Argonauts

Lorenzo Costa: The Argo

(detail of a panel painting c. 1480–90) 

Civic Museum, Padua, Italy

 

 

I. 

 

As everybody knows, the Ἀργοναῦται were the heroic crew aboard the good ship Argo who, sometime before the Trojan War kicked off, accompanied Jason on his quest to find the Golden Fleece, protected by the goddess Hera.  

 

Whether there is any historical basis to this ancient Greek myth - or whether it was pure fiction - is debatable, but hardly important. It remains, factual or not, central within the Western cultural imagination and, in the modern world, the term argonaut refers to anyone engaged in any kind of quest of discovery ...

 

 

II.       

 

For Nietzsche, a philosophical argonaut was one who continually sought out what he terms die große Gesundheit - that is to say, a form of well-being way beyond the bourgeois model of good health we've been given and endlessly told we have to protect; a form of well-being that doesn't make us superhuman, but, on the contrary, allows us to conceive of that which lies overman. 

 

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche describes this new and greater type of health as "more seasoned, tougher, more audacious, and gayer than any previous health" [1] and he argues that anyone who wishes like an artist-philosopher to experience every desire and sail round the dangerous coastal regions of the soul, needs this great health above all else.    

Argonauts of the spirit, who stand divinely apart from others and who "with more daring than is prudent" risk disastrous shipwrecks, will eventually come upon "an as yet undiscovered country whose boundaries nobody has surveyed [...] a world so overrich in what is beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine" that to return home no longer holds the slightest attraction.

 

 

III.

 

In 2015, the genre-defying American writer Maggie Nelson published her award-winning and best-selling book The Argonauts; a series of autotheoretical reflections on desire, identity, family, etc.

 

For Nelson, the term refers to one who sets out to explore (in a quasi-Barthesian manner [2]) the possibilities (and limitations) of love and language and she discusses in detail her relationship with the transgender artist Harry Dodge, with whom she lives in Los Angeles. 

 

This queering of the term Argonaut is certainly an interesting development and one wonders what Apollonius would have made of it ...? 

 

Of course, as almost nothing is known about this ancient Greek author who composed the epic poem about Jason and his quest to locate the Golden Fleece in the 3rd century BC - the Argonautika - it's impossible to answer this question. 

 

However, as Apollonius was clearly interested in the pathology of love, I'm fairly confident he'd approve of Nelson's "always questioning, sometimes wonderfully lyrical" [3] attempt to document the series of bodily experiments she and Harry engage in in order to construct a happy and rewarding life [4]. He might even recognise Nelson's book as belonging to a classical genre of literature that deals with queer phenomena: paradoxography. 

 

The literary critic and cultural historian Lara Feigel rightly identifies the question that haunts Nelson's book; namely, can a love that claims to be radically-other or queer unfold within a conventional domestic setting? Or, to put it another way: can one be a sexually and socially transgressive Argonaut and also a regular mom?

 

Although she attempts to get round this by insisting that "queerness can hold together forms of strangeness that have nothing to do with sexual orientation" [5], Nelson remains "conscious of the dangers of 'homonormativity' [...] and aware that the more the state opens its institutions to the LGBTQ world, the less that world will "'be able to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe'" [6].

 

Perhaps that's the ultimate sign of the Argonaut: someone who wants the best of both worlds; someone who thinks it reasonable to demand the impossible ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Die Fröliche Wissenschaft (1887), V. 382. I am using the English translation by Walter Kaufmann published as The Gay Science (Vintage Books, 1974). See pp. 346-347. Lines quoted here are on p. 346. 

[2] According to Nelson, the title is a reference to Barthes's idea that two people in a long-term love affair have to continually renew things without changing the form of their relationship - i.e., a bit like the Argonauts had to gradually replace each piece of their ship. Nelson expresses her surprise and joy at the manner in which love can be forever renewed. 

      See the sections Le vaisseau Argo and Le travail du mot in Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Papermac, 1995), pp. 46 and 114. 

 

[3] Lara Feigel ...'The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson review - a radical approach to genre and gender' The Guardian (27 March 2016): click here. 

 

[4] Whilst Maggie busies herself becoming pregnant with a sperm donor, Harry undergoes a bilateral mastectomy and begins taking testosterone. 

 

[5-6]  Lara Feigel ... op. cit. 

 

 

Fot a follow up post to this one - on board the Ship of Theseus with Melissa Mesku - click here. 

 

I am grateful to Maria Karouso whose blog post on the Greek poet Seferis and mythic history inspired this one: click here. 

