(Re-)turn to Red

Fig. 1 Killing Joke: Turn to Red  

(Malicious Damage, 1979) [1] 

Cover design by Mike Coles [2] 

 

 

It's amazing how certain songs and certain images can stay with you for many years after you first encountered them. 

 

Take, for example, the debut EP by Killing Joke with a sleeve design by Mike Coles (fig. 1). It's over forty-five years since its release and yet whenever there's a red sunrise - as there was this morning over Harold Hill (fig 2): 

  

 

Fig. 2 I Wonder Who Chose the Colour Scheme ... 

Photo by Stephen Alexander 

 

 

- it's not shepherds that I think of, but the track 'Turn to Red' that begins to play in my head (even though, ironically, the song twice informs us that the sky is turning grey). 

 

And it's Mike Coles's Mr Punch figure [3] that I look to see dancing across the rooftops; which, I suppose evidences the power of his design, as recognised by Russ Bestley: 

 

"One mark of a great designer in the field of music graphics is in the way that the audio and visual become almost inseparable - you can't listen to the music without picturing the cover artwork, and vice versa." [4].

 

Bestley, in fact, is a huge admirer of Coles's work: more so than me, to be honest; I'm far more of a Jamie Reid fan and punk purist [5]. 

 

Having said that, I agree with Bestley that Coles's images for Killing Joke set the scene for the music; that you can almost hear the band's "dark, raw power when you look at their early record covers" [6], including the Turn to Red EP, which nicely combines collage with drawing and photography set against a flat red background [7].

 

And, coincidently, it was Mike Coles's Turn to Red design that influenced me when asked a couple of months ago by Catherine Brown to come up with an image to promote her walking tour of Hampstead, following in the footsteps of D. H. Lawrence, as part of this year's Being Human Festival [8]. 

 

I hope - should he ever see the image (fig. 3) - that it makes Mr Coles smile ... 

 

 

  

Fig. 3 Turning Hampstead Red with D. H. Lawrence (2025) 

Stephen Alexander (in the manner of Mike Coles)

 

Notes

 

[1] The Killing Joke EP Turn to Red was released in a 10" format by Malicious Damage on 26 October, 1979. It had two tracks - 'Nervous System' and 'Turn to Red' - on the A-side and just one track on the B-side; 'Are You Receiving?'. 

      It was then re-released on 14 December of that year in a 7" and 12" format by Island Records, with an additional track; a dub remix of the title track called 'Almost Red'.   

      The title track, featuring a closed groove so that the word red is repeated endlessly (or at least until you lift the needle of the record), can be played by clicking here. And for the remastered 2020 version, with a video by Mike Coles, click here.

 

[2] Mike Coles can be found on Facebook: click here. Or visit the Malicious Damage website: click here. Coles's artwork is also available to buy from the Flood Gallery: click here. Finally, readers may be interested in Coles's book; Forty Years in the Wilderness: A Graphic Voyage of Art, Design & Stubborn Independence (Malicious Damage, 2016), which traces a pictorial history of his work under the Malicious Damage  label, including the record sleeves, posters and flyers promoting Killing Joke. 

      Historian of punk and post-punk graphic design, Russ Bestley, writes of this book: 

      "Part autobiography, part personal reflection, part celebration, this publication may lead to a critical reappraisal of the designer's work alongside more widely acknowledged contemporaries, though such considerations are far from being a driving force for the project, and the title ironically sums up Coles' attitude towards independent and autonomous production." 

      See Bestley, 'I wonder who chose the colour scheme, it's very nice …': Mike Coles, Malicious Damage and Forty Years in the Wilderness', Punk & Post-Punk, Volume 5, Issue 3, (Sept. 2016), pp. 311-328. The essay, which I shall refer to throughout the post, can be downloaded as a Word doc from the UAL research depository: click here.

 

[3] Coles already had a long interest in the traditional British puppet character of Mr Punch and the latter would become a key figure in his work: "'Mr Punch was something that fascinated me before Malicious Damage or Killing Joke. That drawing from the first single was done in 1977 after I'd been to the Punch & Judy festival in Covent Garden'". 

      Mike Coles, quoted by Russ Bestley in the above cited essay, from email correspondence of 18 August, 2016.

 

[4] Russ Bestley, as cited in note 2 above.

 

[5] Whilst Coles is to be respected as an image-maker who developed his own unique aesthetic, for me, he strays just a little too far from what I would consider a punk visual style. And indeed, by his own admission, he "'never took much notice of all the punk stuff'" and "'never really felt a part of the punk movement'". He was more influenced by "'Victorian freak show stuff'" than the Situationists. Quoted by Russ Bestley in the above cited essay, from email correspondence of 14 August, 2016.   

 

[6] Russ Bestley, as cited in note 2 above.  

 

[7] Readers might be interested to know that along with the hand-drawn image of Mr Punch and the picture of two smiling figures taken from a toothpaste ad, the cover features a (high-contrast) photo of Centre Point (which remains a London landmark to this day).   

 

[8] The Being Human festival is an annual celebration of the humanities led by the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, working in collaboration with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. 

      Each November they put on hundreds of free public events across the UK in the hope that they might garner support for the continued study of art, literature, history, and philosophy, etc. by demonstrating the value and relevance of such disciplines; the humanities, it is argued, enable us to understand and fully appreciate what it means to be human. For further information, click here.  

      Dr Brown's Hampstead walk took place on 8 November, 2025 (11:00 - 13:00): click here. It will be noted that it was decided to use an alternative (inferior and far less humorous) image to advertise the talk for reasons unknown.    

 

 

Douglas Murray Contra Michel Foucault

The Ghost of Michel Foucault Haunting Douglas Murray

(SA/2025) 

 

I. 

 

Readers familiar with Torpedo the Ark may recall that I have written several posts which mention the neoconservative political commentator and cultural critic Douglas Murray: click here.

 

And whilst I wasn't exactly blown away by either of the books of his that I've read - The Strange Death of Europe (2017) and The Madness of Crowds (2019) - I still find him in many ways an admirable figure and, if forced to choose, would still rather go to dinner with him than Gaby Hinsliff.   

