A Feisty Evening with Isobel Dixon, Douglas Robertson and D. H. Lawrence

Isobel Dixon, Douglas Robertson & D. H. Lawrence

 

 

I. 

 

A couple of nights ago, I went to the National Poetry Library - which, for those who don't know, is housed on the fifth floor of the Royal Festival Hall in London's Southbank Centre - for what was billed as a D. H. Lawrence celebration, with particular focus being given to the collection of poems entitled Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923).

 

The event also called attention to a recent book by the South African poet Isobel Dixon, produced in collaboration with the highly acclaimed Scottish artist Douglas Robertson who provided a dozen finely detailed illustrations: A Whistling of Birds (Nine Arches Press, 2023).

 

II. 

 

Whilst this work is essentially a response to Lawrence's text - and his short essay 'Whistling of Birds' (1919) lends the book its name - Dixon also invites others, including William Blake, Emily Dickinson and Ted Hughes into the conversation, whilst still finding time to make her own distinctive voice heard. 

 

It's a work that will leave the majority of members of the D. H. Lawrence Society very happy, as it uncritically reinforces the idea of Lawrence as a nature lover in the English Romantic tradition and a poet with an almost uncanny ontological insight into the essence of birds, beasts, and flowers. 

And in their hour long presentation at the NPL, this idea of Lawrence was further reinforced; it was almost as if the important challenge thrown down by the Indian author Amit Chaudhuri twenty-odd years ago to read Lawrence's poetry in light of poststructuralist theory has been completely forgotten [1].

 

Which is profoundly unfortunate in my view. For it results in an interpretation of Lawrence that not only fails to understand the radical nature of his aesthetic, but means he is sold short as a thinker-poet whose primary object is language. 

 

It's because Lawrence writes so well, that we believe he has captured the true nature or being of a snake, for example, when, actually, he dissolves such essentialism based on the idea of a fixed identity into a game of difference and becoming - which is why philosophers including Derrida and Deleuze are such admirers of Lawrence's poetry [2].     

 

 

III. 

 

Just to be clear: I enjoyed the event and wish Dixon and Robertson every success with their book (which has already garnered considerable praise).

 

However, they disappointed by refusing to take Lawrence seriously as a writer; preferring instead to think of him in all too human terms (thus the frequent references to biographical details, as if these somehow might illuminate the text or explain away its complex and often troubling character). 

They also disappointed by dismissing Lawrence's work as a painter in a lighthearted manner, saying it simply wasn't very good. Again, without wanting to go into too much detail here - as I've written at length on this subject elsewhere - this simply betrays an ignorance of what it is Lawrence is attempting to do on canvas; namely, produce an art of sensation that is concerned with the invisible forces and flows that shape the flesh via what Deleuze terms a very special violence. 

 

His is a non-representational depiction of the body without organs and therefore Lawrence is not overly concerned with anatomical fidelity, or reducing figures to the level of optical cliché. In other words, he is not trying capture a likeness and, by his own admission, his pictures are rolling in faults of technique - but that doesn't matter; Lawrence is not so much interested in that which is merely true-to-life, but that which is more true-to-life (we might call this phallic realism).   

 

In sum: just as Lawrence's poetry is primarily involved with language and the assembling of textual abstractions, his painting is involved with colour, line, and the forces of chaos; a violence that works upon the flesh and upon the canvas, distorting and deforming bodies and liberating pictures from the tyranny of the stereotype; a violence that knows nothing of symbolism or signification and cares nothing for narrative or illustration (for if painting has no model to depict, neither has it a story to tell).

 

Lawrence may not be a great painter, or even a very good one. But he's a better one than his critics realise - and a far more intelligent and sophisticated writer than they think him too.   

  

One of Robertson's illustrations for A Whistling of Birds (2023) feat. a squirrel 

next to Lawrence's astonishing Ink Sketch (1929) feat. a nude man and woman 

within a field of rhythm and desire demonstrating how waves 

of inorganic life exceed the bounds of organic activity.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Amit Chaudhuri, D. H. Lawrence and 'Difference': Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, (Oxford University Press, 2003). 

      I have discussed this book and made reference to it elsewhere on this blog: click here. I might not agree with everything Chaudhuri says, but this is an important text whose challenge to the (almost wilfully naive) manner in which Lawrence is usually portrayed and his writing interpreted has still not been met by many within the Lawrence world.

 

[2] See for example Derrida's discussion of Lawrence's poem 'Snake' in volume one of The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago University Press, 2009).

      Readers might also be interested in a post dated 17 July 2015 on Lawrence, Derrida, and the snake: click here.

 

 

Re the use of the word feisty in the title of this post: click here. 

 

This post is for Chloe Rose Campbell and Tamara Ber.   

 

On the Feral Poetry of Fran Lock

 

Fran Lock in human and hyena form

 

 

Fran Lock likes to describe her poetic practice as feral - by which she means "omnivorous, opportunistic, accretive and excessive" [1]. 

 

Hers is not a poetry which germinates in "periods of quiet sustained reflection", but one cobbled together with a certain violence and a needs-be-as-needs-must attitude born of her working-class background. 

 

But is it any good? Based on the work I've read so far, I'd say it is ...

 

Or, at any rate, I'd say that - as a Deleuzian - it appeals to me, because, like Kafka, Lock is not attempting to express the inexpressible, or impose a coherent and conventional linguistic form on lived experience, so much as construct a minor literature. 

 

In other words, she problematises everyday language which all-too-easily and all-too-often becomes sticky with familiar use and overlaid with doxa. 

 

Raised with a strong sense of her Irish heritage, Lock carries English away from itself and opens up a kind of foreign tongue within it; not by simply inventing neologisms, but by forcing a dominant language out of its usual syntactic conventions and thereby making it stutter or scream and travel to its own external limits (limits which are not outside language, but are the outside of language).

 

It's no surprise that Lock is also interested in therianthropy, because writing at its best always effects a becoming-animal (be it insect, hyena, or great white whale) [2] and transports us from the land of Oedipus to that zone of indiscernibility wherein we can lose our domesticated human selves and experiment with wild forms of otherness.  

