What Was I Thinking? (28 December)

 

Torpedo the Ark: images from posts published on 

28 December (2013-2021)

 

Sometimes, it's interesting to look back and see what one was thinking on the same date in years gone by - and sometimes it's simply embarrassing ...

 

Our God is Woman: Our Mission is Protest! 

On this date in 2013, for example, I was keen to express my support for a twenty-year old philosophy student and Femen activist, Josephine Witt, who staged a one-woman protest at St. Peter's Cathedral in Cologne, briefly disrupting a televised Christmas mass by getting her tits out and declaring herself to be God, before half-a-dozen horrified clerics wearing an assortment of robes pulled her from the altar, bundled her out of the building, and handed her over to the secular forces of law and order. 

 

I'm not sure I would now be quite so sympathetic to such an action. 

 

 

In Praise of an Unnatural Death 

 

Skip forward three years and on this date in 2016 I was keen to challenge the judgement of God by refusing to accept what medical professionals describe as death by natural causes; i.e., the all-too-predictable kind of death that results from illness, old age, or an internal malfunction of the body and its organs. 

 

As a philosopher, I argued, one should always desire and seek out the opposite of this; i.e., the joy of an unnatural death, be it by accident, misadventure, homicide, suicide, or that mysterious non-category that is undetermined and which, for those enigmatic individuals who pride themselves on their ambiguity, must surely be the way to go.

 

I then confessed my own preference to be executed, like William Palmer, the notorious nineteenth-century murderer known as the Prince of Poisoners, who is said to have climbed the gallows and placed a foot tentatively on the trapdoor before enquiring of the hangman: Is it safe? 

 

I would like, in other words, to go to my death with the cool courage and stoicism of the dandy and a ready quip on my lips that might cause even my executioner to smile (and serve also to annoy the po-faced authorities who demand seriousness and expect contrition in such circumstances).

 

 

To See More Clearly Than Ever Before 

 

In December 2018, meanwhile, I was entering my Daphne Du Maurier phase - a phase that never really passed and became a long-lasting love for the author and her astonishing body of work. On the 28th of this month I wrote a series of notes on one of her near-perfect short stories - suggested to me by the poet Simon Solomon - 'The Blue Lenses' (1959).

 

The premise of the post and story was the same: what if everyone were to suddenly lose their human features and be seen with the head of the creature that best expresses their inhuman qualities; not so much their true nature, as what might be termed their molecular animality - would we still find this gently amusing? I suspect not: in all likelihood, initial astonishment would quickly give way to horror. 

 

However we choose to describe it, du Maurier's tale is not simply an imaginative fantasy and she, like D. H. Lawrence, is "another of the writers who leave us troubled and filled with admiration" precisely because she was able to tie her work to "real and unheard of becomings". Hers is a genuinely black art, as Deleuze and Guattari would say.   

 

Judenstern

 

Making particular reference to the case of Serge Gainsbourg, back on 28 December, 2019 I was concerned with the history of the badge that Jews were often obliged to wear for purposes of public identification (i.e., in order to clearly mark them as religious and ethnic outsiders). 

 

Although we tend to think of this practice in the context of Hitler's Germany, the Nazis were actually drawing upon an extensive (anti-Semitic) history when they revived the practice of forcing Jews to wear a distinctive sign upon their clothing, including, most famously, the yellow Star of David with the word Jude inscribed in letters meant to resemble Hebrew script.  

 

Gainsbourg was required to wear such as a young boy in wartime Paris; an experience he made bearable by pretending that it was a sherrif's badge, or a prize that he'd been awarded, and which he eventually wrote a song about: click here. 

 

 

Piquerism and Notes on Knife Play

 

On 28 December of the following year, 2020, I expressed my fascination with piquerism; i.e., the practice of penetrating the skin of another person with sharp objects, including pins, razors, and knives - something that I traced back to young childhood and the time I placed a drawing pin on a fat girl's chair in order to see if she would explode like a balloon with a loud bang.

 

Following this, I then explored episodes of knife play in the work of D. H. Lawrence, of which there are several, including the notorious scene in chapter XXIII of The Plumed Serpent (1926) in which Cipriano publicly executes a group of stripped and blindfolded prisoners with a bright, thin dagger, plunging the latter into their chests with swift, heavy stabs. 

 

I think even at the time I was uncomfortable with this and not able to dismiss it with the same ease as Kate Leslie who, if shocked and appalled at first by the killings, eventually concludes that her new husband's penchant for a little ritualised murder is fine if carried out in good conscience.

 

 

Jane Ciracylides: the Girl with Insect Eyes

 

If over the Xmas period in 2018 I was reading Daphne du Maurier, in 2021 I was enjoying the work of J. G. Ballard, including a short story entitled 'Prima Belladonna' which was included in the collection Vermilion Sands (1971) - a collection which celebrates the neglected virtues of the lurid and bizarre within a surreal sci-fi setting described by Ballard as the visionary present or inner space; the former referring to the future already contained within the present and the latter referring to the place where unconscious dreams, fears, and fantasies meet external reality. 

 

The alien female figure of Jane Ciracylides, with her rich patina-golden skin and insects for eyes, has continued to fascinate me to this day. Who knows, perhaps I'll get to play i-Go with her one day (even if she always cheats).  

 

On Dis/Obedience

Portrait of le poète maudit Síomón Solomon

Stephen Alexander (2023) [1]

 

 

According to the Satanist Simon Solomon, at the root of all human sin lies a refusal to listen to the Word of God. This, essentially, is the meaning of disobedience; the turning of a deaf ear to the Holy Spirit. 

