Strange Flesh: Notes On Sodomy

Sleeve artwork for Mortal Way of Life (1988) 

by German thrash metal band Sodom

I. The Sin of Sodom is Polysemic

Sodomy is one of those lovely old-fashioned words that is commonly misunderstood. Many people, for example, think it refers exclusively to anal sex - particularly between two men - and perhaps recall that Oscar Wilde was accused (not unfairly) of posing as a sodomite by Queensberry.

Historically, however, sodomy possessed a much broader meaning and referred to all non-procreative sexual activity, including, for example, oral sex and bestiality. It was often also tied to the practice of pagan witchcraft. Sodomy was thus not simply a form of perversity, but heresy; a rejection of God and a libidinal defiance of his moral authority.

It's hardly surprising, therefore, to discover that sodomy has a biblical origin ...


II. What Begins with the Threat of Angel Rape Ends with Fire and Brimstone 

According to the account in Genesis [18-19], God decided to exact divine retribution upon Sodom after two of his angels entered the city (in human form) and were immediately threatened with gang rape by the inhospitable locals.

Although Lot, who was charged with looking after the divine messengers, offered the townsfolk his virgin daughters as sexual substitutes, the men of Sodom were adamant they wanted to experience strange flesh whilst they had the very rare opportunity to do so.

For the Good Lord, who had long identified Sodom (along with the twin city of Gomorrah) as a hotbed of impenitent sin and sexual depravity, this was the final straw and He unleashed his destructive wrath upon it and its inhabitants in the form of fire and brimstone.

Only Lot and his family were given the opportunity to get out of town, although, unfortunately, their escape didn't quite go to plan after Lot's wife made the fatal mistake of looking back, as if secretly longing to stay and continue her old life in Sodom. For this, as everybody knows, she was turned into a pillar of salt.

(Interestingly - and as perhaps fewer people know - Lot and his daughters found solace in this time of apocalyptic upheaval and great personal loss by entering into an incestous relationship and having drunken sex in a cave ... but that's another story, for another post: click here.)
 

III. On the Necessity of a Little Sodomy

Never one to shy away from these matters, D. H. Lawrence insists that not only can bawdiness be healthy, but even sodomy can be sane and wholesome, provided there is a proper give and take between parties: "In fact, it may be that a little sodomy is necessary to human life."

It's only the fanatic insistence on purity, writes Lawrence, that always leads to madness, denying as it does the simple truth that all men and women are subject to desire and possess "blood and bowels and lively genitals".

The only problem is that Lawrence wishes to restrict acts of sodomy to the right time. But, by definition, such acts occur at the the wrong time, in the wrong place, with the wrong partners and involve a misuse of organs; this is what makes them such unnatural acts.

Nevertheless, it's important to be reminded that however problematic many aspects of his work are for a contemporary readership, Lawrence was not someone who wished to restrict human freedom and experience. Just so long as we don't get our sex on the brain and seek to form an ideal identity upon it, he was happy to acknowledge the necessity of vice as belonging to a general economy of the whole.   

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'What's sane and what isn't', The Poems, Vol. III, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1614-1615.

Lawrentian Reflections on the Birth of Baby Mia

Baby Mia (born 12 Nov 2018)

Following my Nietzschean Reflections on the Birth of Baby Mia, I was informed by a concerned correspondent that, in denying human status to newborn babies, I'm not only tacitly supporting abortion, but opening the door to infanticide. 

I don't agree with this: nor quite follow the logic of the argument. After all, a flower also lacks moral agency, but I don't wish to nip it in the bud. It has its own unique being, even if it lacks what theologians call a soul. In fact, for me - as for Wilde - the beauty of a flower resides precisely in its impersonality and amorality.

Similarly, the great fascination and delight of a newborn baby lies in the fact that although it has emerged bloody and womb-soaked in the world, it doesn't yet belong to the world and hasn't been codified as human (allzumenschliche). It is, rather, just a little bundle of innocence and becoming; a monster of chaos without form.          

Thus, when holding baby Mia, I feel the stirring of strange feelings that come, as Lawrence says, from out of the dark and which one scarcely knows how to acknowledge. Almost it's a kind of terror - certainly it goes beyond mere avuncular affection.

Her inhuman cries seem to echo within oneself, reminding one that life fundamentally involves sorrow and suffering and blind rage. For although babies can make us smile, they're tragic figures who don't even have control of their own bowels or bladders.

To watch these tiny living objects lying naked and so utterly helpless and vulnerable "in a world of hard surfaces and varying altitudes", makes one anxious for their safety. No wonder their mothers not only want to enfold them in love, but wrap them in cotton wool so as to protect their soft round heads and fragile tiny limbs.

But babies are pretty resilient things: and, truth be told, they are at more risk from maternal love than they are from the world at large. For maternal love has become a perverted form of benevolent bullying, worked almost entirely from the will.

And as she proceeds to spin "a hateful sticky web of permanent forbearance, gentleness, [and] hushedness" around her naturally passionate babe-in-arms, the ideal mother invariably undermines the future wellbeing - both physically and mentally - of the child. 

If you want to save the children, then save them from their mothers and leave them to be young creatures, not persons.

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 197.

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 92-3. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), Section VI. 

Notes on DIY

Bob the Builder

As a punk, one was obliged to subscribe to the political ethos of do it yourself: form your own band, print your own magazines, design your own clothes, etc., etc. 

I remember, however, that Rotten supplemented (and qualified) this idea by also insisting that whatever it was one did, one should always do it properly and was contemptuous of those who understood the first rule of punk as a license to be mediocre or inept. There was nothing shoddy or second-rate about the Sex Pistols; the look and the sound was all carefully contrived with an eye for detail and a profound understanding of style.

But for most people, of course, DIY isn't an anarchic method of self-empowerment and taking back control, it's to do with home improvements and having somewhere to go and something to do at the weekends; i.e., wander round Homebase, before then annoying the neighbours with a power drill as you work on the extension or loft conversion.

In other words, it's part and parcel of la vie domestique - i.e., the most boring form of life there is.

DIY encourages consumers to imagine they're skilled artisans, but it's more recreational than creative in character and more about cost-cutting than self-expression. At best - and at a real stretch - it's the idiot younger brother of the Arts and Crafts movement, though I still find it difficult to see a family resemblance between William Morris and Tommy Walsh.         