Eye of the Tiger

Thou hast no speculation in those eyes ...[1]

 

 

It's disconcerting enough when Phoevos the cat sits and stares at me, particulary if naked like Derrida [2], so it must be almost unimaginably awkward (and significantly more frightening) to be caught in the gaze of a tiger ...

 

I'm told that thanks to a mirror-like structure behind the retina called the tapetum lucidum their night vision is far superior to ours, but that they don't see such a wide range of colours. It's movement that catches their attention and shape that they focus on; not hues, tints, and tones. But then, tigers are primarly concerned with stalking prey, not admiring the chromatic splendour of their environment. 

 

According to D. H. Lawrence, who knows a good few things on the subject of animal vision, the tiger is, in a sense, almost blind to the rest of the world, absorbed as it is in its own fullness of being:

 

"The eyes of the tiger cannot see, except with the light from within itself, by the light of its own desire. Its own white, cold light is so fierce that the other warm light of the day is outshone, it is not, it does not exist. So the white eyes of the tiger gleam to a point of concentrated vision, upon that which does not exist. Hence its terrifying sightlessness." [3]   

 

The tiger, inasmuch as it sees us at all, sees nothing but a rather insubstantial meal. The superior being which we like to think we are, is rendered null and void; we are almost hollow in his eyes, like animated scarecrows, or, at best, creatures that have lost their healthy animal reason [4]:

"It can only see of me that which it knows I am, a scent, a resistance, a voluptuous solid, a struggling warm violence that it holds overcome, a running of hot blood between its teeth, a delicious pang of live flesh in the mouth. This it sees. The rest is not." [5]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 3, scene 4, line 94.

 

[2] See Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (Fordham University Press, 2008). 

      In this work, Derrida discusses his experience of being stared at by his cat, Logos, whilst undressed. He describes a sense of discomfort - even shame - of being gazed upon in his all too human nakedness and all too naked humanity. 

      See also the post on TTA dated 5 Jan 2018 entitled 'When I Play With My Cat ... (Notes Towards a Feline Philosophy)': click here.  

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 118.

 

[4] I'm thinking here of a famous section in Nietzsche's, The Gay Science (III. 224), where he writes: 

      "I fear that the animals consider man as a being like themselves that has lost in a most dangerous way its sound animal common sense; they consider him the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal." 

      This is Walter Kaufmann's translation of the original German text (Vintage Books, 1974), p. 211. 

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy ... p. 118.

      Readers interested in what else Lawrence writes about tigers, might like to see the post on TTA dated 4 Oct 2023: click here. Although not one of Lawrence's totemic animals, nevertheless the tiger often appears within his work and held an important place in his philosophical imagination as one of the great realities of reality; i.e., a living thing that has come into its own fullness of being.

Meine Rosen

Meine Rosen (SA / 2024)

 

 

I. 

 

As is well known, Zarathustra often speaks cryptically.

 

Take the following sentence, for example, spoken when, walking through the forest with his disciples one evening, he came to a clearing where lovely maidens were dancing. Attempting to reassure the young women that he meant them no harm, he first praises their light-footedness before adding: 

 

'I am a forest and a night of dark trees: but she who is not afraid of my darkness will discover a bed of roses ...' [1]

What does that mean? 

 

It sounds like a rather elaborate chat-up line to me; i.e., a remark made both to initiate conversation and signal sexual interest. Of course, Zarathustra being Zarathustra, he can't help also displaying his intelligence and poetic sensibility (even as he openly admires the bare feet and fine ankles of the girls to whom he speaks).

 

 

II.

As Zarathustra is essentially Nietzsche's fictional mouthpiece, it's not surprising that the latter also liked to speak with pride about his roses ... 

 

Thus, in the poetic prelude to The Gay Science entitled 'Joke, Cunning, and Revenge' [2], Nietzsche includes a verse entitled Meine Rosen, which also combines the idea of rosy happiness or the promise of joy, with something a bit darker, a bit pervier, a bit more "malice-laden" as one translator has it [3].   

 

Below is my version of the poem; not exactly a translation, more a (somewhat prosified) reimagining, which, nevertheless, I think manages to make Nietzsche's point that those who want to find love and happiness - particularly as he understands these things - have to struggle and be prepared to take risks (i.e., engage in something that some might think of as edge play).

My Roses

 

Of course my happiness wishes to infect you - 

All joy is contagious! 

But if you'd like to smell my roses

 

You'll have to scramble first over rocky ledges

and cut through tangled thorny hedges,

pricking your tiny finger tips!

For my joy - it loves cruel teasing!

For my joy - it loves displeasing!    

Do you still want to pick my roses?

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II. 32.