 

And, of course, as a natural born anarchist and self-styled anti-Christ, I'm instinctively disobedient; neither wishing to comply with nor conform to any external authority. Like Nietzsche, I fear that those who are too weak to command themselves and lay down their own law, will ultimately submit to tyranny and come to desire their own oppression (i.e., that a culture of obedience breeds fascism).

 

However, Nietzsche also says that the only thing which makes life worth living is the giving of obedience for a prolonged period in a single direction; that obedience is the essential thing in heaven and earth and the rebellious refusal to obey is merely the sign of a slave. 

 

And, as the cultural commentator James Walker reminds us, D. H. Lawrence also encourages his readers to obey the promptings of their own souls - not so much the voice of God within, but their own genius or demon: "Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice ..." [2], not living in frictional opposition to such. 

 

This passage from his 1923 novel Kangaroo is perhaps the most memorable statement Lawrence makes on the joy of obedience

 

"If a man loves life, and feels the sacredness and mystery of life, then he knows that life is full of strange and subtle and even conflicting imperatives. And a wise man learns to recognize the imperatives as they arise [...] and to obey. But most men bruise themselves to death trying to fight and overcome their own, new, life-born needs, life's ever strange imperatives. The secret of all life is obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us to new gestures, new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations." [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This portrait - the first in the Simon Solomon Says ... series - is, in part, inspired by Shepard Fairey's phenomenal - and, apparently, phenomenological - Obey Giant project, which transformed from a sticker campaign to a successful clothing line. Click here to visit the official website.  

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 17.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 112.  

 

 

In the Bullring With Simon & Simone

André Masson: Bullfighting (1937)

 

 

I. 

 

In response to a recent post [1], the Irish poet and playwright Síomón Solomon asks:

 

"I wonder how you square your squeamishness and selective sentimentality when it comes to bursten bowels and the suffering of animals, with your professed admiration for Bataille's Histoire de l'Oeil - a work which powerfully illustrates the (Nietzschean) idea that, in saying Yes to life in all circumstances and under any conditions, one must ultimately give even the most terrible aspects of existence one's blessing?"

 

 

II. 

 

It's a fair question. And I'm grateful to Solomon for raising it - and also for reminding me of the following passage from Bataille's short novel:

 

"There were actually three things about bullfights that fascinated [Simone]: the first, when the bull comes hurtling out  of the bullpen like a big rat; the second, when its horns plunge all the way into the flank of a mare; the third, when that ludicrous, raw-boned mare gallops across the arena [...] dragging a huge, vile bundle of bowels between her thighs in the most dreadful wan colours [...] Simone's heart throbbed fastest when the exploding bladder dropped its mass of mare's urine on the sand in one quick plop." [2]

 

Sixteen-year-old Simone, then, is the literary antithesis of forty-year-old Kate Leslie, the protagonist of Lawence's Plumed Serpent, who is utterly ashamed and nauseated by what she witnesses at the bullring. Having expected a display of bravery and a gallant show, Kate is shocked by the human cowardice and beastliness - not to mention the sight of blood and smell of bursten bowels [3].

 

But Simone loves everything about the bullfight; the heat, the noise, the cruelty, and not least the possibility of seeing a toreador injured by a monstrously lunging bull. 

 

When her wealthy English patron, Sir Edmund, informs her that at one time it was customary to serve the roasted testicles of the slaughtered bulls to guests seated in the front row of the arena, she begs him to obtain for her the balls of the first beast killed - only she insists they be served raw on a white plate, so that she might lift her dress and sit on them.

 

Unfortunately, this last part proves tricky to accomplish unobserved in a crowded arena. And so Simone simply holds the dish containing the two peeled testicles on her lap, until the opportunity arises to bite into one of them and then slowly and surely insert the other into her cunt - a lewd act which coincides with a handsome young bullfighter having an eye gauged out by a bull "with the same force as a bundle of innards from a belly" [4].                  

 

 

III.

 

What, then, are we to make of this - and how, then, are we to answer Síomón Solomon's question?

 

Firstly, I concede that it takes an almost inhuman effort to affirm even a single moment or joy, when it's in the knowledge that by so doing we affirm also every pain, every sadness, every cruelty, and every obscenity. But that's precisely what we are challenged to do by authors, like Bataille, who subscribe to the idea that all things are tied together beneath the same dark sun. 

 

However, affirming the fact that all things are part of a general economy of the whole, does not, as far as I can see make one morally complicit with evil, nor does it oblige one to participate in wrongdoing. 

 

I can affirm, for example, the pride of the peacock and the lust of the goat, without being a preening narcissist or a licentious libertine; I can affirm the vital cruelty of the natural world, without wanting to watch or make animals suffer in the bullring; and I can even read works of transgressive literature without wanting to act out ... 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the post entitled 'I Don't Know as I Get What D. H. Lawrence is Driving at When He Writes of Bursten Bowels ...' (6 June 2023): click here.   

[2] Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschal, (Penguin Books, 1982), p. 47.

      For readers unfamiliar with this classic work of the porno-philosophical imagination (originally published in 1928), Simone is a sixteen-year-old erotomaniac with a perverse penchant for inserting soft globular objects - be they eyes, testicles, or boiled eggs - into her vagina or between her arse cheeks. Half-way through the novel, she and her lover - a distant cousin who is the tale's anonymous narrator - run away to Spain in order to escape a police investigation in their native France. Here, they are supported by a fabulously rich (and depraved) Englishman, Sir Edmund, who enthusiastically lays on obscene entertainments for the young couple.  