 

She doesn't always succeed, but that's okay; Lock has learnt to assume the risks of failure and embrace her "moments of humiliated over-reach", continually pushing not only beyond her own comfort zone but her own competence. 

 

It's better, she argues, to be thought ridiculous than boring and if that alienates some readers and critics, she doesn't care; "I’m not a branch of the service industry, and nobody said my relationship to the people encountering my work had to be gentle or friendly."  

 

That's a statement that makes an old punk very happy ...

 

 

Notes

[1] Fran Lock, 'T. S. Eliot Prize Writers' Notes', on the Poetry School website: click here. All lines quoted here are from this text. 

 

[2] Admittedly, and somewhat disappointingly, Lock refers her idea of becoming animal (understood in terms of literal transformation) back to the American author Charles Hoy Fort and his book Wild Talents (1932), and not to Deleuze and Guattari's more philosophical notion developed in Mille Plateaux (1980). 

 

 

Bonus: to watch Fran Lock briefly talking about her work, her relation to language, and animal transformation fantasy, click here. 

 

 

I am grateful to Chloe Rose Campbell for introducing me to the work of Fran Lock. 

 

 

The Perfect Poem (Adapted from Balzac's Short Story Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu)

 

 

 

"You may know your syntax thoroughly and make no blunders in your grammar, 

but it takes that and something more to make a great poet." [1]

 

I.

 

On a cold December morning just after Christmas, a friend mentioned a poem he had been working on for over a decade. That seemed an awfully long time to me, but he was adamant that it would be the verse by which he would finally make his name in the world of letters. 

 

'Besides', he added, 'what are ten short years in the eternal struggle with language?'   

 

I said I'd be happy to read it, if he wanted me too, but he was somewhat taken aback - even slightly offended - by the suggestion: "No, no! It's not perfect yet; something still remains for me to do."

 

Which is fair enough. The mysterious poem, a work of patience on which he had wrought so long in secret, was doubtless also a work of genius - for my friend was a man of great passion and enthusiasm who sees above and beyond mundane reality. But until he wished for it to be read, there was nothing further I could say.   

 

II. 

 

The following spring, my friend sent me a text asking if I could come visit him at his retreat in Cornwall.   

When I arrived, I was shocked. For he had "fallen a victim to one of those profound and spontaneous fits of discouragement that are caused, according to medical doctors, by indigestion, flatulence, fever, or enlargement of the spleen; or, if you take the opinion of the Spiritualists, by the imperfections of our mortal nature". 

 

The poor devil had exhausted himself in putting the finishing touches to his magnificent poem. Slumped in a huge armchair upholstered in blue velvet, he glanced up at me like a man who had sunk into depression. 

 

Naturally, I asked him what was wrong: 'Alas!' he cried, 'for one joyous moment I believed my work was finished, but now I'm sure there are still lines that need rewriting.'

 

As was his wont in times of despair, he had decided to flee abroad: 'I am going to France, to Germany, to Greece in search of inspiration - I don't know when or if I'll be back!'

 

Thinking it might help, I again offered to read the poem. He looked at me aghast: 'What! Show you my verse in all its imperfection - never! I would sooner kill myself - and kill you, my friend - than do that.'

 

I must confess myself amazed by the murderous vehemence with which these words were spoken and knew not how to reply to this utterance of an emotion as hyserical as it was profound. Was it the fabled madness of the poet or had my friend "fallen a victim to some freak of the artist's fancy?"

 

'Okay', I said. 'But be careful you don't die in the process of trying to find the perfect wording and leave the poem unfinished.'

 

 

III.

 

It was a cold December morning just before Christmas when next I heard from Moisés, back from his travels and renting rooms in London. 'Come and visit me at once,' he cried. 'My poem is perfect and I can now show it you with pride.'

 

His small studio flat was in disorder and covered with dust; a few pictures hung here and there upon the wall of dead poets and pop stars from another time. 

 

Without even offering me a drink, he pressed a single sheet of A4 paper into my hands. His dyed-black hair was disordered and his face glowed "with a more than human exaltation". 'Here it is!' he cried. 'Did you ever think that language was capable of such perfection? Have I not spoken with such elemental power that a new world is brought into being?' 

 

I looked at the sheet, but could see nothing written there, just the brilliant whiteness of the paper. Only in the bottom right-hand corner he had signed his name with such delicate beauty that it made me smile and I began "to have some understanding, vague though it was, of the ecstasy in which he lived".  

 

The next day, I heard my friend had killed himself, having first destroyed his perfect poem and all other writings.

 

   

Notes

 

[1] This was spoken by Maître Frenhofer, the main character in a two-part short story by Balzac entitled Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu ("The Unknown Masterpiece"). 

      It was first published in L'Artiste, a weekly illustrated review, in August 1831. It was later published  in Balzac's Études philosophiques (1837) and integrated into La Comédie humaine in 1846. The work is a reflection on art which had a profound influence on the thinking of both Cézanne and Picasso.

      This post is adapted from Balzac's tale and both paraphrases and incorporates lines from it. The original story can be read as a Project Gutenberg ebook: click here. 

 

Butterfly

 

Damien Hirst: Expulsion (2018) 

Butterflies and household gloss on canvas 

(84" diameter)

 

 

I. 

 

One of my favourite short poems by D. H. Lawrence is called 'Butterfly' and exists in two versions, the first of which opens with the following lines: 

 

 

The sight of the ocean 

or of huge waterfalls

or of vast furnaces pouring forth fire

 

does not impress me as one butterfly does

when it settles by chance on my shoe. [1]

  

I have to confess, my own response to Damien Hirst's series of works known as Mandalas [2] made from the wings of thousands and thousands of dead butterflies, was something similar: even whilst astonished by the beauty of the works - and dismayed by the cruelty involved in making them - they did not impress as a single living butterfly impresses when it comes from out of nowhere and briefly settles on one's shoe, or on a flower in the sunshine.