[2] Nietzsche borrows this title from a libretto by Goethe: 'Scherz, List, und Rache'. Although the work was written in the 1780s (and published by the author in 1790), it was not set to music until 1881, when Nietzsche's young friend Peter Gast (Heinrich Köselitz) decided to undertake the task.

 

[3] I'm referring to Adrian Del Caro, whose translation of Nietzsche's poems in 'Joke, Cunning, and Revenge' can be found in the 2001 Cambridge edition of The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff. 

      Del Caro attempts to stay as closely as he can to the rhyme scheme (and rhythm) of the German; readers can decide if succeeds (or not) in the case of Meine Rosen by turning to p. 13 of the above text. For an alternative translation, see Kaufmann's effort - conveniently placed alongside the German original - in The Gay Science (Vintage books, 1974), pp. 44-45. 

 

The Grievance Collector

 

Unfortunately, there's a personality type in the world known as a grievance collector ... [1]

 

The grievance collector remembers every detail of every last slight or misfortune they have suffered (even those that have a purely imaginary origin) and they know precisely who to blame. 

 

Having zero self-awareness, they never stop to consider for one moment that their own venomous nature and toxic behaviour might be responsible for the anger and resentment they feel; they always look to hold others accountable. 

 

The grievance collector doesn't forgive, doesn't forget and never moves on; they wallow in their own victimhood (or stew in their own juices, as my mother would say) and sincerely believe themselves to be, like Lear, "more sinned against than sinning" [2]. 

 

The grievance collector rarely changes their mind; being skilled at the wilful misinterpretation of events and the rejection of evidence that challenges their pre-existing beliefs and opinions, they are confirmed in their own self-righteous bubble of bias and bullshit. 

 

This makes the grievance collector not only contemptuous of others, but wise in their own conceit. Which, in turn, causes them to develop maladaptive patterns of thought and behaviour that disrupt interpersonal relationships. It's not easy being friends with - or a sibling to - someone to whom you can never apologise enough.  

 

Although they mostly stay silent and brood, sometimes the grievance collector can become verbally abusive. And sometimes they will allow their animosity to bubble over into an act of actual violence - the will to revenge motivates them more than a desire to simply right wrongs [3].

Perhaps not surprisingly, if the grievance collector also subscribes to an extreme political or religious ideology, they will often become attracted to terrorism or serial killing. As one expert in this field writes: 

 

"When irrationality, antagonism, and rigidity combine with unyielding overconfidence in their own sentiments, and beliefs go unchecked or are not attenuated, these individuals become metastable - ready to ignite and explode." [4]

 

What then is the best thing to do when confronted by these human tarantulas and time-bombs?

 

Should we lend them a sympathetic ear and attempt to listen more closely to their complaints? I don't think that will make a whole lot of difference, to be honest. 

 

Should we, then, declare war against them; pass judgement and seek to punish or ridicule? Again, I don't think that will help.

 

Probably best we learn from Nietzsche and simply look away ... [5]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I prefer the phrase grievance collector to wound collector, but I'm aware that whilst the latter is often used synonymously with the former, some authors insist on a distinction. In brief, whilst the grievance collector is seen as weighed down or burdened by all the emotional baggage they carry with them, the wound collector is thought of as suffering from a far more profoundly morbid pathology; someone who likes to inflict actual psychological self-harm and, like Jesus, display their injuries.

 

[2] See Shakespeare's King Lear, Act 3, scene 2.  

 

[3] As Nietzsche says: "No one accuses without an underlying notion of punishment and revenge [...] All complaint is accusation [...] we always make some one responsible." See Human, All Too Human, Vol. II. Pt. 1: 'Assorted Opinions and Maxims', 78.

 

[4] See Joe Navarro, 'On Wound Collectors', in Psychology Today (6 Sept 2015): click here to read online. 

 

[5] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book IV, §276 where he writes: "I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation."

 

 

Why the Reformation of Manners is No Laughing Matter

Charles Penrose 

The Laughing Policeman (1922) [1]

 

 "A fool lifteth up his voice with laughter; but a wise man doth scarce smile a little."

(Ecclesiasticus, 21:20)   

 

 

I. 

 

As I made clear in a post published back in June 2014, if there's one thing I hate to see it's people clapping like trained seals hoping for a fish to be thrown their way: click here. 

 

Similarly, if there's one thing I hate to hear, it's the disagreeable sound of people laughing; loudly, publicly, and shamelessly. Unfortunately, this meant my career as a stand-up comedian was extremely short-lived.

 

 

II. 

 

A friend who trained as a psychotherapist, once tried to convince me I was suffering from gelotophobia. But I never quite accepted this explanation rooted in a pathological fear of appearing ridiculous to others. 