To paraphrase Wilde, a great deal of nonsense is spoken about DIY. There's nothing essentially dignified about hammering a nail, hoovering a carpet, painting a ceiling, or fitting a floor. Indeed, most - if not all - jobs of this kind are dirty, dusty, and depressing and such pleasureless activities should be admitted as such.

It's good to take pride in what you do - but when what you're doing is tedious and undignified, then it's best to be honest about it. Sometimes, it's preferable not to do it yourself, but to get on the blower to Bob the builder ... 


Note: I'm paraphrasing Wilde on manual labour in his 1891 essay 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism', written in his anarcho-libertarian phase: click here to read online.

  

Waxing Philosophical on Insincerity

Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

azquotes.com

As a writer, one lives more in fear of being taken seriously than being thought superficial and fraudulent. Thus, like Wilde, one greatly values insincerity ...

If sincerity is the ideal virtue of speaking clearly in accordance with one's true feelings and genuine beliefs, then insincerity is the demonic gift of speaking in tongues and a method for multiplying our personalities and proliferating perspectives.

Insincerity is, therefore, one of the crucial components of art, which, of necessity, is an impure and unhealthy practice; that is to say, a form of decadence that is the very opposite of sincerus. And yet, there are surprisingly many writers who deny this and defend sincerity in all spheres, including artistic sincerity.

Orwell, for example - whom we might regard as the the anti-Wilde - argued that insincerity gives rise to muddled thinking and that this in turn has pernicious (sometimes fatal) political consequences. He condemns writers who seek to disguise their real thoughts and authentic selves by using complex metaphorical language and long words, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.          

But as Nietzsche pointed out, plain speaking Englishmen are the least philosophical creatures on earth and hardly deserve even to be considered as artists, lacking as they do the imagination to lie and the immoral playfulness of those who delight in wearing masks.  

The problem, ultimately, is that sincerity requires perfect knowledge of self - and that isn't possible; not even for philosophers, who remain (of necessity) strangers to themselves just like the rest of us. It's because - as Nietzsche says - Jeder ist sich selbst der Fernste that we remain beings born of insincerity ...

Notes

The line from Nietzsche that reads in English 'everyone is furthest from himself' is found in the 'Preface' to On the Genealogy of Morality. See p. 3 of the Cambridge University Press edition, 1994, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson and trans. Carol Diethe. 

For a sister post to this one on the ethics of ambiguity, click here.   

On the Romantic Conception of Childhood

Suffer little children and forbid them not - 

for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven

I.

If there's one child in modern philosophy and literature who should have been aborted, it's Jean-Jacques Rousseau's fictional offspring Émile (1762). For this immaculate conception fatally shapes the ideal of childhood not just in the Romantic and Victorian period, but well into the twentieth century.

Indeed, in some quarters, there is still an ideal insistence on the essential moral superiority of an individual child over the collective corruption of adulthood. To grow up - I was recently informed - is to fall into complacent mediocrity, accepting of your own limitations and all the evils of the world (i.e. to grow up, is to give up).

Those who believe this - whether they know it or not - are giving credence to the opening li(n)e of Rousseau's book which asserts that each and every child is perfect at the point of their divine creation - Rousseau rejects the notion of Original Sin - but quickly degenerates within a social system designed to erode their natural goodness.   

According to Voltaire, when not fantasising about the noble savage, Rousseau likes to imagine himself as part-educator, part wet nurse to an infantalised humanity. 


II.

Thanks, then, to Rousseau and his novelistic treatise Émile, from around the middle of the 18th century many cultivated and otherwise perfectly intelligent people began to view childhood in a more sentimental light; i.e., as an authentic state of innocence and freedom.

The traditional idea - that children were born sinful and therefore required moral instruction and setting on the path to righteousness with discipline and punishment - was thrown out with the bath water. Perhaps, it was argued, what children really needed was love and affection. And perhaps they should be encouraged to express themselves and develop their healthy instincts and natural creativity.

If Rousseau was right, then, it was hoped, his method of education would preserve the special attributes of childhood and this would result in well-adjusted adults and model citizens.     


III.

Rousseau's ideas rapidly crossed the Channel - Émile was first published in English in 1763 - and disseminated by Romantic poets, including Blake and Wordsworth, who fully bought into the idea of childhood as something blessed. After all, hadn't Jesus told his disciples that in order to enter God's Kingdom they too had to become as children [Matthew 18: 1-5].

This new idealised version of childhood became (and remained) an immensely powerful myth; in all kinds of literature and art, the innocence and purity - and, yes, even the supposed wisdom - of the pre-pubescent was promoted as something that adults should cherish and learn from. Children, it was now thought, were not only our future, they were our salvation too - And a little child shall lead them!

But, of course, these weren't actual children - snot-nosed brats who like to pull the wings off flies - they were, rather, imaginative representations. Even artworks that appeared realistic were underpinned by cultural understandings of childhood and reflected the values and desires of the artist; usually male, usually upper-middle class, and with little knowledge of children living outside the nursery and no direct experience of what day-to-day childcare involved - Nanny takes care of all that.

IV.

By the mid-19th century, the so-called Cult of Childhood arguably reached its nauseating and slightly pervy peak. Lewis Carroll, for example, wasn't simply content to celebrate the childhood of Alice Liddell and her sisters in his writing (and nude photography), but liked to confess his longing to return to a state of infancy himself. A poem entitled 'Solitude' closes with the following lines:

I’d give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life’s decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer-day.

Now, it's one thing to gaze upon the world with childlike wonder - and perhaps the struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play. But it's another thing for a man to actually want to be a child and give an obscene literal rendering to Christ's words. This, says Lawrence, is an extreme form of decadence; a sheer relaxation and letting go of all adult pride and responsibility. 


V.

When not dreaming of regression like Lewis Carroll, there were other men, with darker fantasies, conceiving of ways in which adolescence could be deferred and children kept in a state of eternal childhood. Thus it is that in some of the best-read and most-loved Victorian fantasies we discover a sinister tendency for child characters to die and thus, in this way, remain forever young.

So it is we arrive at a fatal conclusion: idealism ends in murder - for each man kills the thing he loves most. This is why child worship is a form of cruelty and abuse. Place a child on a pedestal, fetishise their virgin purity, and you'll soon find you've built a sacrificial altar ...

See: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom, (Basic Books, 1979).

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

Caricature of J-K Huysmans (1885)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to Thom Bonneville for suggesting this post.

On the Truth of Masks

A stone mask from c. 7000 BC 

Musée Bible et Terre Sainte (Paris)

I.