 

When a single living butterfly emerges from its chrysalis and lifts up its large, often brightly coloured wings, fluttering into flight with 56-million years of evolution behind it, then "wonder radiates round the world again" [3]. 

 

But when Mr. Hirst imports innumerable dead butterflies from breeding farms in the tropics so that he might gleefully glue their body parts on to canvas in order to make art - and money - we go away feeling somewhat despondent, even a little demoralised. 

 

For it's as if life itself has been enframed and we witnesss a gathering of lost souls [4] exhibited for our macabre delight ...      

 

 

II.    

 

Having said this, I'm aware of the need to curb what Giovanni Aloi calls misplaced outrage when it comes to Hirst's use of butterflies. For as he rightly notes, whilst one can subscribe to the view that killing creatures for the production of art is unethical, it's important to acknowledge that what Hirst is doing is nothing new and that most artworks rely upon animal slaughter: 

      

"Watercolours are mixed with ox gall, an extract of bovine gall bladder, and tempera with egg. Sepia, the reddish-brown favourite of life drawing, is derived from the ink sac of the common squid and many other pigments rely on pulverised insects to provide us with the brilliant and subtle hues used in paintings. Canvases, meanwhile, are sized with rabbit skin glue. And ferrets, squirrels, and hogs are killed to make artists’ brushes." [5]

      

Aloi goes on to argue that Hirst is simply being honest about this and making the destructive reality of art apparent:

 

"His work reveals how the achievements of art have depended on our willingness to sacrifice the lives of animals. Or perhaps more disturbingly, Hirst shows us that aesthetic beauty can derive from so-called acts of cruelty towards animals and nature." [6]

 

Finally, Aloi points out that the farms that breed Hirst's butterflies not only help sustain local economies by providing legal and regulated work, but protect the environment by dramatically reducing habitat destruction. The poaching of rare specimiens from the wild - to be sold to international collectors on the black market - is also something that the farming of butterflies helps to prevent. 

 

So, whilst I still remain unimpressed in a Lawrentian sense with Hirst's butterfly mandalas, I would encourage readers to think twice before mounting their moral high horse.   

Damien Hirst: Expulsion (2018): detail

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Butterfly' [I], The Poems, Vol. I, ed. by Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 590. 

      Both short versions of this poem are located in The 'Nettles' Notebook, but readers might like to know that a significantly longer third version of 'Butterfly' can be found in The Last Poems Notebook; see The Poems, Vol. I, p. 610. This can be read online by clicking here. 

 

[2] Damien Hirst's Mandalas exhibition was held at the White Cube Gallery (Mason's Yard, London), 20 Sept - 2 Nov 2019: click here for details.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Butterfly' [2], The Poems, Vol. I, p. 591.

 

[4] Those who know their ancient Greek will recall that the word for butterfly - Ψυχή [psyche] - also denotes soul. 

   

[5-6] Giovanni Aloi, 'The misplaced outrage over Damien Hirst's dead butterflies', Apollo (30 Sept 2019): click here to read online. 

Hello Darkness My Old Friend ...

Hello darkness, my old friend - by Niranjan Morkar

dribble.com

 

 

I. 

 

The three fundamental laws of logic - (i) the law of non-contradiction; (ii) the law of the excluded middle; and (iii) the principle of identity - are all well and good, but cannot be thought valid for all forms of thinking. 

 

Why? Because - whether our logicians like to admit it or not - some forms of thinking rely upon creative madness and daimonic inspiration and so are not regulated by reason alone. 

 

Our very greatest poets, for example, playfully affirm paradox, ambiguity, and what Barthes terms the pleasure of the text; they are unafraid of appearing inconsistent or irrational and are proud to proclaim that if, like Whitman, they contradict themselves that's fine with them (for they contain multitudes) [1].        

 

II. 

 

Similarly, our great poet-philosophers, like Heidegger, argue that even the most enlightened thinking requires darkness: 

 

"This darkness is perhaps in play for all thinking at all times. Humans cannot set it aside. Rather they must learn to acknowledge the dark as something unavoidable and to keep at bay those prejudices that would destroy the lofty reign of the dark. Thus the dark remains distinct from the pitch black as the mere and utter absence of light. The dark however is the secret of the light. The dark keeps the light to itself. The latter belongs to the former. Thus the dark has its own limpidity." [2] 

 

This dark limpidity of thinking, is something that must always be protected. However, it's hard to do so when everything is now lit up with electric lights and we aspire to an ideal of excessive brightness that is brighter than a thousand suns.

 

As Heidegger says:   

 

"The light is no longer an illuminated clearing, when the light diffuses into a mere brightness [...] It remains difficult [...] to keep at bay the admixture of the brightness that does not belong and to find the brightness that is alone fitting to the dark. [...] Mortal thinking must let itself down into the dark depths of the well if it is to see the stars by day. It remains more difficult to guard the limpidity of the dark than to procure a brightness that only wants to shine as such. What only wants to shine, does not illuminate. [3]

 

In sum: whenever you start to think about thinking, you are instantly transported into darkness ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 51: click here to read on poets.org.  

 

[2] Martin Heidegger, Basic Principles of Thinking (Freiburg Lectures, 1957), in Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, (Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 88.

 

[3] Ibid., pp. 88-89. 

 

 

This post (as promised) is for Jenina Bas Pendry. 

 

For a sister post to this one, click here.

On Autumn

Giuseppe Arcimboldo: Autumn (1573)

 

"I notice that autumn is more a season of the soul than nature ..." 

 

 

Ever since childhood, autumn has been my favourite season: a time of conkers and bonfires; pumpkins and toffee apples; giant spiders and daddy longlegs ... What's not to love? I even like the first sharp frosts and shortening of the days.    

 

I've certainly never found anything painful or depressing about this season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and poets who do, I would suggest, merely reveal their own melancholic dispositions [1].