 

For it was more that I found the sight and sound of human beings laughing slightly obscene; not so much an audible expression of joy, but an indicator of our own fallen condition as a species. That's probably why the following remark by Nietzsche immediately struck a chord with me: 

 

"I fear that the animals consider man as a being of their own kind which has, in a fatal fashion, lost its sound animal reason - as the mad animal, the laughing animal ... [2]

 

And it's why the following passage from one of Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son, also delights and is worth quoting at length:

 

"Having mentioned laughing, I must particularly warn you against it: and I could heartily wish, that you may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live. Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill-manners; it is the manner in which the mob express their silly joy at silly things; and they call it being merry. In my mind there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter. True wit, or sense, never yet made anybody laugh; they are above it: they please the mind, and give a cheerfulness to the countenance. But it is low buffoonery, or silly accident, that always excite laughter, and that is what people of sense and breeding should show themselves above. [...] Laughter is easily restrained by a very little reflection; but as it is generally connected with the idea of gaiety, people do not enough attend to absurdity. I am neither of a melancholy nor a cynical disposition, and am as willing and as apt to be pleased as anybody; but I am sure that since I have had the full use of my reason nobody has ever heard me laugh." [3]   

 

Interested as I am in a reformation of manners, it seems to me that emotional restraint is indeed a crucial characteristic of polite behaviour. In other words, etiquette, as a form of discipline and breeding, is no laughing matter and you can't be both gentleman and clown.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Charles Penrose (1873-1952) was an English music hall performer and, later, a radio comedian, best known for his comic song 'The Laughing Policeman' (1922), which sold over a million copies and was still popular even when I was child in the 1970s - much to my irritation. Readers unfamiliar with the song - or those who might wish to refamiliarise themselves - can click here.

 

[2] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, III. 224. 

 

[3] Lord Chesterfield, Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman, (1774), Letter XXXII, dated March 9 O. S. 1748. Click here to read online as a Project Gutenberg ebook. 

      For an interesting discussion of 'Chesterfield and the Anti-Laughter Tradition', see Virgil B. Heltzel's essay of this title in Modern Philology, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Aug., 1928), pp. 73-90. Click here to access on JSTOR.

      As Heltzel reminds us, many ancient Greek philosophers - including Plato - aligned themselves against excessive displays of emotion and raucous laughter. For the key thing when it comes to decorum is learning how to curb your enthusiasm.    

For a contrasting view to the one expressed here - in which I encourage readers to learn to laugh at everything - see the post dated 9 Feb 2019: click here. 

 

 

For an earlier post on the reformation of manners, click here.

Into the Valley of the Giants with Gilbert Noon

 

Georgia O'Keeffe: Black Hills with Cedar (1941)

Oil on canvas (16 x 30 in.)

 

 

Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being, says Nietzsche [1]. And let us be doubly cautious about assigning it with a gender and speaking as if the body of the earth and the body of woman were one and the same thing. 

 

Having said that, I was guilty of doing precisely this in my misspent pagan youth. But now I don't much care for anthropomorphic metaphors of Mother Earth which stress her life-giving and nurturing aspects, particularly when tied to a spiritual ecofeminism and/or left-leaning green politics. 

 

I'm also no longer so keen on those attempts by ecosexuals and nature fetishists to think of the earth in erotic terms - as something one shouldn't merely worship and revere, but fuck [2]. Perhaps that's why the following paragraph from D. H. Lawrence's unfinished novel Mr Noon (1984) struck a chord:

 

"The valley began to depress him. The great slopes shelving upwards, far overhead: the sudden dark, hairy ravines in which he was trapped: all made him feel he was caught, shut in down below there. He felt tiny, like a dwarf among the great thighs and ravines of the mountains. There is a Baudelaire poem which tells of Nature, like a vast woman lying spread, and man, a tiny insect, creeping between her knees and under her thighs, fascinated. Gilbert felt a powerful revulsion against the great slopes and particularly against the tree-dark hairy ravines in which he was caught." [3] 

 

Some critics see this passage as evidence of Lawrence's misogyny, although I would argue that Gilbert Noon's reaction might better be described as gynophobic, rather than misogynistic; i.e., an irrational fear of (being engulfed within) the female body, rather than a learned dislike for and contempt of women per se.   

 

What it does tell us for sure is that, whatever other kinks Mr Noon may have, he's not a macrophile and doesn't - unlike Baudelaire - entertain sexual fantasies involving a giantess [4]; or, if unconsciously he does harbour such thoughts, then these clearly disturb him and he does what he can to repress them.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book III, §109.  