Worn by peoples belonging to many different cultures since the very earliest of times and for a wide variety of reasons - ceremonial and practical, sacred and profane - the mask is that which is más que la cara and which seems to mock the very idea of a real face.

Indeed, it ultimately exposes the shocking truth that the human face isn't a unique natural formation, but a type of social machine that covers and overcodes the front of the head and, eventually, the entire body, thus ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance.

As Oscar Wilde knew very well: we are least ourselves when we present our grinning white face to the world and speak in our own name; it is only when we put on a mask and dare to disguise the self we have been given, that we find the courage to speak with free anonymity.      

II.

Like Wilde, Nietzsche also asserts the philosophical profundity of masks and says that every artist recognises the need to wear such. Indeed, the greatest of men often don monstrous masks in order to best inscribe themselves in the memories, dreams and affections of humanity.    

And of course, beautiful women too are lovers of the mask. Indeed, there are some women who, no matter how carefully you attempt to look beneath their surface, have no natural depth or interior truth but are purely their facades.

Men who love these seductive creatures of veiled appearance and cosmetic disguise, are fated to seek their souls or uncover their nakedness in vain. Yet, it is precisely such women who are often best able to (fetishistically) arouse male desire. 

Remember: after the orgy, the masked ball ...

On Moral Turpitude (with Reference to the Case of Sebastian Horsley)

Sebastian Horsley at home in Soho (Mar 2008) 

Photograph: Steve Forrest / Rex Features 

Having an immoral past or criminal record is bad enough. But flaunting one's queer and amoral dandyism in the faces of American customs officials is probably not the wisest thing to do if one is hoping to enter the United States ...

For whilst America is the Land of the Free, it retains a puritanical sensibility that has long required visitors to behave in a manner that doesn't threaten to gravely violate or undermine the accepted standards of decent society. They even have a concept - moral turpitude - woven into U.S. immigration law which specifically addresses this issue.

Whilst this concept eludes precise definition, it's clearly intended to keep out the base or depraved individual; i.e., the kind of man who don't respect the customary rules that govern civil society and feels no sense of duty to others; the kind of man who has worked as a prostitute, consumed copious amounts of controlled substances and had himself crucified in the name of art; the kind of man whose only concession to American sensibilities upon arrival was to remove his nail polish; the kind of man, in short, like Sebastian Horsley ...

One hundred and twenty-six years after Oscar Wilde breezed through customs at New York (declaring nothing except his genius), and thirty years after even the Sex Pistols were eventually allowed to embark on their ill-fated American tour (despite the authorities' initial reluctance to issue visas), Horsley found himself interrogated for eight hours at Newark before being refused entry, declared a persona non grata and deported back to the UK - on the grounds of moral turpitude.

Wearing his favourite outfit, which included a top hat and long velvet coat, Horsley wisely resisted the urge to unbutton his fly when asked if he had anything to declare (Nothing except my genitals), but couldn't resist being facetious when asked what he kept under his hat (My head). US Customs officials - be it noted - are not known for their sense of humour and do not appreciate irony, sarcasm, or flippancy.    

It's such a shame, because Sebastian was genuinely excited to be going to the USA - which he thought of as a friendly, generous nation - in order to promote his best-selling autobiography Dandy in the Underworld. "I have always felt American in my artificial heart," he wrote on March 12th (2008), but seven days later he was obliged to abruptly revise this feeling. And two years later he was dead ...

Anyway, here's Sebastian looking beautiful but slightly deflated having just returned from the US, addressing the American audience denied him. Sometimes, alas, taking civilisation to the barbarians isn't as straightforward as one might hope ...

Taking Civilisation to the Barbarians

Two Irish poets pictured whilst on tour in America: 

Oscar Wilde (1882) and Johnny Rotten (1978) 

When the Sex Pistols set off on their ill-fated American tour in January 1978, manager Malcolm McLaren had determined that the band would avoid playing major venues in New York and Los Angeles in front of audiences likely to be receptive and would, instead, head to the Deep South and perform in front of hostile rednecks in cities including Atlanta, Memphis, San Antonio, Dallas, Baton Rouge, and Tulsa.

For Malcolm wasn't interested in building a new fan base, or simply increasing record sales; he wanted, rather, to cultivate hatred, incite conflict, and cause as much chaos as possible amongst the barbarians who invented rock 'n' roll: "The idea was to get lost in the swamps and the badlands, making it impossible for the myth of the Sex Pistols to be exposed", as he puts it in the Swindle. 

Of course, any one familiar with the above film or the history of the band, will probably know this already. But what fans might not know is how this idea - often mistakenly said to be ill-conceived - was inspired by Malcolm's love for Oscar Wilde, who in 1882 went on his own (far more extensive, far more profitable) US tour that also brought him into amusingly close contact with some of the colourful locals, including farmers, miners, and gun-toting cowboys.

For despite his pretensions and poses, there was nothing snobbish about Wilde and he took great delight in meeting such people and not just fellow authors, such as Henry James and Walt Whitman. Indeed, one of Wilde's most interesting trips was to a mining town, high up in the Rocky Mountains, called Leadville, the story of which Malcolm was fond of retelling ...

Back in 1882, Leadville was a genuine Wild West town of some 30,000 inhabitants; most of whom had recently arrived and all of whom were hoping to strike it rich following the discovery of thick veins of silver in them thar hills. Strangely, however, as well as the customary saloon and whorehouse, Leadville had (and still has) its own opera house and it was here that Wilde was booked to speak - dressed, according to contemporary accounts, in a purple smoking jacket, knee breeches and black silk stockings.    

His chosen topic for the evening: The Practical Application of the Aesthetic Theory to Exterior and Interior House Decoration with Observations on Dress and Personal Ornament. Unsurprisingly, the talk didn't go down very well. Depending on which account you choose to believe, either the audience eventually fell asleep or Wilde was pushed off stage into the orchestra pit.

Either way, Wilde himself was much amused when, after reading passages from the autobiography of the great Italian artist Benvenuto Cellini, the miners expressed their disappointment that the latter wasn't going to be making an appearance: "I explained that he had been dead for some little time which elicited the enquiry 'Who shot him?'"

Like the Sex Pistols, Wilde liked to meet and mingle with his audience afterwards. When it was discovered that he was a man who not only liked but could handle his liquor - he manfully drank all of those who jeered at him for being a sissy under the table - Wilde became an instant hero in the town and the next day it was agreed to name a new silver vein in his honour.