 

However, the fact that Murray continues to denigrate Michel Foucault's work - or, more precisely, abhor Foucault's influence within academia - is something I still find disappointing (and kind of irritating) ...

 

 

II.

 

Speaking in conversation with philosopher Roger Scruton at an event organised by The Spectator in 2019 [1], Murray concedes that, as a writer, Foucualt is often brilliant and his books are "filled with resonant phrases and so on" [2]. 

 

However, Murray cannot forgive the fact that Foucault deconstructs the notion of truth as an objective thing in itself, to be pursued rigorously and maintained as an absolute standard or ideal: "I finally read Foucault last year and I have to say: I'm so appalled ..." 

 

And why is he so appalled? 

 

Because, says Murray, whilst he'd previously read about Foucault's work and heard others discuss it - and whilst he'd always known that he "sort of instinctively disliked it" - it was only after reading it [3] that he realised how catastrophic Foucault's philosophical project really is:  

 

"this sort of perversion of all life [...] as being solely about power, and the ignoring of every other human instinct - the total ignoring of love, the total ignoring of forgiveness; power, only power." 

 

That, I think, is an unfair and grotesque caricature of Foucault and his work; one that goes beyond being a gross oversimplification [4]. 

 

I'm not a Foucault scholar, but I'm pretty sure that he didn't think of power as something that could be possessed and didn't think either in terms of oppressed groups needing to be emancipated from the domination of more powerful oppressors; he was a post-Nietzschean thinker, not a neo- or quasi-Marxist [5]. 

 

Thus, whilst power certainly plays an important role in his philosophy, he conceives of it in a highly novel manner as something complex that produces things (including us as subjects) and puts something new into the world; it induces pleasures, generates discursive practices, forms bodies of knowledge, etc. It is power - not love - which runs through the entire social body and which, as a matter of fact, calls love into being [6]. 

 

For Murray this is a distortion of the truth: but then, he would say that wouldn't he, as an idealist who, despite professing to be an atheist, still affirms Christian virtues [7].  

Oh, and whilst we're discussing this: I think it's also profoundly mistaken to blame Foucault for the rise of identity politics (which Murray does): Foucault, the masked philosopher and anti-essentialist, argued that identities are not inherent but socially and historically constructed and could easily become traps or a form of subjugation.

 

Instead of creating or maintaining identity, Foucault's political strategy was more focused on refusing it and developing new forms of resistance and even a cursory reading of his work makes it pretty obvious that he would have very little time for today's identity politics (would, in fact, see it as reactionary; a return to the same old bullshit to do with fixed categories and subjectivation). 

 

I really don't understand why Murray fails to see this; particularly as he claims to have read Foucault. It's almost a wilful misunderstanding - one which Jordan Peterson also buys into - and if I said earlier that I'd rather go to dinner with Murray than Gaby Hinsliff, I'd like it to be noted that I'd sooner go to dinner with Foucault than Murray (even if dinner with Foucault often involved nothing more than a club sandwich and a Coke) [8].  

 

Notes

 

[1] The full transcript of Douglas Murray's conversation with Roger Scruton (8 May 2019), in which they discuss what it means to be a conservative, can be found on The Spectator website: click here. All lines quoted in this post from Murray are taken from here. 

      The relevant clip from the night in which Foucault is condemned by both men, has been posted by Culture Wolf on YouTube: click here. Anybody who thinks they might like to watch the entire event online can visit The Spectator website: click here.     

 

[2] Note how Murray doesn't say ideas; implying Foucault was a mere stylist rather than a major thinker. 

 

[3] The fact that Murray doesn't mention any specific books or essays, leaves one to wonder the extent of his reading of Foucault who published around a dozen books during his lifetime and who has had at least twice as many posthumous publications of essay collections, lecture series, etc.

 

[4] It is also, of course, a live paraphrase of a passage that will appear in The Madness of Crowds:    

      "From Michel Foucault [...] thinkers absorbed their idea of society not as an infinitely complex system of trust and traditions that have evolved over time, but always in the unforgiving light cast when everything is viewed solely through the prism of 'power'. Viewing all human interactions in this light distorts, rather than clarifies, presenting a dishonest interpretation of our lives. Of course power exists as a force in the world, but so do charity, forgiveness and love. If you were to ask most people what matters in their lives very few would say 'power'. Not because they haven't absorbed their Foucault, but because it is perverse to see everything in life through such a monomaniacal lens."

      See Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 53. 

 

[5] As one commentator has recently pointed out:

      

"Right-wing critics frequently label Foucault's thought as another species of Marxism. Douglas Murray wrote in The War on The West (2022) that  'Foucault's obsessive analysis of everything through a quasi-Marxist lens of power relations diminished almost everything in society into a transactional, punitive and meaningless dystopia.' Jordan Peterson has also been fond of calling Foucault a 'postmodern neo-Marxist'.

      It's a popular and long-held narrative, but there are several problems with it. For one, it is incoherent to describe Foucault as a 'neo-Marxist' or a  'cultural Marxist'. He, like other postmodern thinkers, was broadly opposed to Marxism."

      - Ralph Leonard, 'Michel Foucault still confuses the Right, 40 years later', Unheard (25 June 2024): click here. As Leonard rightly goes on to argue, it's Nietzsche, not Marx, that haunts Foucault's philosophy. 

 

[6] I'm thinking here of something written by D. H. Lawrence:

      "For power is the first and greatest of the mysteries. It is the mystery behind all our being, even behind all our existence. Even the phallic erection is a first blind movemet of power. Love is said to call the power into motion: but it is probably the reverse; that the slumbering power calls love into being."

      See Lawrence's essay 'Blessed Are the Powerful', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 327. 

 

[7] In a live streamed video conversation on a Christian radio podcast with the theologian and former Anglican Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, Murray confessed:      

      "I was brought up a Christian, a believing Christian into my adult life, and am now, I suppose, in a self-confessedly complex situation of being among other things an uncomfortable agnostic who recognises the values and the virtues that the Christian faith has brought."