[2] See: 'On Ecosexuality' (6 Nov 2016): click here.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Mr Noon, ed. Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 251. 

      Gilbert Noon isn't the only Lawrence protagonist to resent being belittled by landscape; see my post on the case of Alexander Hepburn and his orophobia from Nov 2017: click here.

[4] I discuss macrophilia in a post dated 23 July 2019, entitled 'Bigging Up the Gibson Girl': click here. 

      The poem by Charles Baudelaire referred to is 'La Géante', in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857): click here.       

      Interestingly, although Baudelaire fantasises about living at the feet of a giantess, crawling on her enormous knees, enjoying her curves, and sleeping in the shade cast by her breasts, he doesn't actually speak of creeping between her knees and thighs - and so towards the hairy ravine of her cunt - as Lawrence (perhaps tellingly) misremembers. 

      However, it could be - as Lindeth Vasey suggests - that Lawrence is thinking of Tolstoi's description of a landowner's dream, involving a landscape that is transformed into the body of a giant woman: 'The old man dreamt that he was standing between the woman's legs, in front of him a deep, dark ravine, which sucked him in ...' See the explanatory note 251:37 on p. 328 of Mr Noon (CUP, 1984).       

 

On Nietzsche and the Precariat

 Joan Priego: Contortionist  [1]

 

When Nietzsche suggested that the secret to a fulfilled and happy life was to live dangerously [2], I don't think that what he had in mind was people agreeing to zero-hour contracts, for example, and becoming part of the precariat ... [3]

 

For those of you who are unfamilar with the term, the precariat refers to a new social class made up of workers in non-standard and/or temporary employment that is often poorly paid and affords no rights, protections, or security. 

 

Those neoliberal shits who pretend that such is advantageous to the employee as well as the employer, often speak of flexability rather than precarity, but I think we all know whose needs are best met by this idea and who has to bend over backwards - like a contortionist - just to survive from week to week. 

 

For being flexible doesn't simply mean being willing and able to adapt to change. It also means being prepared to be bent out of shape like a pretzel. In other words, being physically and mentally flexible, means total compliance; one ends up existing in a state of perpetual standby - or on call 24/7 - though without being renumerated for this.   

 

Which, of course, is a form of modern slavery; thus the very opposite of what Nietzsche had in mind ... [4]

 

 

Notes

 

 [1] Spanish sculptor Joan Priego is known for his philosophically-informed works that manipulate (and reimagine) the human body. He is particularly interested in how social, cultural, and economic forces can remake identity; how workers, for example, are required to become ever-more flexible, twisting themselves into knots in order to meet the requirements of the job market.

      The image of the contortionist figure is taken from a post on Priego's blog - Wooden Surface - published on 21 May, 2012: click here. 

      To read an interview with Priego published on the excellent website founded by Tulika Bahadur - onartandaesthetics.com - click here.   

[2] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, IV. 283.    

[3] See Guy Standing, The Precariat, (Bloomsbury, 2011). 

      According to Standing, globalisation is to blame for the emergence of the new social class that he calls the precariat. He describes the latter as formed from several different groups of people, including immigrants and educated youngsters working McJobs. 

      Members of the precariat not only suffer from financial insecurity, but also identity issues and even a disrupted sense of time, due to their working odd hours on different days each week, rather than the nine to five Monday to Friday regime that employees knew in the past.      

      Readers interested in knowing more can find a short paper by Standing entitled 'The Precariat' in Contexts, Vol. 13, Issue 4, (November 2014): click here. Alternatively, see Standing's article on the WEF website entitled 'Meet the precariat, the new global class fuelling the rise of populism', (9 November 2016): click here. 

[4] To be clear on this: when Nietzsche advocates living dangerously, he is addressing those whom he regards as preparatory individuals; i.e., sovereign men and women who will restore honour to courage above all other virtues. Such individuals would refuse to become a tool, or to make themselves perfectly pliable in the hands of others (so probably wouldn't find jobs in today's labour market).   

 

 

On the Splendour of Greco-Sicilian Superficiality

 D. H. Lawrence: Fauns and Nymphs (1927)

  

I. 

 

"Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live: what is needed for that is to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin; to worship appearance, to believe in shapes, tones, words - in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial - out of profundity!" [a]

 

If I had to choose the one passage by Nietzsche that has most significantly shaped my own thinking as a philosopher, both on and off the catwalk, it would be this one. 

 

And, interestingly, despite his onto-theological penchant for indulging in what Nietzsche would characterise as beautiful soul twaddle [b], D. H. Lawrence also seems inspired by this idea of Greek (and Sicilian) superficiality in his 'Introduction to Mastro-don Gesualdo, by Giovanni Verga' [c] ...