[3] See Chapter 1 of D. H. Lawrence's novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), 'Beginnings of a Bull-Fight'. 

[4] Bataille, Story of the Eye ... p. 54.

Nephophilia (A Reply to Simon Solomon)

Dark Clouds (2013) photo by Audrey Skoglund

fineartamerica.com

  

You say it's dark. And, in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun.

                                                                                - Nietzsche

 

 

I. 

 

As Al Murray's Pub Landlord never tires of informing audiences, the British are a sensible, down-to-earth people. They're never going to put a man on the moon, or take the musings of philosophers - particularly in the Continental tradition of France and Germany - seriously. No, of course not: they're a sensible, down-to-earth people. 

 

So I'm never particularly surprised when an Englishman tells me that my thinking is fanciful, impractical, or unrealistic. 

 

But when an Irishman, who identifies as a pataphysical poet and playwright with an interest in all things paranormal and supernatural - including Jungian archetypes - describes my ideas as so preposterous that I might as well be living in the clouds, then I am surprised (to say the least) [1]. 

 

Well, with storm clouds gathering over Eastern Europe, maybe this is a good time to consider what it might mean to inhabit the troposphere ...     

 

 

II.

 

Simon Solomon isn't, of course, the first poet and playwright to ridicule philosophers for their way of thinking. We might recall, for example, the ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes, the so-called πατέρας της κωμωδίας, whose satrirical play The Clouds (423 BC) contributed to the death of Socrates two decades later [2].

 

And do I resent being portrayed as a graduate of The Thinkery? Not at all. 

 

In fact, I rather like the idea of my thoughts originating among the clouds; not so much those white, fluffy, happy-looking ones - cumulus clouds, as they are known - but the dark, heavy, menacing storm clouds (cumulonimbus) which roll into view "from out of the eastern heavens" [3], bringing thunder and lightning our way and blotting out the sun. 

 

For whilst idealists with their sunny disposition speak in favour of blue-sky thinking and are confident and hopeful about the future, insisting that every cloud has a silver lining, etc., I subscribe to a more pessimistic (some might even say nihilistic) philosophy. 

 

And if this clouds my judgement, then so be it. At least my clouds "come from great distances, arriving from the deeps of the sky" [4].       

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the comment made by Simon Solomon at the end of a recent post entitled 'Is Anything Really Worth Fighting For?' (4 Mar 2022): click here.

 

[2] Plato considered The Clouds a contributing factor in Socrates's trial and execution in 399 BC and he mentions the play in his defence of the latter, known as the Apology, which was written shortly afterwards. 

      Aristophanes portrays Socrates as a petty thief, a fraud, and a sophist with an interest in atmospheric phenomena (or what would come to be known as meterology - a Greek term meaning the study of things high up in the sky). Whilst some critics think that Aristophanes's caricature of Socrates is just a bit of fun, others regard it as evidence of the long rivalry between poetic and philosophical modes of thinking.  

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Clouds', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 56. 

 

[4] Ibid., p. 60. 

 

 

Simply Nietzschean

As Simon Solomon is keen to remind me, any attempt to cloak oneself in the skin of another is to violate Zarathustra's greatest teaching: Lose me and find yourselves. No master worthy of the name wants disciples and, in truth, there was only ever one Christian and he died on the cross.

And so, what then are we to make of Foucault's remark in an interview shortly before his death in 1984: I am simply a Nietzschean ... Doesn't this already betray an essential misunderstanding of Nietzsche and his philosophy?

I don't think so. Foucault wasn't a slavish disciple of Nietzsche's, nor an uncritical reader and so this statement is rather more complex than it first appears. It helps, I think, to read the sentence from which the remark is taken in full:

"I am simply a Nietzschean, and I try as far as possible, on a certain number of issues, to see with the help of Nietzsche’s texts - but also with anti-Nietzschean theses (which are nevertheless Nietzschean!) - what can be done in this or that domain. I attempt nothing else, but that I try to do well." [1]

I suppose what Deleuze says of D. H. Lawrence, we might also say of Foucault: it's not that either writer simply imitated Nietzsche; rather, each picks up the arrow shot into the future by the latter and then shoots it in a new direction.

So it is that, whilst finding new targets of his own, the weapons (i.e. genealogical methods) that Foucault adopts, originate in Nietzsche: "Many things change or are supplemented from one initiative to another, and even what they have in common gains in strength and novelty." [2] 

Ultimately, what enables one to call oneself a Nietzschean without embarrassment (but always with a dash of irony) is the fact that there was no one Nietzsche with whom one might identify.

Thus, what it means, to call oneself a Nietzschean, is that one is loyal only to fluidity of thought and a multiplicity of perspectives; that one likes wearing masks as a philosopher; that in all things, one values style above all else. It doesn't mean you have to have a big letter S tattooed on your chest or grow a walrus-handlebar moustache ... 

Notes

[1] Michel Foucault, 'The Return of Morality', trans John Johnston in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), ed. by Sylvère Lotringer (Semiotext(e), 1996), pp. 465-73. The lines quoted are on p. 471. This interview was conducted by Gilles Barbedette and André Scala on 29 May 1984 and was originally published as 'Le Retour de la Morale', in Les Nouvelles littéraires, (Paris, 1984), pp. 36-41. 

[2] Gilles Deleuze, 'Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos', Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, (Verso, 1998), p. 37.