      See 'The Big Conversation' (season 3, episode 3), hosted by Justin Brierly (13 May 2021): click here.

 

[8] In an amusing interview, Foucault expressed his preference for American fast food over French cuisine; specifically mentioning a club sandwich and a Coke, followed by ice cream. 

      The interview, with Stephen Riggins, was first published in the Canadian journal Ethos (Autumn, 1983). As well as revealing his favourite meal, Foucault also voiced his thoughts on the quest for monastic austerity and a cultural ethos of silence. It can also be found under the title 'The Minimalist Self' in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. Alan Sheridan and Lawrence D. Kritzman (Routledge, 1988), pp. 3-16.  

 

An Open Letter to Simon Reynolds on Malcolm McLaren and the Art of Living Like a Hobo

Simon Reynolds and Stephen Alexander 

 

I.

 

Thank you for your remarks on a recent post entitled 'Destroy Success' (7 Nov 2025), in which you were either highlighting (without judgement) the paradoxical aspect of Malcolm McLaren's life and multifaceted career as an artist - the successful failure; the professional amateur; the bourgeois anarchist, the inside outsider, etc. - or you were making some kind of moral appraisal [1] and suggesting (without actually using the terms) that he was a fraud and a hypocrite.

 

I'd like to think you were doing the former and that any antipathy towards McLaren that you feel is nonethless born of love and an ongoing obsession with this fascinating figure: "Even now, despite all the reprehensible things he did and the suspicion that he helped misdirect a generation [...] I can't quite amputate McLaren from my consciousness." [2] 

 

I couldn't help wondering if perhaps you also begrudge the fact that, in his final years, Malcolm was paid large sums of money to give talks all over the world to people in business as well as the arts, travelling first class and staying in the best hotels, etc. But then, why would that be the case when you also give lectures and interviews on an international stage in your capacity as a hard-working pop-historian and pedagogue ...? 

 

 

II. 

 

Your main gripe seems to be that enjoying the rewards of such a lifestyle is further evidence of Mclaren's hypocrisy: "I mean, it's not exactly 'living like a hobo' ..." [3]

 

But, here again, I would disagree: for living like a hobo doesn't mean begging in the streets like a bum [4], anymore than being a punk means adopting a certain look or thinking one has to be angry and miserable all the time in order to be militant, like the po-faced political ascetics who would preserve the purity of the punk revolution. 

 

Whilst the etymology of the term hobo is uncertain, I like to imagine it could be an abbreviation of homeless bohemian, a description that could well be applied to McLaren who "cultivated the mannerisms and appearance of a bohemian outsider" [5] and whose life involved constant travel and a deliberate rejection of conventional work and societal norms; partly out of a desire for freedom and sometimes just for the fun of it. 

 

Malcolm may not have illegally hopped freight trains, but he rarely paid for his own travel - or even his own cigarettes! - and, just like a hobo, he was an extremely resourceful individual, flitting between London, Paris, and New York just as he had once flitted from art college to art college, living on his wits and other people's generosity. 

 

Above all, McLaren stayed true to the number one rule of the Hobo Code [6]: Decide your own life; don't let another person run or rule you. 

 

And one recalls, of course, that Duck Rock (1983) may have thanked many people for their collaboration on the project, but it was solely dedicated to Harry K. McClintock; better known by his hobo name, Haywire Mac, whose Hallelujah! I'm a Bum (1981) Malcolm insisted was crucial to an understanding of duck rock or hobo-punk as he conceived it and an album he made me buy in Collet's bookshop [7].  

 

 

III. 

 

In sum: living like a hobo is primarily about adopting a certain attitude and recognising the creative potential within failure - if I may return to this word. In a piece for The Guardian written two years before he died, McLaren wrote:

 

"I've always embraced failure as a noble pursuit. It allows you to be anti whatever anyone wants you to be, and to break all the rules. It was one of my tutors [...] when I was an art student, that really brought it home to me. He said that only by being willing to fail can you become fearless. He compared the role of an artist to that of being an alchemist or magician. And he thought the real magic was found in flamboyant, provocative failure rather than benign success. So that's what I've been striving for ever since." [8] 

 

McLaren's, therefore, is a very special understanding of failure; an artistic and philosophical understanding of the term. 

 

One is almost tempted to bring Samuel Beckett in at this point; for Beckett (as I'm sure you know) uses the symbolic figure of the tramp to explore various existential themes and informs us that what we learn from failure is not how to succeed in the future, but, at most, how to fail better [9]. Success, says Beckett, is not even an option; we are destined to fail - such is the tragic character of Dasein.

 

The fact that Beckett - like McLaren - affirms this and finds in it a source of darkly comic satisfaction, is something admirable I think. Nietzsche would call it a pessimism of strength [10] and he made it a central teaching of his Dionysian philosophy; a philosophy that, like McLaren's vision of punk, finds creative potential in destruction and flamboyant failure. 

 

McLaren had his successes - but he didn't chase or desire success. Indeed, if anything - and again to quote your own words Simon, if I may - he was thwarted by success [11]. His dream was always to go down in flames or sink beneath the waves [12].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm referring here to the claim made by Reynolds that Paul Gorman's excellent biography of McLaren failed to give a "moral appraisal of its subject". It was an allegation swiftly refuted by Gorman, who rightly pointed out that the primarly task of a biographer is to write a critically objective study, not pass judgement. 

     See: Simon Reynolds, 'Serious Mayhem', a review of Paul Gorman's The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2021), in The London Review of Books, Vol. 44, No. 5 (10 March 2022), and see Paul Gorman's letter in response in the following issue (44. 6), dated 24 March 2022. Both can be read by clicking here.             

 

[2] Simon Reynolds, 'Serious Mayhem', as cited and linked to above.   

 

[3] Simon Reynolds, comment on the TTA post 'Destroy Success' posted on 10 Nov 2025 at 16:56. Click here. 