 

Still, not to worry; who needs sad and sickly poets when there are philosophers capable of writing lines like these which beautifully capture the joy of this time of year:

 

"Autumn - not deterioration and dying, not the over and done - quite to the contrary, the fiery, glowing entrance into the certain silence of a new time of waking to the unfolding - the acquisition of the restraint of the established jubilation of the inexhaustibe greatness of being [Sein] at its bursting forth." [2]   

 

  

Notes

 

[1] To his credit, although there are traces of sadness and regret in Keats's famous ode that I quote from here, he primarily affirms the fact that autumn is a season of great beauty and abundance. To Autumn (1819) can be read on the Poetry Foundation website: click here.          

 

[2] Martin Heidegger, 'Intimations x Ponderings (II) and Directives', (95), in Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 26. 

      One might argue that this short piece demonstrates that philosophy is poetic in a way that poetry never can be (in much the same manner that it's scientific in a way that no science can be). 

 

 

Bonus: to read a fascinating web feature entitled Nietzsche: The Problem of Autumn, by David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates, (University of Chicago Press, 1997), please click here.  

 

 

On the Intelligence of Fish

I'm not as dumb as you look ...

I.

I suppose the cognitive ability of mammals and birds is now pretty much an established fact; that is to say, human beings have finally conceded that they are not the only creatures that possess minds and know how to think and use language, etc.

Unfortunately, however, there's still lingering prejudice when it comes to other classes of animal - fish, for example, are still not accorded the respect they deserve and many people continue to subscribe to the belief that they and other acquatic lifeforms are intellectually inferior to terrestrial organisms.

One doesn't have to be an ichthyophile - or even particularly fond of our underwater friends - to be irritated by the injustice of this and the anthropocentric conceit it displays ... 

II.

To say it loud and clear right from the start: fish are not stupid!

In fact, in many areas, such as memory, their cognitive abilities match or exceed those of animals usually ranked above them in the hierarchy of intelligence constructed by man; numerous studies have shown that they can retain information for months or even years - and this includes goldfish!

And whilst they typically have quite small brains (relative to body size), some species have extremely large brains (again, relative to body size) and are capable of learning complex tasks and forming cognitive maps. (There are some people who can barely manage to do this.) 

Of course, having only mouths in which to hold and manipulate objects (no fingers, no hands or feet), severely restricts their use of tools. But some species of fish use shells and rocks in ways that might surprise many and in one recent laboratory study, Atlantic cod were trained to pull a string in order to release food from a feeding machine. Also, let's not ignore the fact that fish can construct sophisticated shelters and nesting places ...

Such behaviour may be innate, rather than learned, but it's still impressive: for we're not just talking holes in the sand here, but deep and extensive excavations reinforced with coral fragments; beautiful-looking pebble mounds and sand towers; nests made from vegetation, glued together with bodily fluids specially secreted for the job and decorated with coloured algae and/or bits of artificial material that now litter their world just like ours. The fact that fish will often make repairs and build extensions (quicker than my next-door-neighbour) further suggests considerable DIY know-how.

Moving on, we come to the question of social intelligence (i.e., the capacity to know themselves and recognise others) ...

It seems that fish can remember things about other individuals; whether they are friend or foe, for example - something that is obviously quite crucial in a world of dog eat dogfish - and this causes them to modify their own behaviour accordingly (including ways that might even be thought of as manipulative and deceptive, though probably it's going a bit far to say they possess a theory of mind).

Although rare, there are instances of fish cooperating with others of their kind; when hunting prey, for example, it often pays to work in groups. And they can communicate amongst themselves using sign language as well as squeaks and other low-frequency sounds, inaudible to the human ear.

Thus, D. H. Lawrence was wrong to describe them as soundless and out of touch. Indeed, they even enjoy gently rubbing their bodies against one another, so are not suspended in watery isolation, forever apart. That said, Lawrence does recognise that fish not only know fear but joie de vivre - and their joy is often expressed in play behaviour; another key indicator of intelligence.

Finally, fish can learn from other fish simply by observing them in action (this is sometimes described as the cultural transmission of knowledge). You might ask what does a fish have to learn? Well, the location of a reliable food source, or a convenient hiding place, would be two examples of things that it might be crucial to have knowledge of. And, if you are a fish who happens to provide a grooming service for another species, it's important to learn how to do a good job.    

So, in sum: fish are intelligent and sensitive animals, with good memories, impressive problem-solving skills, and the ability to learn new things. We should treat them with the same care and respect as we would warm-blooded creatures, even if they are to some extent forever beyond our understanding and even if, as Lawrence says, we will never know their gods.


Notes

Image adapted by Stephen Alexander from a bottle of Albariño by Faustino Rivero Ulecia; a refreshing white wine with a citric finish that makes a perfect accompaniment to, er, fish ... 

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Fish', in The Poems, Vol I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 289-94. The poem is very lovely, even if technically incorrect on a number of points; but then, to be fair, Lawrence was a poet and not a marine biologist. It can be read online by clicking here. 

For a sister post to this one on the intelligence of reptiles, click here. 

Ailurophilia: On Baudelaire's Erotic Fascination with Cats

Théophile Steinlen's 1896 design for the famous 
Parisian nightspot Le Chat Noir

Poets, like witches and philosophers, love cats and many have written odes to their mysterious companions, including Rilke, who imagines himself suspended like a prehistoric fly in the golden amber of his cat's eyeball.* However, it's Baudelaire who is perhaps most famous for his obsessive love of cats.**

And it's Baudelaire who best understands not only their Satanic-nocturnal nature, but also their undeniable eroticism, equating the feline with the feminine (and vice versa) until it becomes impossible to know at times if he's writing about his favourite pet or his favourite mistress.

Either way, both seem to promise those things he valued most: poetic truth and sensual pleasure; the former being something that develops out of the fleshy materiality of the latter, rather than pre-existing as some kind of disembodied ideal.      

Here's one of Baudelaire's cat poems that hopefully illustrates what I've been attempting to say, followed by my own attempt at a translation into English that invariably loses something in the process, but which, hopefully, adds something that isn't found in other translations ...