II.

 

Regrettably - and unlike Lawrence - I've never lived in Sicily [d], nor even visited this "sun-beaten island whose every outline is like pure memory" [148]. But I'm happy to accept the literary consensus and regard it as a magical location, which provides a clue not only to understanding modern Italy, but also the ancient Mediterranean world. 

 

For according to Lawrence, not only are the Sicilians marked by an ironic fatalism, like the ancient Greeks, but they also lack psychic depth. In other words: 

 

"The Sicilian has no soul, except that funny little naked man who hops on hot bricks, in purgatory, and howls to be prayed into paradise [...] He can't be introspective, because his consciousness, so to speak, doesn't have any inside to it." [151].      

Developing his theme, Lawrence continues:

"The Sicilians today are supposed to be the nearest descendants of the classic Greeks, and the nearest thing to the classic Greeks in life and nature. And perhaps it is true. Like the classic Greeks, the Sicilians have no insides, introspectively speaking." [152] 

 

Unfortunately, however, unlike the classic Greeks, the Sicialians have no external gods. This, for Lawrence at least, is a problem and represents a great loss.

 

Why? Because, says Lawrence, people who live in the sun like flowers - i.e., beautiful but soulless - still need "the bright and busy gods outside" in order to make them feel heroic in the old Homeric sense with "the same easy conscience, the same queer openness [...] and the same ancient astuteness" [152].

 

Whilst the more soulful - more Christian - races of Northern Europe "have got over the old Homeric idea of the hero, by making the hero self-conscious, and a hero by virtue of suffering and awareness of suffering" [151], the Sicilians only feel this sort of thing in short spasms and it is unnatural to them. 

 

In fact, Lawrence concludes, it's pointless to suggest that a Sicilian learn how to develop northern (or Russian) inwardness: "You might as well say the tall and reckless asphodel of Magna Graecia should learn to be a snowdrop." [153]

 

 

III. 

 

Of course, even if the modern Sicilians have lost the bright and busy gods, still they possess the undying beauty of the island itself:

 

"And we must remember that eight-tenths of the population of Sicily is maritime or agricultural [...] and therefore practically the whole day-life of the people passes in the open, in the splendour of the sun  and the landscape, and the delicious, elemental aloneness of the old world. This is a great unconscious compensation. But what a compensation, after all! [...] and you can't read Mastro-don Gesauldo without feeling the marvellous glow and the glamour of Sicily, and the people throbbing inside the glow and the glamour like motes in a sunbeam. [...]

      And perhaps it is because the outside world is so lovely, that men in the Greek regions have never become introspective. They have not been driven to that form of compensation. With them, life pulses outwards, and the positive reality is outside. There is no turning inwards. So man becomes purely objective. And this is what makes the Greeks so difficult to understand: even Socrates." [154]

 

These, then, are the three key words of Greek profundity: superficiality, externality, and objectivity. And these the three key words of the ancient Greek character: singleness, carelessness, dauntlessness [e]. 

 

If you want to become an artist or practice la gaya scienza - if you want to become heroic in the old sense - then you must abandon ideas of salvation or retreating inside yourself in order to twist the soul into knots; instead, concentrate on care of the self as an aesthetic and ethical project that aims for splendour (becoming what Lawrence elsewhere terms an aristocrat of the sun) [f].   

 

Notes

 

[a] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff, (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Preface to the second edition (4), pp. 8-9.  

 

[b] This amusing phrase can be found in note 951 (Spring-Fall 1887) of The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufman, (Vintage Books, 1968), p. 499.  

[c] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Mastro-don Gesualdo, by Giovanni Verga', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 145-156. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the text. Readers are encouraged to also read the two earlier versions of Lawrence's Introduction which appear as Appendices II and III (pp. 369-378 and 379-389). This passage from Version I is particularly Nietzschean-sounding in its vision of the Greeks: 

 

"The Greeks were far more bent on making an audacious, splendid impression than on fulfilling some noble purpose. They loved the splendid look of a thing, the splendid ring of words. Even tragedy was to them a grand gesture, rather than something to mope over. Peak and pine they would not, and unless some Fury pursued them to punish them for their sins, they cared not a straw for sins: their own or anyone else's. 