 

[4] In the revised and expanded fourth edition of his The American Language (Alfred A. Knopf, 1937), H. L. Mencken argued that although commonly lumped together, tramps, hobos, and bums are actually distinct fron another. Both tramps and hobos like to travel around and lead an itinerant lifestyle, but the former try to avoid work preferring just to dream (and drink), whereas the latter, whilst enjoying some prolonged periods of unemployment, essentially want to work, albeit in a series of jobs with no desire to establish a long term career. As for the bum, according to Mencken, he neither wanders nor works.  Obviously, such a fixed and rigid classification is highly questionable.     

      

[5] Simon Reynolds, 'Serious Mayhem', as cited and linked to in note 1 above.  

 

[6] A set of ethical guidelines known as the Hobo Code was created by a hobo union during its 1889 National Hobo Convention, in St. Louis, Missouri.  It consists of more than a dozen rules intended to govern the conduct of hobos nationwide and help dispel negative stereotypes associated with their lifestyle. These rules essentially boil down to: 1. Respect the law. 2. Help fellow hobos. 3. Protect Children. 3. Preserve the natural environment.

      The National Hobo Convention continues to be an annual event - held in Iowa since 1900 - where the Hobo Code is still recognised. Readers wishing to know more are encouraged to visit the Open Culture web page on the subject: click here.  

 

[7] Collet's was a bookshop (that also stocked selected records and tapes) founded by Eva Collet Reckitt in 1934. It was famous for selling radical and revolutionary publications, particularly those from Russia and Eastern Europe, and acted as a hub for left-leaning intellectuals. 

 

[8] Malcolm McLaren, 'This much I know', The Guardian (16 Nov 2008): click here. 

[9] See my post on Beckett's short prose work 'Worstward Ho!' (1983) and the idea of failure (11 Jun 2013): click here.   

 

[10] This phrase - Pessimismus der Stärke - can be found, for example, in Nietzsche's 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy (1871), where he describes it as a "predilection for what is hard, terrible, evil, problematic in existence", arising from strength and well-being rather than decadence or enfeebled instincts. 

      See 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism', in The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside, ed. Michael Tanner (Penguin Books, 1993), p. 3.    

 

[11] Simon Reynolds, 'Serious Mayhem', as cited and linked to in note 1 above.  

 

[12] It is interesting to note that, etymologically, the term flamboyant that Malcolm used in relation to the kind of failure he aspired to, comes from the French and means 'flaming' or 'wavy'. 

  

 

Candid Camera (Notes on Secret Photography)

Monday 22 September, 2025, 11:31 

Stratford Station, London, England 

(SA/2025)

'The photographer is ... the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. 

Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world picturesque.' [1]

I. 

 

Candid photography is the capturing of images that, in a sense, have suggested themselves to the camera; spontaneous snaps of a scene, an event, or an anonymous subject that reveal the world in its randomness and objective innocence. 

 

If there is any hint of a pose - or any indication that the photographer is attempting to frame things aesthetically or ideologically, for example, and thereby impose their ideas or values on the image - then the picture is immediately robbed of its candid nature [2].

 

However, that's not to say candid photography reveals the truth of the world, even if it offers a glimpse of the world as is. And one must always be aware of the fact that no representation is ever really honest; the camera always lies and the world, no matter how exposed it may appear, is always fundamentally in darkness.  

       

 

II. 

 

The image used above is, I think, a good example of a candid (and covert) snapshot. It was taken yesterday, at Stratford Station, in East London, and shows a young woman standing on platform 8 waiting for an Elizabeth line train to Shenfield. 

 

I was standing opposite on platform 9 waiting for a Greater Anglia train to Liverpool Street. I thought it was unusual to see someone isolated on what is often a very busy platform and she struck me as very much a contemporary London girl; carrying a tote bag, holding an i-Phone in one hand and a coffee cup in the other, tattoed legs and green dyed hair. 

 

I've no idea who she is, but I like to imagine she's a student at the London College of Fashion; or a jewellery designer who has a studio in Hackney. Similarly, I like to think that, should this image ever come to her attention, she'll be fine with my having taken it and then publishing it here [3]. 

 

In a sense, a silent and secretive act - committed whilst in a shared public space and which involved what Baudrillard terms the photographic gaze (i.e., one that does not seek to probe or analyse or master reality, but, with a sort of insouciance, non-intrusively capture the apparition of objects) [4] - has brought us into initimate complicity. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1]  Susan Sontag, On Photography, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 55.  

 

[2] Obviously, this is the ideal. In practice, it's very hard to take a purely candid photograph, if only because even the most naive and amateur of photographers - i.e., one such as myself who knows very little about composition and the technical aspects of taking a picture - still views things with an intelligent eye and cannot resist retrospectively imposing a narrative or philosophically-informed interpretation on the image. 

      I'm also vaguely aware of the history of photography and the important place of candid images within that history; so radically different from the traditional posed pictures. 

      However, as far as possible, I have snapped candidly by sticking to my one snap and one snap only rule, never trying to capture the same image twice, or make a technically superior version; if I miss the decisive moment well, that's too bad (there'll be others).   

 

[3] Whilst I don't have full knowledge of the law, I believe that in the UK one doesn't require explicit consent to take someone's photo if they are in a public space, especially if, as in this case, the image is reproduced solely for editorial and artistic purpose and is not being used commercially. I think France has much tighter laws around this whole area to do with image rights and personal privacy.   

 

[4] See Jean Baudrillard, 'Photography, Or The Writing Of Light', trans. Francois Debrix in Baudrillard Now (22 April, 2023): click here to read online.  

      This essay was originally published in French as 'La Photographie ou l’Ecriture de la Lumiere: Litteralite de l’Image', in L'Echange Impossible (Éditions Galilée, 1999), pp. 175-184. An earlier translation into English, by Chris Turner, can be found in Impossible Exchange (Verso, 2001), pp. 139-147, where it is entitled as 'Photography, or Light-Writing: Literalness of the Image'.

      I am aware, of course, that Baudrillard hates the digitilisation of photography as an art form and would not acknowledge my image taken on an i-Phone to be a photograph in the sense he understands it (lacking both sovereignty and punctual exactitude). See section IX in part 2 of the post on Baudrillard's 'Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?' (16 September 2025): click here.