Le Chat

Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon coeur amoureux;
Retiens les griffes de ta patte,
Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,
Mêlés de métal et d'agate.

Lorsque mes doigts caressent à loisir
Ta tête et ton dos élastique,
Et que ma main s'enivre du plaisir
De palper ton corps électrique,

Je vois ma femme en esprit. Son regard,
Comme le tien, aimable bête
Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard,

Et, des pieds jusques à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum
Nagent autour de son corps brun.


The Cat

Come not with claws, beautiful cat,
As you leap into my affection;
Allow me to plunge into your eyes
Of metallic crystal.

When my fingers gently stroke along
Your head and supple spine,
My hand thrills with the pleasure
Of touching your body electric.

I sense the same spirit as in Her: her gaze
Like yours, dear creature, is one of cold
Intensity, piercing like a banderilla.

And, from head to toe,
A subtle yet dangerous perfume,
Envelops her dark skin.


Notes

* See Rilke, 'Black Cat' in Duino Elegies (1923): click here to read online. 

** If memory serves me correctly, Baudelaire devoted no fewer than three poems to cats in Les Fleurs du mal (1857) and they make appearances in many of his other poems too. As might be expected, therefore, the theme of Baudelaire's cats has proved a popular - and fertile - one amongst literary critics and theorists (Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss famously co-authoring a structuralist reading in 1960, for example).

To read an online edition of Les Fleurs du mal provided by Project Gutenberg, click here. 

Alternatively, visit fleursdumal.org - a site dedicated to Baudelaire and his work that not only contains every poem of each edition of Les Fleurs du mal, but a selection of English translations (for those, like me, whose French isn't very good). 

For another post on the love of cats, click here.  

D. H. Lawrence and the Poetry of Evil

Surprisingly, evil isn't an idea that features very often in Lawrence's poetry. 

Indeed, prior to the handful of late verses that I wish to comment on here, I can recall only two earlier poems in which the concept appears: 'Cypresses', wherein Lawrence makes the Nietzschean claim that life-denial is the only real form of immorality; and one of the Pansies in which he suggests that the root of our modern iniquity is free trade and so calls for a religiously inspired communism (as if that wouldn't result in the tyranny of evil men). 

Happily, the Last Poems Notebook provides some further reflections on the question of evil ...

Evil is homeless

In this verse, Lawrence challenges the conventional idea that evil is located in (or leads to) Hell. Hell, he says, is the "home of souls lost in darkness", not of evil. For evil is decentred and without dwelling-place. It flourishes on the "outskirt fringes of nowhere"; a non-place [ου-τοπία] where grey carrion-eaters roam in perpetual twilight and human beings fall into fixed automatism.

What then is Evil?

The invention of the wheel is often seen as marking a great leap forward for humanity, having a fundamental impact on the development of civilisation. For Lawrence, however, "the wheel is the first principle of evil" - both within the external world of things and material activity and within the inner workings of the psyche.

For when the mind consists of a circle in a spiral and a wheel within a wheel, turning "on the hub of the ego" and driven by the will - and when "the wheel of the conscious self spins on in absolution", liberated from "the great necessities of being" (such as strife and kisses) - then, says Lawrence, we witness the birth of pure evil.  

The Evil World-Soul

Although he doesn't here speak of the demiurge, Lawrence does insist on the existence of a malevolent world-spirit. However, he again blames this on man and technology; "it is the soul of man only, and his machines / which has brough to pass this fearful thing called evil".   

Using a word that was very much in vogue in the 1920s - having only recently entered the English language via Karel Čapek's seminal sci-fi play R. U. R. - Lawrence declares: "The Robot is the unit of evil. / And the symbol of the Robot is the wheel revolving."

Later in this series of verses, Lawrence identifies more familiar sources of evil, such as war,  although it's important to note that he insists that strife is a good thing and that killing one's mortal enemy may in fact be a pure form of passion and communion. 

Murder, however, is always evil and modern warfare fought with guns, explosives and chemical weapons, is essentially murderous and thus, as such, profoundly evil. 

Departure

Finally, we come to a poem in which Lawrence calls upon a few individuals to find their courage in the face of the corruption that threatens them and decisively turn their backs on it: "Now some men must get up and depart / from evil, or all is lost." 

Lawrence also extends his list of evil things to include not only old favourites, such as spinning wheels, but also all forms of abstraction: as found in the fields of finance, science, education, popular culture, politics, etc. We must say no to all these things - setting up a profitable business, turning on the radio, believing the false claims of astronomers - if we are to make ourselves impregnable against evil.     

Of course, this would mean leading a life at such odds with almost everyone and everything that one might question both the feasibility and desirability of doing so ...

Notes

All of the above poems may be found in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), as can the related verses 'Doors', 'Death is not Evil, and 'Evil is Mechanical'. 

Readers might be interested to know that Lawrence originally wrote a 123-line poem entitled 'When Satan Fell' which he then broke into the evil series of verses discussed here. 

The poem in Pansies that I mention is 'The root of our evil' (ibid., 418-19). 

Surprise musical bonus: click here. 

 

On Poetry, Fashion and Punk

Sonia Delaunay and Tristan Tzara

Robe poème, Le ventillateur tourne ... (1922)

Photo: R. Riss / The Delaunay Estate (Paris)

According to an article in Vogue, poetry is back in fashion and a number of recent collections have been inspired by verse.

Pierpaolo Piccioli, for example, collaborated with several poets to create a series of garments for his autumn/winter 2019 Valentino collection, in an attempt to redefine romanticism for a digital generation (i.e., to transport millennials beyond the screen and into the realm of dreams). 

But of course, as Rosalind Jana reminds us:

"The dialogue between clothes and poetry isn’t a novel one. In the '20s, textile artist Sonia Delaunay collaborated with [...] Dadaist poets including Tristan Tzara and Joseph Delteil to cover a series of dresses in snippets of their poetry. She called them robes poèmes. None of the resulting works still exist, but illustrations show gorgeous, colour-blocked garments with words snaking across arms and descending down skirts."