      As for being burdened with souls, they were not such fools." [376-77]    

[d] Lawrence and his wife Frieda spent two years living in Sicily in the early 1920s, at the Fontana Vecchia, on a hill above Taormina. Like many others before him, including - perhaps most famously - Goethe, Lawrence was captivated not just by the island, but also its people, flora, and fauna and he wrote some of his loveliest poetry on the island. In Version I of his Introduction to Mastro-Don Gesualdo, he confesses: 

 

"Perhaps the deepest nostalgia I have ever felt has been Sicily [...] Not for England or anywhere else - for Sicily, the beautiful, that which goes deepest into the blood. It is so clear, so beautiful, so like the physical beauty of the Greek." [378].     

[e] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction [Version I] to Mastro-Don Gesualdo, by Giovanni Verga', Introductions and Reviews, Appendix II, p. 378.

[f] See the poem 'Aristocracy of the sun', in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 457. See also the related verses 'Sun-men' and 'Sun-women', p. 456.  

On Staying Safe and Living Dangerously in the Age of Coronavirus

Image designed by wearphilosophy

As a Nietzschean, I've been steeped in a courageous philosophy that celebrates the idea of living dangerously. And so, for me, there's nothing more insulting than being instructed by someone in a mask to stay safe.

Not only does such willingness to parrot the government's Covid-19 propaganda display their own cowardice and conformity, it offends the libertarian and Clash City Rocker in me who prefers to stay free above all else and affirm the fact that risk is a crucial component of being.

For those who might not be familiar with Section 283 in Book IV of The Gay Science where Nietzsche advances his idea of gefährlich leben, here are the crucial lines:

"For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is - to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves!"

Although, as Walter Kaufmann notes, this magnificent formulation is found only here in Nietzsche's works, it is one of his most memorable motifs and, arguably, is as central to his philosophy as major concepts such as the overman and eternal recurrence.   

I've no idea how long the coronavirus pandemic will last, but I'm hoping that the time will soon be past when people were content to live socially distanced from one another, hidden behind masks, and obsessed with health and safety to the detriment of everything else. 
 

See: Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), IV: 283, p. 228-29.

Let's Go Outside: Notes on The Horla

Cover of the 1908 edition 

of Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla 

I.

The concept of the Outside is as important to me now as it was twenty-five years ago when I decided to entitle my doctoral project on the work of Nietzsche and Lawrence Outside the Gate, referencing not only one of the little rhyming preludes to The Gay Science, but also the Killing Joke album of that title from 1988. [1]  

I suppose my understanding of the concept has remained fairly consistent over the years; mostly shaped by the occult musings of Richard Somers in Kangaroo (1923) about dark gods and invisible strangers in the night, tapping at the doors of human perception in order to gain admission into our world which we have illuminated with electric light in order to banish the darkness and create the illusion of safety, even though we remain standing on the edge of an invisible abyss. [2] 

That's Foucault I'm paraphrasing and his attempt to think the thought from outside has also been an important influence on my work; a type of thought that stands in contrast to the interiority of most philosophical reflection and the positivity of our scientific knowledge; a type of thought that we find not in mysticism, but in literature - such as in the work of Sade and Hölderlin:

"Can it be said without stretching things that Sade and Hölderlin simultaneously introduced into our thinking, for the coming century, but in some way cryptically, the experience of the outside - the former by laying desire bare in the infinite murmur of discourse, the latter by discovering that the gods had wandered off through a rift in language as it was in the process of losing its bearings?" [3]

I think it probably can - and I think we can say also that Guy de Maupassant is another writer who gives us an experience of the outside in his unsettling short story Le Horla (1886/87) ...

II.

The word Horla is, of course, a neologism coined by Maupassant; an amalgam of the French words hors and là.

Thus, the Horla is literally the one who is out there - always waiting for a chance to enter so that it can steal your milk and water and drive you out of your fucking mind; an alien entity that threatens to overwhelm (and possibly supersede) humanity. Who said the Übermensch couldn't have an extra-terrestrial origin - or come, like a virus, from out of the jungle or Brazilian rainforest?

The 42-year-old victim of the tale has not only been mentally unhinged by his experiences, which started with a strange malaise and a kind of nervous anxiety, but reduced to a pitiful physical state:

"He was extremely thin, cadaverous even, as some madmen look when they are consumed by an obsession. Their bodies seem ravaged by one sick thought which devours them faster than any disease or consumption." [4]

His doctor prescribed cold showers and sedatives and the latter at least helped the man to sleep; unfortunately, sleep turned out to be even more intolerable than the insomnia. He explains why:

"'As soon as my head hit the pillow, my eyes closed and I was out. I mean out completely. I fell into absolute nothingness, a void, a total blank. My self became completely dead until I was suddenly, horribly awoken by the most appalling sensation. An unbearable weight was lying on my chest and another mouth was sucking the life out of me through my own.'" [237]

Obviously, that's not very pleasant and no one would want to experience such a thing. Nor, I suppose, would most people - there are doubtless exceptions - want to see their roses plucked by an invisible hand and sniffed by an invisible nose belonging to an invisible being. I mean, greenfly can be a problem enough as it is.