This apparently involved a ceremony in which Wilde was lowered to the bottom of a mine in a bucket, where he proceeded to eat a meal and smoke a cigar. "I had hoped that in their simple grand way they would have offered me shares in [the lode], but in their artless untutored fashion they did not."

Upon returning to the surface, Wilde and his new pals retired once more to the saloon where he saw what he described as "the only rational method of art criticism" he'd ever come across; over the piano there hung a notice reading: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.

"I was struck", says Wilde, "with this recognition of the fact that bad art merits the penalty of death, and I felt that in this remote city, where the aesthetic applications of the revolver were clearly established in the case of music, my apostolic task would be much simplified ..."

Whether there's anything Wildean about the Sex Pistols is debatable. But there's certainly something punk rock about Oscar and his sexy, stylish, subversive aesthetic.  

Notes 

Photo of Oscar Wilde, by Napoleon Sarony (New York City, Jan. 1882).

Photo of Johnny Rotten, lead singer with the Sex Pistols, by Roberta Bayley (San Antonio, Texas, Jan. 1978).

To find out more about Wilde's American adventures, click here. 

To watch the Sex Pistols perform their song New York at Randy's Rodeo, in San Antonio, Texas, (8 Jan. 1978), click here. 

This gig is notorious for the fact that Sid Vicious hits a member of the audience over the head with his bass guitar. 

For a sister post that provides a kind of PS to this one and refers to the case of Sebastian Horsley, click here.   

The Wisdom of Solomon 1: On Sincerity, Authenticity, Black Sheep and Scapegoats

Simon Solomon (aka Dr Simon Thomas)

simonsolomon.ink 

Dublin-based poet, critic and translator, Simon Solomon, has been kind enough to leave several lengthy comments on recent posts and I would like here to respond to some of his points, hopefully demonstrating the same intelligence, humour, and breadth of reading as this rather shadowy figure ...

I: Sincerity and Authenticity [See: Comes Over One an Absolute Necessity to Move ...]

I think, Simon, we might trace Lawrence's insistence on honesty to a rather old-fashioned form of moral sincerity, born of his nonconformist Protestant background, rather than the more modern, post-Romantic "cult of authenticity" to which you ascribe it.

In other words, he wants to say what he means and mean what he says, more than he cares about being true to some kind of ideal model of self. However, let's not get all Lionel Trilling about this and drive ourselves crazy trying to precisely define and differentiate each term.

Besides, either way, you're absolutely right that Wilde ironically mocks both ideals and exposes the ambiguities and contradictions to which they inevitably give rise. Sincerity or authenticity, authenticity or sincerity - let's call the whole thing off and pull up a couple of deckchairs in Eastbourne.

PS: As for honesty always being described in terms of brutality, this is probably just a cliché - unless, of course, we imagine the truth as something terrible (as, arguably, Lawrence himself imagines it; thus his insistence that when one speaks sincerely, one does so with the voice of a demon).

II: Baa, Baa, Black Sheep etc. [See: Separating the Black Sheep from the Scapegoats]

Despite the language drawn from analytic psychology, which, as you know, is anathema to me, I liked your reading of the black sheep as one who exists "in a state of ambivalent internal exile within the family constellation".

That's kind of how I feel: and, I suspect, kind of how you feel too. Indeed, this is probably a common feeling amongst all those who envy orphans and know that the most beautiful words in the world are those spoken by Meursault: Aujourd'hui, maman est morte.        

You're absolutely right to remind us of the scapegoat as a pharmakon (or, more accurately, a pharmakós); i.e., the unfortunate individual (often a slave, a cripple, or a criminal) either driven into exile, or ritualistically sacrificed in order to redeem the community and save it from disaster (be it plague, famine, or invasion).

I was interested, also, to read your take on René Girard's work on mimetic desire and his development of the so-called scapegoat mechanism. Your brilliant description of him "dragging the ancient Jewish scapegoat bleating and whimpering out of Leviticus into a libidinally saturated post-psychological age", made me smile and wish that I could write sentences like that.

And yes, as you rightly conclude, whether its Jews, queers, witches, or communists, history demonstrates that the scapegoat mechanism "is gloomily indispensable and only the targets change".

PS: I'm not entirely sure I understood the part about Christ and the redemption of desire, but, I suppose the story of Jesus is the ne plus ultra when it comes to scapegoat mythology. His attempt to universalise the idea and redeem all of humanity via his sacrifice could only ever fail. And his resurrection surely defeats the whole point, exposing the fraudulence not only of the scapegoat mechanism, but also lying at the heart of Christianity. If he died for our sins, then the Nazarene should at least have had the decency to stay dead.


Note: readers interested in part two of this post - On the Grain of the Voice and Further Remarks on Lunacy - should click here.

Hot Gypsy Girls 3: On Carmen and Her Seduction of a Famous German Philosopher

I'm a free spirit, men love me / I'll drink, I'll dance but do not forsake me

For my magic will end in flames and / Your heart will burn out my name

I: L'amour est un oisseau rebelle

The character of Carmen, a young Spanish gitana, is the perfect embodiment of the Hot Gypsy Girl stereotype. Bizet's opera, composed in four acts and first performed in 1875, is the tragic story of how a respectable army officer, Don José, is drawn in to her dangerous world in all its oriental otherness and infectious immorality.

His mad obsession with Carmen and vain belief that he might possess her love, costs him everything; his honour, his dignity, and his masculine pride. Although it is she - not he - who ends up in a pool of blood on the floor, having been murdered by his hand: Ah! Carmen! ma Carmen adorée! he cries, having stabbed her in a jealous rage.  

But whilst it's Carmen who is ultimately the victim of a terrible crime, it's Don José with whom the audience are expected to sympathise; seeing him as the victim of her duplicity and guile. And that, of course, is exactly how racism, misogyny and class discrimination works. It's also how a work of art that openly exploits a Hot Gypsy Girl's appeal in order to titilate its audience and appear outrageously unconventional, implicitly reaffirms the bourgeois order at the same time.

As Adriana Helbig rightly notes:

"Don José's transformation and Carmen's murder embodied a strong message to the 19th-century middle-class audience: ­ Carmen's deviant, immoral actions would not be tolerated and any contact with her would lead to pain and eventual social, spiritual, and moral ruin."