As a philosopher on the catwalk, I'm naturally excited by this combination of words and fabrics - or text and textiles - animated by the body of the wearer. However, as more punk-provocateur than poet, I'm perhaps more interested in the possibilities that fashion provides for political sloganeering rather than the reproduction of lines of verse.    

Thus, lovely as Delaunay's colourful designs could be - and as amusingly avant-garde as Tzara's poems were - I prefer the clothes of - or inspired by - McLaren and Westwood that incorporated Situationist slogans and lyrics by the Sex Pistols. I'm not sure to what extent (if any) these items brought about social and cultural change, but they certainly made one feel heroic and dangerous at the time.

I remember, for example, riding the rush hour tube in my youth and attempting to antagonise commuters by wearing a hand-painted shirt that read: 'Wise up sucker! Punch your boss, not the clock!'       

c. 1984/85

Notes

Rosalind Jana, 'Why Poetry is Back in Fashion', Vogue (15 March 2019): click here to read online.

The poem by Tristan Tzara that appears on the dress design by Sonia Delaunay above reads in the original French:

Le ventillateur tourne
dans le coeur de la tête
La fleur du froid serpent
de tendresse chimique

Susan de Muth's English translation reads:

The extractor fan turns 
In the head's heart
Bloom of the cold snake
Of chemical tenderness

See: Tristan Tzara and Susan de Muth, 'Dress Poems', Art in Translation, (Routledge, 2015), Vol. 7, No. 2, 304-308. Published online 17 August 2015: click here.    

Of Parasitic Heads and Archaic Torsos: In Memory of Islaam Maged (A Guest Post by Simon Solomon)

My frail and breaking sister 

I hold these memories in my aching arms.

I. The Numen of the Part-Human

In shifting horror into black humour with a splash of compassion, a dash of French theory, and a dollop of autobiography for good measure, the ingredients of Stephen Alexander's recent post concerning the terrible and strangely beautiful case of the fused Egyptian twins Manar and Islaam left us humanely stirred and poetically shaken. We are thus grotesquely grateful for this tragicomic Yuletide offering.

Given the acute rarity of this condition, Manar is apparently the only child to have survived - at least temporarily - her own beheading. Nevertheless, it is the role of her bodiless sister-fragment, the sacrificed Islaam, to which we feel peculiarly drawn. As might be surmised, the unstable ambivalence toward it/her attests to the undecidable mixture of uncanny in/humanity with which one looks upon such stupendously rare entities - or they upon us.

If Islaam was quite literally nobody, this apparently did not stop her from eliciting her sister's mortifying sibling attachment, as well as the love of her family. To that end, after she had been surgically removed from the autosite, she was given proper burial rites by her parents, who, to all intents and purposes, clearly viewed Islaam as a tiny child and not merely a genetic obscenity or clinical remnant.

However, whilst a functioning separate brain ensured that Islaam had a mind of her own, one doesn't need to be a doctor to see that, having no possibility of bodily autonomy, she would have been entirely incapable of a viable life. Moreover, since it appears that her continued existence might have exerted a toxic and ultimately lethal drain on Manar's well-being (in the weeks before surgery, for example, the latter suffered several episodes of heart failure due to Islaam, rotting alive with gangrene, channelling waste back into their her body), a decisive intervention was clinically crucial to save the hostess.

While it might seem luridly sentimental to some readers to interrogate such medical expedients, let alone mourn a lethal parasite, Islaam's identification and death rites nevertheless point to the way in which the ownership of a head (whether or not it comes with arms, legs and a beating heart to complete the ensemble) secures a human destiny. There would appear to be no way, one might say, of resisting the urge to put a name to a face ...

II. Of Rilke, Radiance and Sculpture (Or the Terrible Beauty of Being Born)

Islaam's haunting posthumous image - a dead head resting upon the failed promise of a noble breast - put me in mind of Rilke's famous ekphrastic poem, 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' (1908), written in the aftermath of his reverberating association with the sculptor Auguste Rodin, for whom he worked as a secretary during 1905-6.

The poet's charged visits to the Louvre, where he viewed the ancient sculpture, were the cultural departure point for his phenomenological exploration of aesthetic distance vis-à-vis classical fragments, in which the object, under Rilke’s modernist gaze, more than merely taking its Baudrillardian revenge, gleamed with its own radiant and transformative life:

We have not known the unconscionable head 

nor its eyes' ripening apples. And yet the star- 

cold torso burns still like a chandelier, 

in which his glances gleam and abide,

cut back merely. Else the bow of the breast 

could not deceive you and no smile join 

to the shifting softness of the loins 

toward their procreative centre, their phallic absence.

Else the stone might stand disfigured and dwarfed 

below the shoulders, diaphanous,
not glister like a bloodied hawk,

nor pour through all its contours, 

since, like the panoptical sun, there is no place 

it does not see you. Change my life, yours. 

- Trans. S. Solomon

If, as Rilke famously claimed, beauty is the beginning of terror, we would turn his poetic equation on its head: it is the terrible that initiates us into the beautiful.

Thus, as we read it, Rilke's sonnet commemorates the luminous power of creation's disappearance: the way what is not, what is missing, what has broken off or crumbled to dust, charges and animates an artistic composition with numinous power, to the point of ultimately driving the modern mind into a state of psychic rearrangement.

As the solar god of poetic music, Apollo is all-seeing like the sun. But he is also a god of dreams, appearance and illusion. Art, therefore, is inherently treacherous; as implied by Rilke's deployment of the verb blenden (to 'blind', to 'dazzle', or 'deceive') to describe the lucent charisma of the ancient relic.

The sacred head was, or is now, unerhört - ‘outrageous’, ‘scandalous’, ‘tremendous’. Like the sun itself, the head of a god, Rilke tells us, is something we could not have borne; now, sightlessly reborn, it is the torso instead that, literally and metaphorically, takes us in. This mystical antique is, in effect, a kind of headless hallucination, a decapitated game-changer. An acephalic Apollo inserts a rent in the rational.

