includes the manufactured objects of everyday life, such as tables, chairs, and the red brick floor upon which they stand.

For love (should we choose to continue using the term) is fundamentally a question of forming ever-changing relationships; not just with people or other living beings such as next door's cat, but with objects of all kinds, be they inorganic, artificial, or virtual. And the duty of art, philosophy, or science is ultimately one and the same; to reveal the relation between us and the world of which we are an intrinsic part - but not a determining factor. For the relationship between us and the universe is not based upon some form of correlation between consciousness and being; the world exists as a mind-independent reality with or without Man or God as witness. 

Whether this relationship needs to be erotic in character, as objectophiles seem to believe, is debatable. But I can't see why it shouldn't be conceived of as such within the framework of a perverse materialism. Certainly it's a form of touch first and foremost and not an abstract or ideal relation. Love allows us to feel the world and not just think it - to know it in a carnal sense via what Lawrence would term 'direct vibrational contact'. 

And so, as I said in an earlier post, whilst I have problems with some of the statements made by  those within the OS community, still I feel they have something important to teach  any one hoping to develop an object-oriented ontology and a find a new form of happiness. For just as the American author Dana learnt how to attune himself to a non-human reality during his two years before the mast, so too has Erika Eiffel achieved something similar. Thus we might paraphrase what Lawrence writes of the former in order to say this of the latter (in tribute):

Erika's soul is not human in the ordinary sense. She is not looking for human things, nor listening to human sounds. Her adventure is not an adventure of a being among beings: it is an adventure into the material universe. In this twilightly place where integral being ceases, she stares lovingly at the Tower and encounters it in all its reality, abandoning her personal self in order to experience the joy of loving a non-living yet amazingly potent object.

The Woman Who Married the Eiffel Tower

"Things are not only structures with closed contours that lend themselves to manipulation and whose consistency constrains us. They lure and threaten us, support and obstruct us, sustain and debilitate us, direct and calm us. They enrapture us with their sensuous substances and also with their luminous surfaces and their phosphorescent facades, their halos, their radiance and their resonances."

          - Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common.

Thus it is that when we encounter the Eiffel Tower, for example, standing so tall and magnificent amidst the city landscape, what we see before us is not just a large metal structure onto which we might hang all kinds of personal attributes like so many Christmas tree baubles. Rather, amidst the urban chaos of Paris and the noise of the traffic, we encounter an object with its own irresistible imperative, "radiating over us like a black sun, holding us in its orbit, demanding our attention", as Graham Harman rather nicely puts it.  

The object, therefore, is primarily and above all else a force and our love for the object is an effect of this force and not something freely entered into and determined by the amorous subject. And so, when Erika Eiffel speaks of her love for the Tower she indicates she has submitted directly to the sensual power of the latter. For just like living organisms, inanimate objects also have something commanding about them which compels us to acknowledge their uniquely seductive presence and understand them for what they are: actual entities, or real things-in-themselves that exist independently of us.

For this is what the world is: an inhuman arena of innumerable objects that encounter and affect one another in a violent and immoral orgy of existence. To believe that we play a decisive role in this is, of course, merely anthropocentric conceit. Dasein might possess unique ontological insight and so be 'richer in world' than a lizard or a rock, but all objects exist equally within what Lawrence might term a democracy of touch.

To be clear, I've nothing against experiencing the world through the eyes: it's lovely to look at the Eiffel Tower glittering in the sunlight. And it's wonderful to write about the Tower in the manner of Roland Barthes, as sign and symbol. But it's fatally mistaken to think of it as something that exists only as an effect of photons on retinal cells, or within language.

Graham Harman is on the money once more when he writes that the essential being of an object is a "capital X that forever recedes from all contact with human meaningfulness". It cannot, therefore, be seen, or snapped with a camera, or known in full - not even if you love the object dearly and have a  long-term romantic relationship with it.

All objects - including our human lovers - withdraw into the darkness of their own primal reality and even our most brilliant thoughts, intimate fantasies, or tender kisses can ever fully reveal their truth or exhaust their being. The desire for total transparency and the dream of ultimate union with those we love is futile and mistaken.

Even Erika Eiffel seems to me a little greedy in her love. It would be nice if she could just learn to let the Tower be and show a little more respect for the pathos of distance that separates her and the object of her affection, rather than seek some kind of pan-psychic identification or merger into matrimonial oneness.

That said, I sincerely wish her and the Tower all the love and luck in the world.  

Sexy Eiffel Towers

Photo by Petter Hegre: Anna S Eiffel Tower Park (2009)

I'm on the top, with the jump,  jumping to my death,

It's Paris - La Tour Eiffel - the sexiest building left.

Located on the Champ de Mars, La Tour Eiffel is a 320-metre puddle iron construction, weighing some 10,000 tonnes. Erected in 1889, it was named after the engineer, Gustave Eiffel, who oversaw the design and construction.

Initially, many critics - including artists and intellectuals - opposed the building of the Tower. Some feared it would dominate the Parisian skyline and overshadow other much-loved monuments; others derided the proposed structure on the grounds that it lacked any serious purpose or function. Indeed, the Tower's uselessness and frivolity was felt by many to be something of a scandal in an age which prided itself on its utility and seriousness. However, once built it proved an immediate success with the French public and quickly became a global attraction. 

As one of the most recognisable objects on earth, this empty monument has received millions of visitors, served as the architectural inspiration for at least thirty similar towers around the world and featured in numerous films and photographs as an iconic and romantic symbol of the city in which it stands.

Indeed, in a very real sense, La Tour Eiffel is Paris and Paris is La Tour Eiffel and wherever you are in the city you must, as Roland Barthes points out, take endless precautions if you don't wish to see the Tower: whatever time of day, whatever season of the year, whatever might obscure your view and isolate you from it, the Tower is always there. Silently persisting, "it is as literal as a phenomenon of Nature whose meaning can be questioned to infinity but whose existence is incontestable."

                              

But just as every Parisian is obliged to encounter and acknowledge the Tower, so are we all: for it has become present to the entire world, in our dreams and fantasies. Almost the question arises not why some individuals are sexually attracted to the Tower, but why isn't everyone aroused by this virtually pure signifier that paradoxically means everything? 

For La Tour Eiffel excites like no other structure on earth. It is the supreme object and it affords us a multiplicity of pleasures: we can fall in love beneath it and we can fall to our deaths from the top of it. One way or another, it thus promises bliss and stands in all its mysterious thingliness forever beyond human reason.