Don't It Make Your Blue Eyes Weep - A Guest Post by Simon Solomon

Police breach social gathering legislation to pollute lagoon at Harpur Hill, Buxton 

Photos: Sky News

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. - Albert Camus

In the febrile air of 1967/68 Paris, the Situationist International group planned a beautifully macabre stunt to protest the Vietnam war and épater les bourgeois by staining the Seine blood-red and depositing in it the corpses of a couple of hundred Asiatics to drift downstream to Notre Dame.

Reportedly, obtaining the cadavers was the easy part, courtesy of an enterprising plan to hijack a refrigerated truck en route to one of the city's medical schools that was said to do a brisk trade in Chinese dead bodies. However, the industrial dye proved a sticking point since the quantities were prohibitive. Thus, the plan sadly foundered, and the river herself remained artistically unperturbed. [1]

Fast forward to the viral madness of 2020 Blighty this week, when it has been depressing beyond belief to read of Derbyshire's Police's serial overreaches of the government's already draconian guidelines in locking down the entire nation - bar the odd permitted sortie to buy a pint of milk, stretch your legs or go to your job if you feel you must (and still have one) in order to, say, stay alive.

Taking as its departure point a spokesman's confidently philistine assertion that 'driving to beauty spots in the Peak District cannot be considered an essential journey', the constabulary has recently been keeping us safe by means of a catalogue of reassuring innovations - culminating in the reassuring use of drone surveillance to trace the car number plates of drivers back to Sheffield and subsequently name and shame on social media tweed-jacketed ramblers and old ladies with dogs. As Plod now extends its Orwellian arm to issue its wisdom concerning the dispensability of beauty for psychic health, God's green earth (beyond your own garden fence) is now - in its Cyclopian gaze - officially off limits. [2]

And so, building upon its blatant contempt for the necessity of beauty for anyone with half a soul or a breath of joy in their Covid 19-squeezed heart - and in a supremely dumb gesture strangely redolent of the French situationists (but without a soupçon of the spirit, wit and intelligence ) - the same force's recent desecration of a Buxton lagoon with a cheery black pigment at public expense has made good on its claim that communing with nature is to be outlawed, since the area (and doubtless any others it so decrees) is intrinsically 'dangerous'.

With this in mind, a surprisingly literate Facebook post on Buxton Police SNT reads, 'we have attended the location this morning and used water dye to make the water look less appealing.'

Difficult as it might seem for the rest of us to make this up, news reports state that the force has form in this domain, since the same tactic has been used in the past to reduce anti-social behaviour - such as children wading in the water or young people (whose risk of death from Corona virus is close to nil) admiring its turquoise tones in short sleeves. [3]

The former Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption has lambasted the overreach in an extended public statement, the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch has dubbed the force's behaviour 'sinister' and 'counter-productive', and even the former Justice Secretary David Gauke has called matters 'badly misjudged', while local residents have themselves taken to social media, with one commenting: 'If only they were this authoritarian to people carrying zombie knives, stealing your car or grooming kids in Rotherham' - an item of customer feedback one wouldn't be surprised in the current climate to see earn its writer a court summons all by itself.

How best to respond to people who seemingly think aesthetics are a species of foreign head lice?

Clearly, the aforesaid pushback is pointless against those who clearly don't even have enough shame themselves to admit they are wrong (while seeking to shame others for such dangerous behaviour as going for a spin and a scenic stroll). We are ourselves at a loss, but would suggest that any remaining poets, anarchists and libertarians not yet criminalised in the Buxton area should band together under cover of nightfall, create a kindly cordon sanitare around the local cop shop, and throw a bucket of some suitably irremovable industrial dye of their own choosing over a few local officers. (In this venture, we suggest scarlet might be a colour of choice to leave the recipients suitably red-faced.)

As for the Blue Lagoon itself, by some accounts the water is barely more chemically benign than ammonia, contains dead animals, turds and needles, and is so cold it might (literally) drag you under at a stroke. There are a few sensible signs up, we gather, so that people can assess the risks for themselves like adults. Such excremental details, however, only make us love it all the more for its clearly Baudelairean allure to the local populace, and we look forward to looking in when time permits. 

Notes

[1] On the Situationist movement and fun and games on the Seine, see Christopher Gray (ed. and trans.), Leaving The 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International (Rebel Press, 1998). Thanks to Stephen Alexander for reminding me of this.

[2] Except it isn't! To see a summary of the correct and updated government/police powers (which allow one to drive and hike in the country with loved ones to one's heart's content), see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-52106843.

[3] This is of course in no way to diminish the deaths of a small number of 'non-vulnerable' young and middle-aged people from Covid-19 in the UK in recent weeks.

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

Surprise musical bonus: click here. 

For a follow-up post to this one, click here.

Benevolence

Jean-Michel Zazzi: Friedrich Nietzsche (2019) 

artsper.com

To read what one commentator writes, you'd think that Nietzsche's entire project (assuming it's possible to ascribe such a notion of purity and wholeness to his work) was based on the concept of Schadenfreude and that the greatest thing about his revaluation of values was that it allowed one to revel in the misfortune of others - including malignant ex-girlfriends - in good conscience.*

That would be very much mistaken, however.

For whilst it's true that Nietzsche rejects the Christian virtue of pity [Mitleiden] and speaks of the positive role that cruelty has played in the formation of man (often using Grausamkeit as synonymous with Kultur), so too does he privilege terms such as Wohlwollen in his text - what we in English-speaking countries term benevolence.