 

Reflections on Genocide in Fairyland

Stephen Alexander (1994) [1]

 

'It is time to speak of the fairies. In order to escape from the intrepid melancholy 

of expectation, it is time to create new worlds.' [2]

 

I. 

 

My friend Jennifer has written a fairy tale about a young woman and an enchanted fish. 

 

Reading it reminded me that, once upon a time, I too wrote a short collection of tales to which I gave the title Genocide in Fairyland ... 

 

 

II. 

 

Motivated by my deep green ecological concerns, my enthusiastic reading of Jack Zipes, and my love for the stories of Angela Carter - not to mention my abiding hatred of Disney - I decided, in the words of Borges, that it was time to speak of the fairies in order not simply to create new worlds of the imagination, but voice support for this world and the creatures that inhabit it. 

 

And so, I set about writing a collection of stories (numbering eight in all) and an introduction that began:

 

"Fairies symbolise the frailty of the flesh as well as the beauty and magic of the natural world. Their plight dramatises the struggle of peoples the world over to retain a traditional way of life when confronted by modernity (i.e., the world of money and machines). 

      Further, the destruction of Fairyland parallels the destruction of our own environment and our ability to dream and envision a different way of relating to one another and to the Earth."  

 

And concluded: 

 

"What I've attempted with this short collection of stories is not new; the fairy tale has long lent itself as a genre to those interested in political issues and philosophical concerns to do with identity, otherness, sexuality, interspecies relations, etc. 

      Unlike realist narratives that attempt to tell it as it is, or didactic moral fables that instruct us how it should be, folk and fairy tales, at their best - which is to say, at their most violent, most anarchic, most crude, and most comical - give a glimpse of how things might have been (once upon a time), or could possibly be (in a time to come that is already now/here)."

 

Genocide in Fairyland, then, was a book of dysfunctional creatures in a disenchanted land. Little people looking, just like the rest of us, to build up new little habitats and have new little hopes (no matter how many skies have fallen) [3].    

       

 

III.       

 

Unfortunately, I don't have copies of the eight stories (nor do I have the rejection letters from the handful of publishers I sent a proposal to) [4]. 

 

However, I do have short outlines of each tale that expose my thinking at the time and which I would like to share here:  

 

 

Come Not with Kisses 

 

A tale set in the land of the Great White Swan concerning a young princess's attempt to preserve an egg entrusted to her by a dying swan and which, she is told, contains the future. 

      Discovered by her swan-hating soon-to-be husband attending to the bird, the princess in a moment of panic hides the egg in the safest place she can think of, inserting it into her vagina. 

      Time passes: her wedding to Prince Renée goes ahead as planned, but all the while she thinks of the swan and his promise that he would one day return to her. Shortly after their honeymoon, she announces her pregnancy and he is delighted with the news. 

      However, he has a surpise awaiting him: 

 

"Won't it be strange, when the nurse brings the new

- born infant 

to the proud father, and shows its little, webbed 

greenish feet 

made to smite the waters behind it?" [5]

 

 

The Tower of Love 

 

We all know that, in the name of love, there was once a king who locked his only daugter in a tower without a door on the day she began to menstruate, so that she would never wed and be lost to him.

      The princess, however, had other ideas and let down her long hair, thereby allowing any passing stranger to climb up to her room in the tower, should he so please. 

      Less well known, however, was that in the fomer Soviet Union tales were told of a group of female inmates in a high security prison who, in order to be transferred to jails with less brutal conditions, would impregnate themselves with sperm obtained from the single male prisoner confined below. 

      Using a long piece of thread, they would lower a condom to him from their cell window and sing a song of encouragement as he jerked off into it. Once he had finished, they would then retrieve the condom and attempt to self-inseminate. 

      As the prison guards were deeply religious - despite years of communism - they regarded any pregnancies that resulted as miraculous events.  

 

Curdled Milk 

 

This is the story of a simple-minded giant accused of inappropriate conduct when playing with a group of children. What concerns here is exactly what concerned Michel Foucault with reference to the 1867 case of Charles Jouy in the village of Lapcourt, France:      

      

"The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become [...] the object not only of collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration." [6]

 

 

Home Sweet Home (Revenge of the Unhappy House-Spirit)

 

A house-spirit is a bit like a hob; very hairy, but fully clothed and a wee bit more human looking. Usually, a house-spirit will live on the top shelf above the stove, where it is nice and warm and he can enjoy the smell of the cooking. 

      In the middle of the night, long after the people of the house have retired to their beds, a house-spirit will clean and tidy up the kitchen and help himself to some milk and cheese. The house-spirit also regards child minding as one of his duties and the thing he likes to do above all else is to rock a baby in its cradle.   

      But where does a house-spirit fit into a fitted kitchen? Into a world of dish-washers and microwaves and baby monitors and disinfectants that kill 99.9% of all known germs? 

      The answer, of course, is that he doesn't. 

      Angry and plunged into depression, the house-spirit in this story decides to extract a terrible revenge upon the modern couple who have robbed his life of purpose and the tale develops into a tragic one involving domestic violence and cot-death.  

 

 

Night of the Moon-Beam Folk

 

This is the story of the moon-beam folk and their revenge upon modern city-dwellers, whom they blame for polluting the clean fresh air that they provide [7]. 

      As the latter sleep in their beds in rooms kept artificially warm in winter and artificially cool in summer, the moon-beam folk visit and weave a web of moon-beams across their faces, covering their mouths and nostrils, and thereby ensuring that they go on breathing the same stale air all night long and wake feeling drowsy and fatigued. 

      Aware of his own increasing lack-lustreness, Jack sets out to discover its cause. Medical science providing no satisfactory answer, he consults a gypsy woman from the old country, and it is she who tells him of the moon-beam folk and how he might appease them.               

 

 

Hob

 

Acculturation refers to the way in which one group of people is obliged by another group of people - usually dominant, but not necessarily superior - to assimilate and surrender their beliefs, habits, customs etc. Often this is done in the name of some grand ideal, such as material and moral progress,

      Loosely based on the story of the Yanomami - the so-called fierce people of the Amazon rainforest bordering Venezuela and Brazil - this is the tale of the Hob; a horrible, ungodly, unwashed, uneducated race of hairy little people living in the last great forest of Fairyland. 