This being the case - Carmen being an essentially moral and reactionary tale - one is surprised that Nietzsche loved it so - but loved it he did! Indeed, he claimed to have seen it twenty times (coincidentally the same number of performances that Brahms also claimed to have attended) and that each occasion left him feeling happier and more alive than the last.

Perhaps we might briefly explore why that was the case - why, if you like, even a famous German philosopher should fall under the spell of a Gypsy Girl in all of her Andalusian hotness ...


II: L'amour est enfant de bohème

A real man, says Zarathustra, wants two things above all others: Gefahr und Spiel. For this reason, he desires a woman like Carmen; for within the pornographic imagination the Hot Gypsy Girl is one of the most dangerous playthings on earth. And so, perhaps, at some level, in boasting of his love for Carmen and her animal vitality, Nietzsche is affirming his own masculinity following his failed relationship with Lou Salomé.

But there are, of course, other reasons why Nietzsche was drawn to this opera and proclaimed Bizet a genius - not least to piss off the Wagnerians, although it should be noted that Wagner himself greatly admired Carmen, having attended the very successful first production in Vienna, six years before Nietzsche first saw it in Genoa, in 1881.       

For Nietzsche, Carmen identifies the tragi-comic essence of love, which Oscar Wilde famously summarizes: Each man kills the thing he loves. But, more than this, it accomplishes a much-needed Mediterraneanization of music, by which Nietzsche means it makes music gay and free-spirited once more; giving wings to thought and - as he also hints - putting lead in pencil.

In other words, Bizet makes horny; giving one that feeling of power that is, in Nietzschean ethics, the source of happiness and, ultimately, goodness. For Nietzsche, Carmen makes one a better man and a better philosopher - and this is why he is happy to throw himself at the feet of a Hot Gypsy Girl in Seville ...


Notes

Bizet's Carmen (1875) was based on a novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée, written and first published in 1845. Amongst other sources, Mérimée drew upon George Borrow's book The Zincali (1841) for material on the Romani living in Spain; a work largely responsible for the Spanish components of the Hot Gypsy Girl stereotype. 

Adriana Helbig, 'Gypsies, Morality, Sexuality', The New York City Opera Project: Carmen (2003). Click here to read. 

Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1967). 

For an interesting essay on Carmen as Nietzsche's muse, by Traian Penciuc, click here. Pencuic rightly argues that Nietzsche's affinity for Bizet's opera is anything but whimsical.  

To read part one of this post - On the Racial and Sexual Stereotyping of Romani Women - click here. 

To read part two of this post - Esmeralda: Trope Codifier and Fraud - click here.

Sailing to Byzantium (Notes on Yeats and the Singularity)

William Butler Yeats by Tricia Danby

deviantart.com

Written in 1926, when Yeats was 61 and starting to feel his age, the poem 'Sailing to Byzantium' was published two years later in a collection entitled The Tower (1928).

Composed of four stanzas, each arranged into eight ten-syllable lines with a traditional rhyming scheme (a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c) of Italian origin much favoured by poets who go in for a mock-heroic effect - not that Yeats didn't take himself and his work very seriously indeed - it describes the metaphorical journey of a man musing on his own mortality and attempting to imagine a vision of eternal life that might provide him with posthumous hope.     

In other words, given the problem of a heart sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal, Yeats looks to art for a solution, speculating that he might be able to escape his paltry body and transfer his soul into some non-natural form - such as that of a mechanical golden bird, that sits in a fake golden tree and sings about the mysteries of time.

This quest for immortality is, for Yeats, at the heart of all spiritual yearning; a yearning that becomes increasingly acute - and increasingly desperate - with age.

What's interesting - to me at least - is not that Yeats openly expresses his contempt for imperfect nature, which, in his mind, is full of ugliness and prone to decay; for that's common among idealists who despise the softness and (sinfulness) of the flesh. It's the fact, rather, that he's equally explicit in his positing of the artificial object as superior to the natural entity in every sense, including, the aesthetico-spiritual.

Ultimately, his is a material idealism of things, including golden birds, not an immaterial idealism of disembodied minds. And his dream is of being gathered into the artifice - not the reality or truth - of eternity. Once his soul has been released from nature, he wants it to be reincarnated in a man-made object.

I thought of Yeats whilst reading an interview with Ray Kurzweil, the American author, computer whizz, and Google's director of engineering. Kurzweil is a public advocate of artificial intelligence and transhumanism who eagerly awaits the singularity - i.e., the moment when mankind fuses with its own technology, finally securing immortality and a new Byzantium; albeit a scientific utopia wherein the knowledge drive is triumphant, rather than poetic fancy.     

If Yeats fantasized about becoming a toy bird, Kurzweil hopes to have his consciousness downloaded onto his laptop and eventually transferred back to his cryogenically preserved and technologically enhanced body, which will be all ready and waiting in its vat of liquid nitrogen at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Arizona.

Both of the visions described here are anathema to me; not only as a Lawrentian, but also as a Wildean. For like the latter, I too hope that if I am to be reincarnated one day it will be as a flower - no soul but perfectly beautiful.

And for that to happen, I need to be buried in the dark soil and allowed to decompose; returned to nature, not released from it; returned to death, which, as Nietzsche says, is a return to the actual, not projected into some virtual future founded upon techno-idealism and dreams of becoming-machine. 


See: W. B. Yeats, 'Sailing to Byzantium', in The Collected Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran, (Scribner, revised paperback edition, 1996). Click here to read on the Poetry Foundation website.

D. H. Lawrence and the Grand Perverts

Drawing of D. H. Lawrence by David Levine (1968)

According to D. H. Lawrence, in a letter written to Aldous Huxley, behind all of those whom he identifies as grand perverts, lies "ineffable conceit" and boundless ego.

Figures including St. Francis, Michelangelo, Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marcel Proust, are all guilty of the same thing; namely, "attempting to intellectualise and so utterly falsify the phallic consciousness", says Lawrence.

By this, he seems to mean they get their sex in their heads and barter away the sheer intensity of lived experience for mere representation. In other words, they fall into idealism, into narcissism and into solipsism; "the utter incapacity for any development of contact with any other human being".

But, in as much as phallic consciousness is also "the basic consciousness, and the thing we mean, in the best sense, by common sense", I suppose he's also taking a dig at all those who dare to think differently from those who subscribe to the morality of custom and popular prejudice, or what Lawrence mistakes for an instinctive-intuitive form of folk wisdom. 