For Nietzsche, like the rest of us, doesn't merely 'deal in damage and joy', he also deals in goodwill and affirms the idea of having a cheerful, friendly disposition. This is particularly true in his mid-period writings.

In Human, All Too Human, for example, Nietzsche writes of those little, daily acts of kindness that, although frequent, are often overlooked by those who study morals and manners; those smiling eyes and warm handshakes, etc., that display what D. H. Lawrence terms phallic tenderness, but Nietzsche simply calls politeness of the heart.**  

These things have played a far more important role in the micropolitics of everyday life and the construction of community than those more celebrated virtues such as sympathy, charity, and self-sacrifice.

Of course the power of malice also plays a key role in human relations - and Nietzsche affirms an emotional economy of the whole - but, as I have said, it's profoundly mistaken to read from this that he is some kind of sadistic psychopath.

In other words, moving beyond good and evil does not mean behaving like an unethical little shit and I would remind Dr Solomon that "the state in which we hurt others is rarely as agreeable [...] as that in which we benefit others; it is a sign that we are still lacking power".**

Criminal lunatics who carry out atrocities and seek to justify their actions by calling on Nietzsche's name are invariably bad and/or partial readers; individuals as confused in their thinking as they are unrestrained and immoderate in their actions.  

* See the remarks made by Simon Solomon following my recent post on the subject of schadenfreude: click here.

** Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1996), I. 2. 49.

** Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), I. 13. 

If You Only Palpitate to Murder / No One is Innocent

Jamie Reid: God Save Jack the Ripper (1979)

One of a series of posters designed by Reid for The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980)

For more information visit the Victoria and Albert Museum website: click here. 

Some interesting emails have arrived in my inbox concerning a recent post by Símón Solomon on Charles Manson: click here.

Several people professed no interest in the case; others voiced their concern that, in publishing the post, I am helping to further mythologise Manson and his Family when such vile individuals should be starved of the oxygen of publicity and allowed to fade from the collective memory as soon as possible.

However, whilst I agree with D. H. Lawrence that "if you only palpitate to murder" it quickly becomes boring and results, ultimately, in "atrophy of the feelings" (i.e., like the sexual excitement generated by pornography, the sensational thrill of violent crime is subject to a law of diminishing returns and one must therefore seek out an ever more lurid level of explicit detail), I don't think we can simply ignore negative limit-experiences.

Like it or not, figures like Charles Manson are indelibly part of the cultural imagination and undoubtedly have something important - if disturbing - to tell us about ourselves. As Símón rightly argues, it's virtually impossible to exaggerate (or expunge) Manson's enduring impact and whilst some might need to think him beyond the pale, he was "very much a product of American post-War popular culture and a toxic body politic".

Similarly, in the UK, figures ranging from Dick Turpin and Jack the Ripper to Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, are as British as fish 'n' chips and will continue to haunt our cultural imagination for as long as we continue to consume the latter (even though he's horrible and she ain't what you'd call a lady).

This was perfectly understood by Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid, the latter of whom designed the provocative series of God Save ... posters that the former pasted up in Highgate Cemetery in the famous 'You Needs Hands' scene of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir. Julien Temple, 1980) - a scene which I have discussed elsewhere on this blog: click here.      

Reid's artwork - much like the Sex Pistols' 1979 single featuring Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs on vocals - advances the challenging theological idea that, thanks to original sin, no one is innocent - i.e. we are each of us, as fallen beings, corrupt at some level and capable of committing acts of atrocity. Similarly, we are all of us - no matter how evil and depraved - capable of redemption; for we are all God's children (not just those who attend church and say their prayers).

Was punk rock, then, simply a disguised form of moral humanism founded, like Christianity, on a notion of forgiveness ...? Was its nihilism merely a pose?     

See: D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI: March 1927-November 1928, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 600.

Play: Sex Pistols, No One Is Innocent (Virgin Records, 1978): click here.

Again to Nowhere and Nothing Again: The Multiple Death-in-Life Masks of Charles Manson - A Guest Post by Símón Solomon

With the 50th anniversary overlap of Quentin Tarantino's latest movie - a black comedy-cum-thriller set in 1969 LA - and an orthodoxy-busting new book by Tom O'Neill, the helter-skelter spiral concerning the life, death and afterlife of celebrity mass murderer, Charles Manson, continues to unravel.

If Tarantino’s title attests to a sense of his picture's elliptical storyboarding, O'Neill’s obsessive study, two decades in the making, underwrites its anarchic archetypal matrix. Either way, should one or both works help to provoke laughter at the facile official version of the Family's choreographed career, a valuable public service will have been performed. In any event, the supposed madman who derailed free love's peace train and called himself no one is a media star all over again.

Some might need to think of him as beyond the pale, but, arguably, Manson was very much a product of American post-War popular culture and a toxic body politic. Thus, at a time when the psychedelic Summer of Love was turning - or being turned - hateful and psychotic, the Family's graphically mediated slaughter of the heavily pregnant actress Sharon Tate, plus three unfortunate friends and a visitor, would be obscenely exploited in order to euthanise the counter-culture by injecting a final shot of fatal terror into the haunted paradise of the beautiful people.

Although the Leno and Rosemary LaBianca slayings two nights later in a separate Los Angeles neighbourhood were suspected by investigators to be copycat homicides, the synergetic contiguity of the two events sealed the Manson clan's fate, implicated as its purported ringleader already was in the murder of Gary Hinman by Bobby Beausoleil.

What fascinates about Manson's legacy as Hollywood's Bluebeard-esque signature villain, is his shapeshifting multiplication through a panoply of visages that evoke resemblances with Jim Morrison, a desert Christ, Büchner's schizophrenic assassin Lenz, and a swastika-stamped beatnik Nazi.