         

     

When Jack Went Back Up the Beanstalk

 

The story of Jack - the poor boy who, with only a handful of beans, makes good by slaying a giant - is the quintessential English folk tale. 

      But surely it's wrong to steal and murder; even if one is stealing from and murdering a being regarded as a cannibalistic monster or ogre ...? And surely there are social consequences of rewarding such a youth as Jack - lazy, dishonest, violent - with wealth and celebrity ...?  

      In this tale, I pick up Jack's story several years after his initial adventure and reimagine what happened atop the beanstalk. 

 

 

Bait 

 

One of the more shameful methods employed by hunters to trap and kill wolves was to tie a female dog in heat to a tree in the forest and then wait for a male wolf to pick up her scent, locate her position, then mount her. Once inside the dog, and having ejaculated, the wolf's penis swells up and is gripped by the contracting muscles of the female dog's vagina (effectively acting as a plug to trap the semen). 

      This results in what is known as a copulatory bond (or breeding tie), locking the the two animals together for a period up to 30 minutes and, during this time, the hunter will come out from his hide and club the defenceless wolf to death.   

      With this in mind, here is my version of La Belle et la Bête, involving a cruel hunter who plans to use his own adolescent daughter as bait in order to trap and kill the Beast. Unfortunately for him, however, Beauty falls in love with the Beast after discovering that she rather enjoys his sexual embrace and so the two of them turn the tables on her father and it is he who falls victim to them.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Proposed design for book cover incorporating a black and white version of William Blake's frontispiece for Songs of Experience (1794).   

 

[2] Jorge Luis Borges with Margarita Guerrero, Book of Imaginary Beings, trans.  Norman Thomas di Giovanni (E.P. Dutton, 1969).

 

[3] The last line borrows from the famous opening passage to D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) - a passage which may well have influenced my thinking more than any other passage in any other novel.    

 

[4] And nor, sadly, do I have the letter from Tony Juniper, then at Friends of the Earth, who agreed to write a foreword to the book, after I had promised that a percentage of any monies that it might make from sales would be donated to FoE and/or other green organisations and causes.  

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Won't it be Strange -?, Pansies (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1929), p. 23. 

 

[6] Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Pengun Books, 1998), p. 31. 

      Probably I would be a little more cautious about writing this tale today, in light of what we now know concerning Foucault and the sexual exploitation of minors. See the post dated 9 January 2021 in which I discuss this problematic issue with reference to Foucault and Gabriel Matzneff: click here. 

      And see the post of 11 June 2021 on child sexual abuse accomodation syndrome with reference to the case of Norman Douglas and Eric Wolton: click here.     

 

[7] A tale inspired by a scene in D. H. Lawrence's novella St. Mawr (1925); see p. 108 of the Cambridge University Press edition - published as St. Mawr and Other Stories - ed. Brian Finney (1983). 

 

 

Re-entering the Circle of Fragments

Self-portrait used for cover of The Circle of Fragments 

(Blind Cupid Press, 2010)

 

 

I. 

 

The final book I published with Blind Cupid Press in 2010 [1] was a collection of little poems [2] written in the period 2000-09.

 

The title of the work - The Circle of Fragments - and, to some extent, the style of the pieces themselves, was inspired by the following lines written by Roland Barthes: 

 

"To write by fragments: the fragments are then so many stones on the perimeter of a circle: I spread myself around: my whole little universe in crumbs; at the centre, what?" [3]  

 

"The fragment ... implies an immediate delight: it is a fantasy of discourse, a gaping of desire. In the form of the thought-sentence, the germ of the fragment comes to you anywhere: in the café, on the train, talking to a friend ..." [4]  

 

What I wrote in a very short preface to the book is even more true now than then: along with a few broken bones and some shards of shattered glass, these leftover fragments - written between Barcelona and Berlin, Aberdeen and Athens - are pretty much all that remain from this period of my life.  

 

And so, it was amusing to recently re-enter le cercle des fragments and look back at what they captured (and, just as importantly, what they missed or failed to capture).    

 

 

II.

 

Obviously, I cannot reproduce all 112 of the fragments, although readers will find a number of them scattered here and there on Torpedo the Ark if they search the index closely enough (or click on those titles below that conveniently come with a link). 

 

However, I thought it might be instructive to provide a full list of titles [5] in the hope that they will provide a clue of sorts as to the content, theme, mood, and tone of the anthology:

 

Sea-Bitch, German Sea-Cow, Sun-Lizard-Rock, Love Remains the Great Adventure, In the Land of Convalescence, Underground with all the World, Death Chant, Sitges, Post-Coital Disappointment, At the Anchovy Museum (Collioure), Mosquito, Black Holes, The Holy Life, One Should Not Apologise Oneself Out of Existence Simply to Please Her, The Sorrow of an Invisible Man, The Bitterness of a Domesticated Man, The Woman Who Was Jealous of the World, Idiota, At the Funeral of a Domesticated Man, Lolita, In Memory of Anaïs Nin, In Memory of Henry Miller, The Birthday Cake, On the Other Side, Blanes, Song of a Discontented Man, When You Are Dead, In the Bookshop, Yolanda, In Becoming a Subject of the Sun, Lemon Drizzle, The Taormina Virgins, Un relation privilégiée, Phallic Defiance on Ward H2, In Memory of Friedrich Nietzsche, Filthy Love (In Memory of Georges Bataille), Diary Fragment, Hakenkreuz, Her Cunt, Supposing Truth to be a Woman, Life Bleeds, At the Party, Spinster (In Memory of Sylvia Plath), Flightpath, In Memory of Marinetti, Under Erasure, Haecceity, In Memory of the Divine One, The Three Consolations, Baby on the Bus, Aberdeen, Miracle, Tear Drops, Polarity, Confession of a White Widowed Male, Being and Nothingness, The Boring Dead, Little Greek, Flow, Becoming-Flower, Promises Promises, Fucked-Up, Crab-Like, Pa amb Tomaquet, Sandals, Floratopia, Fox, We Do Not Have Souls, September, In This Life, Posthumous Hope, Decree Nisi, Dawn, Image, Thomas, Mark, In Kissing Liberty, Odysseus, With the Coming of the Sun and the Rising of the Moon I Think of Her, Dawn Chorus, Conflicted Morality and Desire, Seven Fragments of Glass: I: Crash! II: In the Confrontation with Glass III: At the Hospital in Athens IV: Poppies V: The Vengeance of Objects VI: On Which Side is Wonderland? VII: I Love Everything That Flows, This is not a Love Song, Love, What She Should Tell Him, Tears, The Danger, Gifts, Self-Sacrifice, The Hired Hand, Snippets, Death Sentence, Lost Crows, We’re a Long Way From Wuthering Heights, Breast Relief for a Dying God, Little Miss Microbe, Reflections on the Abolition of Slavery, Regents Park, Cockroach, Caliban, If the World Were Caring, The Tour Guide, Roses in April, Abandoned, Baby Fingers, Negritude, Rats, Beige, Zurüchgeblieben, Aufklärung.   