 
And this, when you think about it, is not only surprising, but bitterly disappointing. That Lawrence - of all people - should end up defending doxa (that form of truth and goodness which goes without saying and from which we should never deviate) and condemning a host of other writers, artists, and thinkers as perverts (a term used in an admittedly idiosyncratic manner, but still in an essentially negative and pejorative sense), is, if nothing else, an outrageous example of the pot calling the kettle - and every other kitchen utensil - black.   


See: D. H. Lawrence, Letter 4358, to Aldous Huxley, 27 March 1928, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James. T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 342.  

Floraphilia Redux (With Reference to the Case of Rupert Birkin)

Floraphilia 

YouTube (2009)

 

Flowering plants don't just grow in soil: they are also rooted in our hearts and blossom in our poetry; from Wordsworth's daffodils to Sylvia Plath's poppies. We love flowers and our love is like a red, red rose; just as the columbine is the emblem of our foolishness, the marsh-lily the symbol of our corruption and the narcissus conveys our conceit.

In language, as in art, we have formed an unnatural alliance with flowers and some, like Oscar Wilde, fervently hope that in the next life they might even become-flower - which is to say, beautiful but soulless. Here, I would like to examine this literary-erotic entanglement with flora and the manner in which we, like insects, become implicated in their sex games just as they are utilized in ours ...

What are flowers?

Flowers are the obscenely colourful sex organs of the flowering plant and they are what distinguishes angiosperms from other earlier forms of seed producing plant. Without flowers, an angiosperm would be just another gymnosperm: all leaf and naked of seed. Arguably, the same is true of people: they either blossom into full being like a bright red poppy, or they remain closed up within a mass of foliage and growing fat like a cabbage.

What is pollination?

Pollination is the process by which one plant receives the pollen from another: it is the botanical term for fucking. Some angiosperms are pollinated abiotically by the wind, some by water. And some rely upon small animals, such as bats or hummingbirds. But the majority, around 80%, exploit the labour of roughly 200,000 different types of insect. It is, if you like, a perfectly natural form of artificial insemination.

But insect pollination might better be viewed as a form of paid sex work, rather than erotic enslavement. Because when plants are fucked by insects the latter get something sweet in return for their services: nectar. However, this is not to say that the insects are entering into the relationship with full consent (whatever that might mean in the world of bugs and bees and cigarette trees) and most seem blissfully unaware that they are playing such a crucial role in plant reproduction.

Further, there are instances of male insects being sexually duped by a plant with sex organs that have evolved to look like the female of their species. The insect is attracted not by the pretty colours or the alluring scent of the flower, nor even the promise of a sugary drink, but by the prospect of being able to mate. The French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari discuss this in A Thousand Plateaus, with particular reference to the case of an orchid and a wasp. However, they argue that it should be understood in terms of becoming and not in the more conventional terms of mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.

The question remains, however, what this aparallel evolution or game of becoming, has to do with us: how are we implicated in the sex life of flowers? The answer is hay fever. For what is the allergic reaction to pollen suffered by many millions of men, women and children other than a sexually transmitted condition? Every spring we are sexually pestered by flowering plants that promiscuously allow their sperm-producing cells to be carried by any passing breeze into the eyes, ears, nose and throat of any passing creature.

As with herpes, there is presently no cure for hay fever. However, an article in The New Scientist several years ago suggested that 'organic masturbation' with fruit and vegetables might alleviate the problem. It turned out to be an April Fool's Day joke. But, many a word spoken in jest ... The revenge of the flowers starts with a runny nose, but who's to say in what humiliating circumstances it might end?

Of course, not all plant-human penetration is non-consensual. Whilst no one wants a nose full of pollen, many men and women are happy to insert carrots, cucumbers, and courgettes into those places usually reserved for cocks, tongues, fingers, and toys. But just because a woman might choose to insert a banana into her vagina, it doesn’t necessarily mean that she is on the road to building a body without organs, or that she's had done with the judgement of God.

In D. H. Lawrence's novel, Women in Love, the central male protagonist, Rupert Birkin, is a confirmed floraphile, as this scene illustrates:

"He was happy in the wet hill-side, that was overgrown and obscure with bushes and flowers. He wanted to touch them all, to saturate himself with the touch of them all. He took off his clothes, and sat down naked among the primroses [...] then lying down and letting them touch his belly, his breasts. It was such a fine, cool, subtle touch all over him, he seemed to saturate himself with their contact.
      But they were too soft. He went through the long grass to a clump of young fir-trees [...] The soft sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles. There was a thistle which pricked him vividly, but not too much, because all his movements were too discriminate and soft. To lie down and roll in the sticky, cool young hyacinths, to lie on one's belly and cover one's back with handfuls of fine wet grass, soft as a breath, soft and more delicate and more beautiful than the touch of any woman; and then to sting one's thigh against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one's shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch-trunk against one’s breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges - this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying. Nothing else would do, nothing else would satisfy, except this coolness and subtlety of vegetation travelling into one’s blood. How fortunate he was, that there was this lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, waiting for him, as he waited for it; how fulfilled he was, how happy!"

Lawrence continues:

"Really, what a mistake he had made, thinking he wanted people, thinking he wanted a woman. He did not want a woman - not in the least. The leaves and the primroses and the trees, they were really lovely and cool and desirable, they really came into the blood and were added on to him. He was enrichened now immeasurably, and so glad.
      ... Why should he pretend to have anything to do with human beings at all? Here was his world, he wanted nobody and nothing but the lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, and himself, his own living self.
      It was necessary to go back into the world. That was true. But that did not matter ... He knew now where he belonged. He knew where to plant himself, his seed: – along with the trees, in the folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves. This was his place, his marriage place. The world was extraneous."

It might be suggested that in this extraordinary scene Birkin is in the process of forming a rhizome between himself and the vegetal world, similar to that formed between the wasp and the orchid. It's a deterritorialization of sex from its traditional object and aim; a setting free of desire to roam and eventually reterritorialize on all kinds of new things, in all sorts of strange new ways. The great and intoxicating truth that Birkin demonstrates is that we can form loving relations not just with anyone - but anything and everything.

Admittedly, it's not love in the conventional and orthodox sense of the word, which is to say love that has been sanctioned by God and which involves the right persons doing the right things at the right time in the right place with the right organs - a model that is so restrictive and so reductive that it makes one want to immediately run outside and commit acts of erotic atrocity like Diogenes in the market place.