Shot through with a consummate performer's narcissistic and solipsistic grandiosity (in my mind's eye my thoughts light fires in your cities) and memorably inflected anti-humanism (I have X-ed myself from your world), Manson may or may not have been a malignant killer, but, like some fire and brimstone reincarnation of Oscar Wilde without the dress sense, he was always fiendishly quotable.

One can readily see how Tarantino was drawn to his cinematically suggestive story, even as one suspects a superior auteur like David Lynch - whose noirish attunement to Hollywood’s underside is indissociable from the Manson-magnetised termination of flower power  - might have concocted a far more unsettling film.

As we might expect of a mortal so manufactured, if not consumed, by his own demoniacal myth, it is difficult to exaggerate Manson's enduring cultural impact. Yet the more prosaic and humiliated humanity onto which his personae were pinned curdles the legend: a rootless and institutionalised roamer from a broken family; a beatnik thief; a sociopathic fantasist of race war who hung out with Hell's Angels; a failed musician with a monstrous superiority complex.

His archetypal reversion to zero, to a politics of utopian and/or dystopian annihilation, is presumably the clearest clue to the Family's engineered reality. To take Charlie at his word means to view him as essentially a cipher, a figment, of Hollywood’s phantasmic horror, a parodic Freddie Kruger precursor to the Terrible Beauty generation.

His final reported phone call from jail, a recursive quasi-Beckettian microscript, says it all in its unsaying:

'Nothing with everyone and everything over and gone to start backwards again and again to nowhere and nothing again.'

Notes

Quentin Tarantino's new film, Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 21 May 2019. It is released in the UK on 14 August 2019. Click here to watch the official trailer.

See: Tom O'Neill (with Dan Piepenbring), Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, (William Heinemann, 2019).

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

This is a revised and updated version of an earlier (unpublished) post of the same title. 

For a follow-up post to this one, click here. 

All of My Life is All I'll Give You: Un/Holy Reflections on the Case of St. Nietzsche (A Guest Post by Símón Solomon)

Nietzsche Icon from Ryan Haecker's 
blog Transhuman Traditionalism 

I.

'How is negation of the will possible? How is the saint possible? This really seems to have been the question that started Schopenhauer off and made him into a philosopher.'

- Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, §47 

In concert with these Kantian-looking questions, Nietzsche conjoins his taskmaster in tragic aesthetics, so that, guilty by association, Schopenhauer's questions become Nietzsche's questions too. That they are also two questions he collapses into one yields, in effect, a pseudo-singularity that differs from itself. To insert ourselves between them, to read Nietzsche against himself by insisting on their analytical separability, we must therefore ask:

(i) What if sainthood were not only the personification of the will's renunciation?

(ii) What if martyrdom were something other, something stranger, than the instincts' resentful atrophy?

(iii) Might the saint even be that inculpable being, incorruptibly defenceless, who is innervated by a god?


II.

'Up to now the most powerful people have still bowed reverently before the saint, as the riddle of self-conquest and of intentional final sacrifice. Why did they bow? In him they sensed - and, so to speak, behind the question mark of his fragile and lamentable appearance - the superior strength which wished to test itself in such a victory, the fortitude of the will, in which they knew how to recognise and honour their own fortitude and pleasure in mastery once more.'

- Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, §51

In this exemplary aphorism, Nietzsche bears witness to the figure of the saint as a kind of limit-figure, in which the ascetic ideal - the nadir of the slavish revolt against which he stockpiles his anti-Christian dynamite - folds back upon itself into a mystical spectacle of the will to power. We might think here of Jung's crucial insight that les extrêmes se touchent; an observation that further demands Nietzsche be received as the ground-breaking psychologist he claimed himself to be, presenting as he is an early object lesson in the psychodynamics of projection. 'They were honouring something in themselves', he discerns, 'when they venerated the saint'.

Or, as Zarathustra declared, 'You want to create the world before which you can kneel: this is your ultimate hope and intoxication'.

Just as Rudolf Otto identified terror and fascination as the two drivers of religious awe, such overmastered reverence conceals, on Nietzsche’s diagnosis, a diabolical distrust: a hermeneutics of suspicion avant la lettre freudienne. What the men of power learned from this 'monster of denial' and unnatural contrarian was thus a new kind of dread, a new fear of power's self-overcoming.

In other words, they encountered in the saint a kind of fiend or force field, an unsurpassable adversary, atrociously empowered by 'a burning eye in a body half destroyed' [Human All Too Human, §141]. The will now bore a power that brought them, the non-saints, to a standstill. If the saint was a question mark, as Nietzsche tells us, whom they felt compelled to question, its crook sent back no echo.

In Tears and Saints, the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran offers the stirring speculation that 'Nietzsche’s greatest merit is that he knew how to defend himself from saintliness. What would have become of him had he let loose his natural impulses? He would have been a Pascal with all the saints’ madnesses.'

Of course, a wholly undefended Nietzsche would still have been Nietzsche, but for Cioran a Pascal-pacified Nietzsche, the Pascal Nietzsche envisioned as 'profound, wounded and monstrous' [Beyond Good And Evil, §45] and who antedated Wagner alongside Schopenhauer as one half of the four couples who did not refuse him, the sacrificer, in his 'descent into Hades' [Human All Too Human II, §408].


III.