III. With all Earth for a Body: The Afterlife of Islaam

If the name Islaam translates as 'the will of God', we can reinterpret its bearer as directed by a pure vector of fate, the expressive silence of cosmic necessity. (Islaam's head was literally unerhört, unheard, since she could not make sounds, though she could apparently blink, cry and smile.)

The poetic question is whether it is sentimental to mourn a part object, or whether there is a play to be staged about a human bloodsucker that was literally no more than a pretty face. In viewing Islaam's death as an event and not merely the rational operation of a clinical machine, we are returned to an immanent a/logic of sacrifice, a lucent horror incarnated by an impossible object - 'impossible' in the sense of being unable to sustain itself, to offer mortal satisfaction, or to entertain a future beyond its urgent expenditure.

Islaam's irremediable fate, in exemplary terms, was to die that another might live, to stitch the decision of death like a phantom skull into the remaking of a consanguineous body. As such, we would argue, her separation is the inseparable operation that signals the possibility of the sacred.

Remembering the stillborn lamb and its hacked-off head in Ted Hughes's astonishing poem 'February 17th', we fantasise about Islaam's caput mortuum placed on a burial mound, 'its pipes sitting in the mud, / With all earth for a body'. Or under the ground, where the roots of plants might lend the dead head the push of organic limbs and the soil pack her bones with black flesh.

But she was the gift to whom only death could be given; like the fire of Antigone, or a baby Christ. What Rilke memorably described as 'all the shame of having a face' was never less shameful, never more strange.


Author's Notes

The epigraph beneath the image of Manar and Islaam is taken from Paula Meehan's poem 'The Lost Twin', which can be found in her collection Dharmakaya, (Carcanet Press, 2000). 

For two alternative translations of Rilke's sonnet Archäischer Torso Apollos, by Sarah Stutt, and an interesting discussion of the work by Carol Rumens in her Guardian column (15 Nov 2010), please click here.

This post is dedicated to my sister, Lisa Thomas.


Editor's Notes

Simon Solomon is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and serves as a managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He blogs at (and can be contacted via) simonsolomon.ink

Simon appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm. I am very grateful for his submission of this twin text to my own attempt to discuss the case of Manar (and Islaam) Maged, entitled Heads You Lose and published on 23 Dec 2018 - and grateful also for his kind permission to slightly edit the post.  

On Poetry and Plagiarism (with Reference to the Case of Ailey O'Toole)

America's most wanted: Ailey O'Toole
poet and convicted plagiarist 

The poem-as-text is a "multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, 

blend and clash [...] a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."  - RB 

Ho hum, another week, another plagiarism scandal in the ridiculously small and self-absorbed world of poetry ... The young offender being hauled over the coals this time by moralists who police the above and zealously enforce intellectual property rights, is prize-nominated American poet Ailey O'Toole.

There's no question that Ms O'Toole paraphrased lines in her poem 'Gun Metal' from a work by Rachel McKibbens - she even contacted the latter to admit as much. But whether we describe this as theft or borrowing, inspiration or intertextuality, isn't quite so straightforward.

In my view - and I'm saying this as a writer - O'Toole has nothing to apologise for or feel ashamed about. Indeed, if I were her, I would tell those sanctimonious bores who sit in judgement and threaten to derail her career - her publishers have already cancelled her first collection and spoken of their pain and anger - to go fuck themselves.  

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

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

After Ms McKibbens went public with her accusation, several other poets came forward and claimed that they too were victims of a terrible literary crime committed by O'Toole. Some even spoke of being violated, or having their identities stolen and experiences belittled.

In part, this hysterical overreaction is due to the p-word itself, which, etymologically, means kidnapping - thereby encouraging writers to regard words as their precious offspring.** This, however, is a laughable turning of the truth on its head; for it isn't authors who give birth to language; it's language that gives birth to them.  

Ultimately, whatever we might think of her and what she did, O'Toole's plagiarism demonstrated a good deal of art; her selection of lines was clever and she skillfully wove them into her own text, tweaking them as she saw fit.

Surely then, we can, in the words of the Irish novelist, poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith - commenting here on Sterne's cheerful habit of plagiarism - "pardon the want of originality, in consideration of the exquisite talent with which the borrowed materials are wrought up into the new form".  

Notes

*I'm aware, having read several interviews with Ms O'Toole, that she would find the view expressed here anathema. For she subscribes to a conception of poetry as something highly personal and highly political; a therapeutic art form that helps individuals deal with their mental health issues and other traumatic experiences (child abuse, rape, domestic violence, homophobia, sexism, racism, etc.).    

**We have the first century Roman poet Martial, known for his epigrams, to thank for this; he first used the Latin term plagiarius to denote someone guilty of stealing someone else's verses. The word appeared in its modern form in English c.1620 and the Romantics, who valued ideals of originality, sincerity, and authentic feeling etc., regarded plagiarism as the greatest of all literary sins. 

Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 142-48. I discuss this essay at some length in a post on postmodern approaches to literature that can be read by clicking here. 

Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, (1766), Vol. V, p. xviii.

Readers interested in knowing more about this case, might like to read Kat Rosenfield's piece published on the arts and culture website Vulture (4 Dec 2018): click here. 

The Ballerina is Not a Girl Dancing

In a late prose piece, Mallarmé makes the provocative claim that "the ballerina is not a girl dancing".

Indeed, according to Mallarmé, she's not even a girl, but a living metaphor; symbolising "some elemental aspect of earthly form", such as a flower or a swan.

And she doesn't dance so much as use her body - "with miraculous lunges and abbreviations" - to produce and perform a special kind of condensed writing whose ties to a metaphysically stable world of referents have been snapped: une écriture corporelle.

Thus, whilst not quite one and the same thing, ballet and poetry are semiotically entwined; they are both formalised and ritualised aesthetic sign systems, designating truth that is plural and uncertain.