 

 

III. 

 

Looking back, I still think many of these little poems sparkle in an amusing manner (even if the world at the time did not agree) and I regard them with similar affection as D. H. Lawrence regarded his own collection of fragments, which he called Pansies.

 

Better, says Lawence, to offer a simple thought which "comes as much from the heart and the genitals as from the head" [6], than present clever ideas and opinions - or didactic statements - dressed up in lyrical form. 

 

And this passage from Lawrence re his book of pensées perfectly expresses how I felt about The Circle of Fragments: 

 

"I do not want to offer this little book as a candidate for eternity in the ranks of immortal literature. It is [...] a book of today, and if it is a book of tomorrow, well and good. But I hope that on the third day, it will have gone to sleep, and become forgotten. Immortal literature dragging itself out to a repetitional eternity can be a great nuisance, and a block to anything fresh." [7] 

      

   

Notes

 

[1] There were seven Blind Cupid Press books published in 2010. The other six titles were:  

 

Whore's Don't Fuck Between the Bedsheets: Fragments from an Illicit Lover's Discourse 

Outside the Gate: Nietzsche's Project of Revaluation Mediated Via the Work of D. H. Lawrence

Visions of Excess and Other Essays

The Treadwell's Papers Volumes I & II: Sex/Magic and Thanatology

The Treadwell's Papers Volumes III & IV: Zoophilia and Reflections Beneath a Black Sun

Erotomania and Other Essays

[2] As will become clear, I primarily think of the pieces as fragments, though often in the past I described them as little poems, even if that's a problematic term both for me and for my critics who insist that they lack the rhythymic language and richness of imagery that defines the art of poetry. Some have suggested that they might, at a push, be called aphorisms, but, again, I'd be weary of using that term; the fragments may be short and observational, but I'm not sure they embody any form of wisdom or truth. 

 

[3] Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Papermac, 1995), pp. 92-93.

 

[4] Ibid., p. 94.  

  

[5] I'm one of those writers to whom titles matter. Indeed, I sometimes dream of the perfect title that would make the text redundant. Probably this is why I was once told that I'm not a serious writer or thinker, but, rather, a sloganeer or a comedian addicted to certain catchphrases and for whom everything is ultimately just a set up for a punchline. 

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Introduction to Pansies, Appendix 6, The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 663. 

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Unused Foreword to Pansies, Appendix 7, The Poems, Vol. I ... p. 667.   

 

 

Gilles Deleuze on D. H. Lawrence's Three Manners of Relating to the Sun

Enculage (A Portrait of Deleuze and D. H. Lawrence) 

(SA/2025) [1]

  

'Men should group themselves into a new order of sun-men ... 

walking each in his own sun glory, with bright legs and uncringing buttocks' [2]

 

 

I.

 

The first thing to say is that Deleuze's writing is not always easy to understand. 

 

Even the Google AI assistant admits that his work is difficult due to its density and the fact that he employs highly specialised language, makes numerous obscure references to other philosophers and disciplines, and rarely bothers to explain himself to the reader who is left to think through his esoteric concepts as best they can (filling in gaps and making vital connections as they go).   

 

However, as with other French thinkers of his generation, I think one is rewarded if one only makes the effort and puts the time in to read Deleuze, carefully, and with a certain generosity of spirit. Of course there will be times when he'll make you roll your eyes or sigh with exasperation, but so too will there be moments of joy and revelation.  

 

 

II. 

 

From November 1980 to March 1981, Deleuze gave a lecture-seminar series entitled Spinoza: The Velocities of Thought. 

 

In the 14th of these seminars (there were fifteen in total), he discusses the two definitions of the body given us by Spinoza: one concerned with the relation of movement (i.e., the kinetic understanding of the body) and one concerned with the power of being affected (i.e., the dynamic understanding of the body) [3]. 

 

Half way through the seminar, however, Deleuze digresses in order to consider writers and artists who share an obsession with the sun and asks how their solar-infused thinking might connect to the work of Spinoza. 

 

One of these writers is D. H. Lawrence and it's Deleuze's remarks on Lawrence - someone he names along with Nietzsche, Kafka, and Artaud as a true heir to Spinoza (whether he knows it or not) - that most interest me here ...

 

 

III. 

 

According to Deleuze, the body is composed not so much of organs, but of an infinity of extensive parts: 

 

"These extensive parts belong to me according to a certain relation, but these extensive parts are perpetually subject to the influence of other parts which act upon them, and which don't belong to me."

 

So, to give a rudimentary example, skin is something Deleuze considers his and which forms an important part of his body. But the solar energetic particles that act as heat upon his skin are external forces. Skin cells might act "according to a certain relation that is precisely characteristic" of his body, but SEPs "have no other law than the law of external determinations". 

 

Whenever one exclaims 'I'm hot!' one is admitting that an external body (the sun) acts on one's own body. To perceive that one's skin is beginning to burn is to become conscious of the fact that one inhabits a universe that is not mind dependent or under human control (and that one really should've applied some additional sunscreen).   