However, let it suffice for me to point out to those law-abiding individuals who think that love should circulate exclusively within a system of moral legislation, that were it not for Eve daring to consort with serpents and eat of whatever fruit she pleased, then none of us might have attained to carnal knowledge, or experienced the full range of earthly delights. Ultimately, love is tied to transgression and to crime - not to obedience or conformity with social convention.

In fact, one might argue that the highest forms of love are precisely those branded as paraphilias in which strange connections are sought out and one dreams of establishing an inhuman relationship with alien forces, or heterogeneous terms and territories. Quite clearly, Birkin is caught up in a process of becoming-plant via a series of perverse participations none of which involve imitation or identification. It's a question of extracting from his own sex the particles that best enter into proximity with those emitted by the plants and which produce within him a micro-florality.

If usually when we love we do so in order to seek out ourselves, that's almost certainly not the case here. For Birkin is not depositing his sperm amongst the foliage in the same way as he might come inside a woman and one suspects that he isn’t even that concerned with his own functional pleasure or the banality of orgasm. What really excites Birkin, even more than the delicious touch of the plants on his bare skin, is that he might enter into a new way of being and release the flows and forces and strange feelings presently overcoded by his humanity. Or, put more simply, that he might blossom and unfold into his own poppiness.

The problem with having a human being as a lover, is that their body often doesn’t serve to set anything free; rather, it gives impersonal desire personal expression and in this way it acts as a zone of containment, or a point of blockage - a dead end if you like, no matter how you choose to penetrate it. In other words, the anus is a cul-de-sac and, as Bataille reminds us, the vagina is a freshly dug grave.

There is, I admit, something utopian in this belief that we might discover via molecular-desire a new world in which we each contain an infinite number of impersonal selves and the anthropomorphic representation of sex is shattered once and for all: a future in which love will no longer mean boy-meets-girl, but boy becomes-girl, boy becomes-animal, boy becomes-plant, etc. But, even after the orgy, it surely remains true to say that perversions make happy.

This, however, is not to argue that the only way to form an intimate relation between yourself and the world of plants is to roll around naked like Birkin in the wet hill-sides, saturated with a mixture of pollen and semen. Nor does it mean having to masturbate with the contents of your vegetable drawer. For art also serves as a method of becoming and when Van Gogh paints sunflowers "he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as a man, and the sunflower, as sunflower". The canvas acts as a zone of proximity wherein something is exchanged between the two terms: the artist becomes-object, just as the object becomes pure line and colour.

This is the power of painting: it gives us the third thing, which, in this case, is a kind of human-flower hybrid that blossoms in the fourth dimension as a form of perfected relationship and becoming "where no Kodak can snap it". And, for Lawrence, our life hinges upon this relationship formed between ourselves and the world around us. Via an infinite number of different contacts we enter into the kingdom of bliss.

Alas, it’s not easy to come into touch in this way. To form a new relation with the world is invariably painful, if only because it involves the breaking of old connections and loyalties and this, as Lawrence reminds us, is never pleasant. But, nevertheless, we live in bright red splendour like the poppy via acts of infidelity and not by staying true to old attachments like a fat green cabbage forever stuck in the same old cabbage patch.

See:

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 106-07.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Morality and the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 171.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Art and Morality', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, p. 168.

Note: A much longer version of this work was first presented at Treadwell's, London, on 19 June, 2012.

On the Question of Ensoulment

Soul entering human embryo at point of conception 

Holygraphic quantum-semantic electron microscopy imaging by pixwit.com

D. H. Lawrence wasn't a biologist, but that didn't deter him from sharing his metaphysical speculations on human fertilization and the development of the embryo. And, being primarily a religious thinker, the vital question for him concerned ensoulment; i.e., the moment at which a newly formed human being is animated by the Holy Spirit.
 

For Lawrence, as for the Pope, just as coition is the essential clue to sex, conception is the crucial act here: the instant that the father-quick fuses with the mother-germ is when a new unit of individuality is born, nine months prior to the birth of the actual baby.

However, we might note that - unlike the Pope - Lawrence also believes in a form of reincarnation via which the souls of the dead re-enter and pervade the souls of the living, breeding thoughts and feelings and ensuring that each person is composed of a multiplicity of forces and so isn't absolutely unique or entirely self-contained.

As interesting as the latter belief is, it's the former notion of ensoulment that I wish to discuss here, examining the view that it occurs at conception and not, for example, at the formation of the nervous system, or when there is measurable brain activity; nor when a tiny heartbeat can be heard, or fetal viability is attained; nor when the newborn is rudely slapped on the bottom and draws its first breath.

It's a view, however, that isn't shared universally. Aristotle, for example, subscribed to a model of epigenesis and believed that ensoulment - in a human sense - only occurred forty days after conception in the case of the male embryo and ninety days after conception in the case of the female fetus, when movement is experienced within the womb. Before this time he held that an embryo had the soul of a vegetable, followed by that of an animal and so couldn't be regarded as a fully human individual.     

Aristotle's views on this question influenced many of the great Christian thinkers, including Thomas Aquinas, who, even whilst conceding that the early embryo did not contain a human soul (one capable of rationality and distinguishing between good and evil), still maintained that aborting it constituted a grave sin (a position which, rightly or wrongly, the Catholic Church has been remarkably consistent on over the years).

It's worth recalling, however, that the ancient Greeks and early Christians knew nothing of fertilization; it wasn't until 1876 that Oscar Hertwig conclusively demonstrated that it involved fusion of two parental gametes and resulted in a genetically distinct zygote. Aristotle believed that the embryo arose exclusively from semen and that the female body merely provided a safe space for the embryo to develop.

Compared to this view, the notion of ensoulment at conception doesn't seem so outlandish; provided of course that one is willing to accept the idea of a non-corporeal and immortal essence animating the human being like some kind of divine breath or spark. Personally, I'm not.

I tend, rather, to share Foucault's more negative, more material view of the soul; as a virtual and historical reality that is produced as an effect of power continually shaping and disciplining the body and which ultimately serves to imprison the flesh. And, like Wilde, I hope that if ever I am to live again it can be as a little flower - no soul, but perfectly beautiful. 

Generation Snowflake

Photo: Getty Images / Uppercut

It's never nice (and probably not even very helpful) to negatively characterize a generation. And I'm particularly sensitive to the fact that when it's members of my generation negatively characterizing a younger generation, it's often born of bitterness and betrays a certain envy.