As to the demono-maniacal Nietzsche's infamous sign-off in Ecce Homo, 'Dionysus against the Crucified', was what defeated him what also broke his youthful Lieblingsdichter, the mad poet Hölderlin: the monotheistic cult of the Cross plunging into the imperishable circus of the Greeks that revolved around it eternally? The image of the Bacchic Jesus, the horned Christ, is a demonic thought, truly beyond good and evil.

Nietzsche may not have been a Christian, or, perhaps, was a kind of mortified Christian - 'a man whom the grace of God has not touched’ as Eric Voegelin described him - but nor was he simply a nostalgic pagan, a satyr of the wine-god: the god of ecstatic dissonance, of wine, women and tears.

As Rouven J. Steeves has noted, Nietzsche was not unambiguously 'against' Christianity, or laying siege to the Nazarene with the sorcery of Greek ecstasy. Rather, as something 'even more primordial', his agon channelled the free spirit of Luther via Pascal, mingled with his self-styled Dionysus as a creative principle of life, to become a kind of Jobian Prometheus - an anti-ass, a world-historical beast, a fire-breathing Anti-Christ.

'Dionysus against the Crucified' signals, we suggest, a kind of divine double-crossing, an impossible authorship: a Dionysus crucified; the dying Christ dionyised. The German gegen, however can also signify 'towards': Dionysus towards the Crucified. And toward the end, Nietzsche signed himself as the Crucified One ...

In the German language, weinen and wein, tears and wine, share a common root. Drinking and dying are given together for those who dare to speak with a forked tongue, before they are driven mad. Here is the close of Nietzsche’s pious and tormented 1863 schoolboy poem, 'Before the Crucifix'.


On the floor lay a coin,
corroded and minted
with the devil’s hand and blow,
what it costs eternally, in heaven and on earth,
the soul hanging on the cross,
and, sunk deep in sin and lust,
thinking itself holy
that must yet be damned.


Author's Notes

E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. I. Zarifopol-Johnston, (University of Chicago Press, 1998). 

E. Cyblulska, 'Nietzsche Contra God: A Battle Within', Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, vol. 16 (1-2 October, 2016), pp. 1–12 (online).

C. Kerényi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, trans. R. Manheim, (Princeton University Press, 1976).

R. J. Steeves, 'Dionysus versus the Crucified: Nietzsche and Voegelin and the Search for a Truthful Order', in Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition, ed. L. Trepanier and S. F. McGuire (University of Missouri, 2011), pp. 108-136.

E. Voegelin, 'Nietzsche and Pascal', Nietzsche-Studien, vol. 25(1), pp.128-171. 


Editor's Notes

Símón 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

Símón appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm.

To read a sibling post by Stephen Alexander, on why it's preferable to have horns rather than a halo, click here.  

On Saints and Satyrs: Why It's Preferable to Have Horns than a Halo

St. Anthony encountering a satyr 

Fresco from the Skete of St. Demetrios, 

the Holy Monastery of Vatopedi, 

Mount Athos, Greece  

I.

Nietzsche cheerfully claims in the Preface to Ecce Homo that he's the very opposite in nature to the kind of individual who has traditionally been regarded as virtuous and that he prides himself on this fact: I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus and I would rather be a satyr than a saint.

He doesn't aim for the moral improvement of humanity or long to see men and women with halos. On the contrary, he'd rather individuals grew horns and found their best strength in the evil that exists as a potency within us (and also a power outside us) over which we have no final control; a potency often thought of in terms of either animality or the daimonic.

Let me expand upon these ideas before, in part two of this post, Dr. Símón Solomon explains why it is that the figure of the saint never quite departs from Nietzsche's text and why his relationship with the holy fool is often ambiguous and perplexing.

II. 

Zarathustra famously says that man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him.

Of course, evil isn't being used here as a moral term. Rather, it refers to a healthy expression of will to power, or what Freud (negatively) terms man's primary hostility - i.e., that which is permeated with a death drive and perpetually threatening chaos and destruction if not mediated by the power of Love.

Nietzsche, however, feels it is Love - or moral idealism - that, in its attempt to negate difference and becoming, is fundamentally nihilistic. He argues that the restrictions placed on man's instinctual life and the frustration of his most active forces ultimately has the effect of weakening him and ensuring the becoming-reactive of these forces.

Marcuse calls this the fatal dialectic of civilization and D. H. Lawrence notes: "We think love and benevolence will cure anything. Where as love and benevolence are our poison." Of course, it's true that man has been made into an interesting animal via this moral poisoning - Nietzsche readily admits this - but so too he has been made sick and full of self-loathing.    

Ultimately, what I'm suggesting here is that if man were allowed to develop a pair of horns, then he'd be stronger and happier - if a little bone-headed - and, as a consequence, superior to the righteous but resentful creature he is today.

Those who wish for men to be saints and have halos above their heads, subscribe to a model of light-headed humanism that, in restricting the desire for power, has created an unhappy species of herd animal that is, to paraphrase Nick Land, sordid, passive, and cowardly.  

Notes

Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1988).

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Penguin Books, 1976), p. 330.

Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, (Beacon Press, 1955). 

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 114.


For a sister post to this one by Símón Solomon, click here.

On Opening Heaven and Hell: A Boxing Day Post Dedicated to a Secular Saint, by Símón Solomon

You pays your money and you takes your choice ...

I.

While it's probably safe to say that the philosopher Stephen Alexander is not en route to canonisation any time soon, the presiding presence of Torpedo the Ark may forgive me for divulging to his readers that he once indirectly referred to himself as Harold Hill's first secular saint.