 

Okay: so far, so straightforward; but also, so what? 

 

Well, according to Deleuze, this example allows us to gain a concrete understanding of what is meant by pantheism - a concept found not just in the work of Spinoza, but also in the writings of D. H. Lawrence; an author who "constituted for himself a kind of English pantheism" and promoted his own form of sun-worship [4]. 

 

Deleuze wants to know how sun-loving pantheists like Lawrence live and feel and he posits that there are, "generally speaking, three ways of being in relation to the sun" ... 

 

 

IV.

 

Firstly, there's the wrong way: the way of the majority of modern holidaymakers. Those whom Lawrence thinks vulgar and contemptible; those who lie naked like pigs on fashionable beaches: 

 

"He finds that these people live poorly. There you have his idea. It was also Spinoza's idea that people live poorly, and if they are wicked, it's because they live poorly; fine. They live poorly, they dump themselves onto the beach, and they understand nothing about the sun. If they were to understand something about the sun, after all, says Lawrence, they would come out of it more intelligent and improved." 

 

As soon as they put their clothes back on, they are as grey and as filled with bitterness as before; "they lose nothing of their virtues and vices". Essentially, they remain at the most basic and naive level of knowledge and think of the sun as no more than some kind of tanning machine in the sky; or something that "makes the thermometer rise!" [5].      

 

 

V.

 

The second manner of relating to the sun is one that is a bit more knowledgeable, though not merely in a theoretical or abstract sense; these people have a "practical comprehension of the sun" and, at the same time, they know how to compose the relations of their body in greater relation to the sun.   

 

Such a person might be a 19th-century still life painter who goes out into nature:

 

"He has his easel; this is a certain relation. He has his canvas on the easel; this is another relation. There is the sun, and the sun does not remain immobile. Fine, so what is he going to do? What is it that I’m calling this knowledge of the second kind? He will completely change the position of his easel; that is, he is not going to have the same relation to his canvas depending on whether the sun is high, or the sun is about to set." 

 

Van Gogh is a good example of such (even if he was eventually driven a little crazy by the sun) [6]. 

 

It was by being out in the elements and by lying on the ground in order to get just the right angle to paint the setting sun that Vincent learnt how to compose relations and raise himself to "a certain comprehension of causes". And it was only at that point that he could begin to describe himself as a sun-lover (i.e., one posessing a genuine affinity with the sun, even if it leads to madness). 

 

This is the second kind of knowledge; a completely different state from the one in which the holidaymaker tans his hide in the sun:

 

"Here, at the second level, there is already a kind of communion with the sun. Peruse Van Gogh's letters; it's obvious that when he is painting these huge red suns, it's obvious that this is what he is. Not that the sun is brought down to him; it's he who begins to enter into a kind of communication with the sun."

 

 

VI. 

 

And what about the third manner of relating to the sun and the third kind of solar knowledge?

 

It's here that Deleuze turns to Lawrence's poetry and fiction in which the sun plays a central role and there is what might be called in abstract terms "a mystical union" between man and sun.  

 

For Deleuze, this union with the sun is not a religious metaphor and nor is it a question of identification, even if it allows one to affirm the sun as God and to become a sun-man or sun-woman, opening like a flower before the sun and able to announce: 

 

I am that I am

from the sun,

and people are not my measure. [7]  

 

Deleuze notes that only when one attains this third kind of knowledge, does one arrive at this mode of intrinsic distinction. And as a result of this: "the rays by which the sun affects me are the rays by which I affect myself, and the rays by which I affect myself are the rays of the sun that affect me". 

 

In other words, it's a game of solar auto-affection - not identification; "the internal distinction between his own singular essence, the singular essence of the sun, and the essence of the world" is maintained in Lawrence's work. 

 

Reading Lawrence's late texts on the sun, Deleuze informs his students, "can trigger an understanding of Spinoza that you would never have had if you had stayed solely with Spinoza". Which is why, of course, in order to understand any philosopher - not just Spinoza - one needs to read literature and study art and "accumulate a thousand other things as well that have value by themselves".      

 

VII.

 

And so, in sum ...

 

Van Gogh has unique experience with the sun, as proved by his paintings; and from Lawrence's writings we learn that he too had "a special involvement with the sun" (one that we might describe as  libidinal paganism).     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Deleuze uses the term enculage to describe his preferred method of engaging with other authors. This is usually translated into English as buggery, though I think I would use the more contemporary-sounding (if more vulgar) assfucking:  

      "I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important to me to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed." 

      Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans, Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 6. 

 

[2] Lines from Lawrence's poem 'Sun-Men', in Pansies (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1929), pp. 149-150. 

      I thought they not only anticipated the text to follow, but also related to the sun-drenched portrait of Deleuze and Lawrence above, bearing in mind the title (explained in note 1 above) and Lawrence's use of the phrase uncringing buttocks.

 

[3] Gilles Deleuze, 'Spinoza: The Velocities of Thought' (Session 14, 24 March 1981), transcribed by Sandra Tomassi and Madeleine Manifacier, augmented by Charles J. Stivale, English translation by Timothy S. Murphy (for Web Deleuze); augmented by Charles J. Stivale. 

      All quotations from Deleuze in this post are from this work as it appears online. Click here to read courtesy of The Deleuze Seminars project, which aims to translate into English Deleuze's seminar-lectures given at the University of Paris 8 at Vincennes/St. Denis, between 1971 and 1987, and to make them freely available.     

 

[4] See my essay 'Sun-Fucked', which is available to read on James Walker's Digital Pilgrimage website under the title 'Sun-Struck: On the Question of Solar Sexuality and Speculative Realism in D. H. Lawrence' (14 Jan 2019): click here. 

      For those who don't fancy such a long read may prefer to see the two short posts published on Torpedo the Ark extracted from the above essay: click here and here.

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Oh wonderful machine!', in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 554. 

 

[6] See the post written on Van Gogh's ear and the dangers of sun-gazing (25 Jan 2014): click here.  

[7] See the poem 'Aristocracy of the Sun', by D. H. lawrence, in Pansies (1929), p. 152.