For whereas we were the future once, now it belongs to the millennials and their future is ever-absorbing our present and spitting it out as a past that, far from deserving respect or admiration, needs to be apologised for: 

OMG! Don't you realise how inappropriate that is? Check your privilege!    

Having said that, it's very hard for those of us who were shaped by an age of confrontation and provocation - who relished the opportunity to offend and incite controversy - not to despise members of Generation Snowflake; a subset of young people, typically students with an acute sense of their own entitlement, who call for the establishment of safe spaces in which to avoid hearing or discussing ideas that might distress them, or conflict with their own politically and morally correct worldview. 

I don't doubt their generational fragility, or believe them to be feigning hurt. It's their obvious sincerity, indeed, which I find most most troubling. For, as Oscar Wilde once warned, whilst a little sincerity is a dangerous thing, too much can prove fatal ...

Reflections on Exile

Able was I ere I saw Essex

It's been suggested, rather snidely, that my Essex exile is entirely self-imposed; something voluntarily entered into and which I'm thus responsible for.      

Of course, I'm far too fatalistic a thinker to accept this piece of naive psychologizing which rests upon the rational-moral fallacy of a free-willing subject exercising complete control over the course of actions and events.

But, however it came to pass, my Essex exile is an unfolding reality and a profoundly unpleasant one at that.

It's not that I feel banished from a beloved homeland - something that the Greeks regarded as a fate worse than death - so much as shut-out from a way of life which, limited as it was in opportunity and human contact, was nonetheless my own; i.e. a piece of chaos to which I'd given style. 

Thus my Essex exile is more a form of aesthetico-existential deprivation rather than geographical displacement. I do miss London: especially Soho. But mostly I miss the series of small habits, daily routines and rhythms that enabled a reassuring and necessary consistency and continuity of self (or at least the impression of such).

As Deleuze and Guattari note, even nomads happy to wander homelessly in that savage realm of dangerous knowledge outside the gate have to keep enough elements of subjectivity in order to be able to respond to the dominant reality when they wake up in the morning.

And so, as poets from Ovid to Oscar Wilde have discovered, exile isn't much fun or easy to bear if it involves a loss of soul and not merely a loss of familiar streets and favourite haunts.  

Worse Than Hitler

Several years ago, I gave a paper to the Philosophy For All crowd entitled Carry on Nietzsche: How One Becomes as Queer as One Is. Concerned primarily with the question of style and camp aesthetics, the paper was a playful comparative study of the German philosopher and Oscar Wilde and a promotion of what the former called die fröhliche Wissenschaft.   

At the end of the presentation, however, an East European woman stood up and accused me with a voice full of rising and righteous emotion of being morally bankrupt and politically suspect; she, she said, had seen for herself where my kind of nihilism leads (for she had visited Auschwitz). With tears in her eyes and a tremor in her voice - and all the while jabbing a finger in my direction - she concluded her case against me with the almost insane accusation that I was worse than Hitler. Not as bad, or in some way similar - but actually worse!

Thinking about this incident now, I see that her attempt to dismiss my work and shut-down discussion of it by playing the Nazi card is a classic example of what Leo Strauss termed reductio ad Hitlerum; an association fallacy which marks her intellectual desperation or lack of legitimate counterargument. She was simply attempting to distract people from what I had said, rather than debate the work.  

Further, one might wonder if it is in fact possible to be worse than Hitler - for doesn't Hitler serve as the absolute last word in evil within secular culture, much as the Devil used to serve when we were more religiously minded? Nick Land comments precisely - and brilliantly - on this:

"Hitler perfectly personifies demonic monstrosity, transcending history and politics to attain the stature of a metaphysical absolute: evil incarnate. Beyond Hitler it is impossible to go, or think. ... In this regard rather than Satan, it might be more helpful to compare Hitler to the Antichrist, which is to say: to a mirror Messiah, of reversed moral polarity. ... Hitler is sacramentally abhorred, in a way that touches upon theological 'first things'. If to embrace Hitler as God is a sign of highly lamentable politico-spiritual confusion (at best), to recognize his historical singularity and sacred meaning is near-mandatory, since he is affirmed by all men of sound faith as the exact complement of the incarnate God ... and this identification has the force of 'self-evident truth'. (Did anybody ever need to ask why the reductio ad Hitlerum works?)

- Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment, Part 4: Re-running the race to ruin

What Big Extraterrestrial Eyes You Have

Matilda the Cat is something of an internet sensation, with thousands of followers on social media. But, despite her appearance, she's actually a perfectly normal moggie. The poor thing does suffer, however, from a rare condition in which the lenses of her eyes have spontaneously detached, causing blindness, and giving her the look of an alien being. 

Those who are interested in reading more about her case should visit: aliencatmatilda.com - her official website. Because, fascinating as her story is, what I really wish to discuss here is the origin of the idea that aliens - particularly those known as Greys - have large, black, glassy-looking eyes. 

Obviously it doesn't come from the actual world, because there are no entities from out of space visiting planet Earth on a regular basis and abducting large numbers of human beings in order to probe them and fuck with their minds. Many people - mostly Americans - might believe contrary to this and insist that there's a global conspiracy covering up the facts, but, alas, it is of course complete nonsense; a mad fantasy on behalf of the needy, the lonely, and the fearful. A bit like the belief in a loving - but vengeful - God. 

For God, like ET, is a convenient fiction. Not surprisingly therefore, we find that our idea of what an alien looks like first comes from literature: H. G. Wells to be precise, who, as long ago as 1893 was already imagining futuristic grey-skinned beings with big heads and large eyes. Then, in 1901, he depicted the natives of the moon (Selenites) in very similar terms. 

He was followed in this belief that alien races would conform closely to a certain body type, by the Swedish writer Gustav Sandgren who, in 1933, under the pen name of Gabriel Linde, published a sci-fi novel translated into English as The Unknown Danger. Here, once again, a race of aliens were described as chinless wonders possessing big bald heads, large gleaming eyes, and small mouths. 

Thirty years later and press reports of the Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction case described those doing the abducting in this identikit manner. All stereotypes are grey; but by now all Greys were stereotypical.

Spielberg unimaginatively gave us more of the same in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). And then, in the 1990s, Mulder and Scully chased very familiar looking aliens for nine seasons, The X-Files firmly establishing the link in the paranoid imagination between Greys and the military-industrial complex of the New World Order.

As Oscar Wilde once said, Life imitates art far more than art imitates life. The disappointing thing is how few people realise this (and how tragic the consequences can be).