And this is why Nietzsche loved both art forms and not only held great poets such as Goethe and Heinrich Heine in the highest regard, but blessed the feet and fair ankles of sweet girls who, in dancing, transcend their gender and humanity and bring meaning to a crisis.     


See: Stéphane Mallarmé, 'Ballets', in Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson, (Harvard University Press, 2009). 

Ian Bogost: Play Anything (2016) - A Review (Part 3: Chapters 5-7)

Dr. Ian Bogost: bogost.com 

I have to admit, four chapters and 120 pages in, I'm a bit bored with this book by Bogost. The assertiveness and the repetitiveness I can deal with, but I have real trouble with the folksy Americanism of the writing style and the overly-familiar - overly-familial - character of the book. It's certainly not philosophy as I conceive of it. However, as Magnus Magnusson used to say, I've started so I'll finish ... 

Ch. 5: From Restraint to Constraint

Is abstaining from a material modern lifestyle really the answer to the paradox of choice?

It's an interesting question. But as much as I approve of a certain degree of asceticism, I don't think the answer is yes. And neither does Bogost, for whom restraint is a type of fashionable narcissism that only leads to irony - and irony, as we have seen, is Bogost's great bugbear.

Further, as a strategy for living better, restraint also connects to the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the values that lie at the foundations of the global economy (Bogost seems to take it as a given that both these things are highly suspect). Ultimately, he says, the feeling of any restraint results in "a terrible sensation" [130] and can even prove fatal (don't tell that to my friends in the BDSM community for whom orgasm denial is so delightful). 

What then? The answer, says Bogost, is to accept the world's constraints, rather than attempt to impose your own restraint upon it. Embracing constraint doesn't mean embracing asceticism (which is an expression of anxiety): "Rather, it means inventing or adopting a given situation as a playground in which further exploration is possible." [143]

In other words, for Bogost, there's a very real and important connection between constraint and creativity. He writes:

"Artists and designers have long known that creativity does not arise from pure, unfettered freedom. Little is more paralyzing than the blank canvas or the blank page. At the same time, the creative process is not driven by restraint either; one does not paint a painting or write a novel or form a sculpture or code an app by resisting the temptation to do something else. Rather, one does so by embracing the particularity of a form and working within its boundaries, within its constraints." [146]

But it's important to realise that Bogost is using the term creativity in a rather special (philosophical) sense derived from Whitehead. For Whitehead, creativity refers to a process (inherent to the universe) of generating novelty or newness; i.e. it's a fundamental feature of existence and not something unfolding exclusively within the sphere of human subjectivity and experience.

To mistakenly think man is central to the process of creativity, rather than peripheral, is what Bogost calls the fallacy of creativity. In the end, we don't speak, write, or sing the world - it speaks, writes, and sings us. Art emerges from a negotiation between the artist and a set of material conditions that impose certain limits. Graham Harman regards this as the culminating insight of Bogost's book and he might well be right; though, to be fair, it's found in Whitehead - as Bogost acknowledges - and we also find it in Heidegger, who famously declared Die Sprache spricht and that man is the poem of being (not the author).

The artist's job, then, is not to express his own desires, ideas, or fantasies. It is rather to allow the gods and demons to enter from behind and below; Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!, as Lawrence puts it.

Ch. 6: The Pleasure of Limits

Bogost picks up on this idea of inspiration in the context of ancient Greek poetry and the Muses. For the Greeks, of course, poetry was a worldly rather than a personal activity; one that was tied to a long cultural tradition, to myth, and to the divine. What he really wants to stress, however, is how structured it was - almost unimaginably so, for those raised into the idea of free verse in which almost any text "with unusual white space and line breaks" [158] qualifies as poetry. Bogost notes:

"A sonnet is not a poem even though it has to spill language across fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, but because it does. It takes the surplus of language and offers a rationale for structuring a portion of it in a particular way." [161]

I suppose that's true. But I'd still rather read one of the great modernist poets than Shakespeare. And besides, free verse - if it's any good - isn't really free in the way implied by Bogost. Other than idealists who believe in an individual's right to total freedom of expression and the dissolution of all form, all structure, all rule, etc. no one in their right mind thinks art is anything other than a discipline.

There might be pleasure in transgressing limits - be they aesthetic, moral, or physical in nature - but this is still, of course, a pleasure reliant upon limits. This isn't to say we should therefore fetishise limitations and constraints or regard rules as written in stone (though some do), it's simply to acknowledge that they're necessary.

Indeed, they're not only necessary, but ontologically crucial. For as Bogost points out: "A thing is not only what it appears to be, but it is also the conditions and situations [i.e. the constraints] that make it possible for it to be what it is." [174]

Or, put another way: "Limits aren't limitations, not absolute ones. They're just the stuff out of which stuff is made." [203]     


Ch. 7: The Opposite of Happiness

"Fun is the opposite of happiness" [216], says Bogost. For fun "doesn't produce joy as its emotional output, but tenderness instead" [217].

And so we arrive at a quasi-Lawrentian conclusion; playful encounters with another being - whether it's human, animal, vegetable, or artificial in nature - result in affection and warmth and sympathy. The German's have a word for this: Mitleid.

Thus, OOO - as an ethic or art of living - rests on the presumption that the essence of morality can be defined in terms of purely selfless actions that ask for and expect nothing in return. Nietzsche, of course, was highly critical of this; he'd regard it as laughably naïve, lacking as it does any appreciation of man's ethical complexity and the fact that there are multiple forces at work within every urge and every action.

Ultimately, if Bogost wishes to save his work from falling into warm soft fuzziness, then he needs to spend a little less time watching babies sleep and either subject it himself to a little coldness and cruelty, or find an editor who will read it with steely intelligence and a sharp pencil.   

Notes

Ian Bogost, Play Anything, (Basic Books, 2016). All page numbers given in square brackets refer to this hardback edition. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Song of a Man Who Has Come Through', The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 

To read Part 1 of this review - Notes on a Preface - click here.

To read Part 2 of this review - Chapters 1-4 - click here.