Thus, on this day of all days, we wanted to pay our own deconsecrated tribute from across the Irish Sea to this prodigiously stylish, provocative and gifted writer, from whom - despite the prevailing disembodiment of the friendship in recent years - we continue to take much fractious inspiration and sometimes antagonistic pleasure, and to whose deliciously idiosyncratic platform we are delighted to be able to contribute as Gastautor and commentator on a (semi-)regular basis.

Stephen, though your name may never be dedicated to divinity (or even up in the lights we often feel you deserve), we hope that the pious vessel in your sights will be repeatedly holed but not wholly blown out of the water, lest TtA one day exhaust its irreverent purpose ...


II.

Though much of the detail of his namesake's biography is overlaid by theological propaganda, our main Biblical source for the historical St. Stephen, viz., the Acts of the Apostles, places him as a notable Hellenistic Jew tasked in his role as archdeacon with a fairer distribution of welfare to Greek-speaking widows. At the same time, with his practised penchant for signs and wonders, he was also said to have excelled in the rather attention-seeking art of enacting miracles, which quickly aroused the interest of the Synagogue of the Libertines, the Cyrenians and the Alexandrinians.

Clearly, there was only one way such subversive street theatre was going to end ...

As is the case with any saint worth his or her (pillar of) salt, the manner of Stephen's death infinitely transcends the significance of his foreshortened life. Accordingly, and in the traditional fashion, although it appears that he may just have missed out on early membership of the 27 Club, his timeless demise, as protomartyr of at least six denominations of the Christian church, was not lacking in gruesome glamour. 

Following blasphemy charges trumped up by the usual suspects, in which he stood accused of crimes against God, Moses and, more importantly, the Sanhedrin Assembly, Stephen's knockdown reminder while on trial that the chosen people had crucified the Son of God and less than life-preserving echoes of Christ's prophecies concerning the destruction of the Second Temple hardly screamed of an overwhelming desire to keep body and soul together.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his self-evident impatience to meet his Maker, however, Stephen himself was reportedly equanimous before his judges, with one report likening his countenance to that of an angel. Sentenced to the Biblical cliché of death by stoning, he faced the rock-wielding mob with prayers for his murderers and a divine vision to boot, rapturously declaring (in what was presumably not a piece of holy misdirection to facilitate a cunning escape) that he had 'seen heaven open and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God!'

In Christian iconography, the St. Stephen is frequently depicted for obvious reasons with three stones, while holding a palm frond (signifying victory over the flesh) and a copy of the Gospels. Those to whom his patronage now extends comprise a hilarious miscellany that includes deacons, bricklayers, stonemasons, casket makers, people with headaches, and ... horses!


III.

In Ireland, St. Stephen's Day has also been known as Day of the Wren [Lá an Dreoilín]. In what appears to have been a ritual of atonement, groups of wren boys with painted faces would hunt and stone a wren to death, then tie the birds corpse to a holly stick and parade it through the streets, while a nominated hunter collected coins. Among numerous variants of the Wren Boys’ song, alluding to this act of ornithological regicide, one runs:

The wren, the wren, the king of all birds, 
On Saint Stephen's Day was caught in the furze, 
Although he is little, his family is great. 
I pray you, good landlady, give us a treat.

In its Celtic lineage, the associated myth derived from a Samhain sacrifice, in which the wren was connected with midwinter song and the dying year, and may also have been entangled with Druidic rituals. The Welsh warrior and magician Lleu Llaw Gyffes reputedly gained his (etymologically contested) name by killing a wren. On the Isle of Man, meanwhile, the hunted wren is an avatar of the shapeshifting queen of the fairies, Tehi Tegi, who was said to have drowned her suitors in the river and then turned herself into one to evade capture.

Among both the Norse and Christian traditions, the wren's association with treachery is likewise strikingly emphasised, in which one highly poetic legend conveys that, during the 8th-century Viking raids, as a troop of Irish soldiers entered an enemy camp under cover of darkness, the micropercussion of a wren nibbling breadcrumbs on a drum woke the sleeping warriors, leading to the invaders' rout.

In the case of St. Stephen, the story runs that, while attempting to conceal himself on the cusp of death - for it seems even martyrs, like Bee Gees, are not after all wholly indifferent to staying alive - his hiding place was revealed by a chattering wren.

For us, the way such symbolic narratives sew betrayal into the tapestry of these archetypal matrices of love and war, of soul and death, provides a kind of cold comfort at this chilly time of year, restoring the psyche to its sacrificial self-exposures, demanding our hunger for transcendence dance with deception, and darkening our enthusiasms.

The ecstasy of St. Stephen reminds us, whether we find our faith in God’s death or eternal life, of the art of dying as a summons to visionary existence. We know St. Stephen of Harold Hill is enduring his own considerable sacrifices now and we wish him every strength of spirit for the year to come, as well as much power to his writing elbow.

Author's Notes

For an Irish perspective on St. Stephen, see Rosita Boland's article in The Irish Times entitled 'A martyr whose day is set in stone', (24 Dec 2010): click here.

For further Biblical background, see the entry on St. Stephen in the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia: click here.

And on the Irish Day of the Wren, see Rose Eveleth's article in The Smithsonian Magazine, entitled 'The Irish Used to Celebrate the Day After Christmas by Killing Wrens' (26 Dec 2012): click here.    

Finally, readers will doubtless recall Stephen Alexander's own controversial post on this topic published on Torpedo the Ark (26 Dec 2013), entitled It's My Name Day (And I'll Decry If I Want To). 


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.

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.