And to have anyone reading over your shoulder - or absorb your own reflection - is always profoundly irritating, is it not?

The poor man eventually admits himself into the care of an eminent psychiatrist, Dr. Marrande, who overcomes his own professional scepticism and concludes that his patient's experiences with the Horla may well have been all-too-real. He informs his colleagues: "'I cannot tell if this man is mad or whether we both are ... or whether ... man's successor is already in our midst ...'" [244]    

This last idea is one that the man has already developed very eloquently:

"'What is this being, gentlemen?  I believe it is what the earth is waiting for, to supersede humanity, to usurp our throne, to overwhelm and perhaps feed on us as we feed now on cattle and wild boar. We have sensed and dreaded it for centuries. We have heard its approach with terror. Our forefathers have been haunted by the Invisible.
      It has come.'" [243]

Notes

[1] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 'Joke, Cunning, and Revenge: A Prelude in Rhymes', number 57. The original German verse, entitled Wählerischer Geschmack, [Fastidious Taste] reads:   

Wenn man frei mich wählen liesse,
Wählt' ich gern ein Plätzchen mir
Mitten drin im Paradiese:
Gerner noch - vor seiner Tür!

Which we might translate as: When given a free choice, / I'd choose myself a place / in the centre of paradise: / Better still - outside the gates!

To play the title track from the Killing Joke album - digitally remastered in 2007 and provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group in 2015 - click here. 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 285:

"The Lord thy God is the invisible stranger at the gate in the night, knocking. He is the mysterious life-suggestion, tapping for admission. And the wondrous Victorian Age managed to fasten the door so tight, and light up the compound so brilliantly with electric light, there was no outside, it was all in. The Unknown became a joke: is still a joke.
      Yet there it is, outside the gate, getting angry."

[3] Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside, trans. Brian Massumi, (Zone Books, 1987), p. 17.

[4] Guy de Maupassant, 'The Horla', in A Parisian Affair and Other Stories, trans. Siân Miles, (Penguin Books, 2004), p. 236. Following page references are given directly in the text. Note that this is the first version of the tale, published in 1886, and not the longer, more developed version of 1887. 

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. 

Ours Is Essentially a Tragic Age: Notes on the Opening of a Novel

Two female readers of the Penguin edition of 
D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1960)

showing little interest in the opening lines

Lady Chatterley's Lover opens with the following paragraph:

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."

I think it's an opening that deserves to be looked at a little more closely ...


One immediately notes the use by Lawrence of an omniscient third person narrator; one who sees and knows all things in a god-like manner, even the private thoughts and feelings of the characters. As one Nietzschean little girl informed her mother, there's something indecent about this.

One suspects that Lawrence would seek to justify his narrative technique in terms of perfect empathy rather than epistemological transparency, but I still find it questionable that although in this opening paragraph the narrator describes Connie's position in a rather matter-of-fact manner, thereby ironically distancing himself from her, he will later describe things from Connie's perspective in a far more lyrical fashion, as if even her most intimate experiences were also his own and ours as readers.

Thus, whilst we get to see the workings of Clifford's mind, we get to share Connie's orgasm and made fully complicit in her sexual shenanigans. That's what happens when free indirect discourse meets the pornographic imagination - interiority is taken to a perversely material conclusion.   

What I'd like to suggest is that whenever a narrator says ours is we should be on our guard; we certainly shouldn't be lulled into false consensus or made an accessory after the fact. His - and maybe Connie's - may be an essentially tragic age, but it's not compulsory for any reader to subscribe to this belief.

And what does this claim mean anyway, for those of us living in an essentially inessential age that lacks any intrinsic character or indispensable quality? Lawrence would doubtless say that's the nature of our (postmodern) tragedy; that we have no soul or substance and live accidental lives of random contingency. But Lawrence is more of a metaphysician than he often pretends and still clings to the verb to be in all seriousness. 

Essential or otherwise, it seems that the narrator employs the idea of tragedy in a conventional sense; i.e. this is a post-cataclysmic period of great suffering, destruction, downfall etc. But it's important to note that Lawrence is not a tragic writer and, in fact, hates tragedy as usually conceived; thus his refusal to take it tragically.

This saying no to the tragic reception of tragedy is part of Lawrence's admirable attempt to take a great kick at misery and his refusal to wallow in his or anyone else's misfortune. Lawrence despises those who, in his words, are in love with their own defeat; he would be the last person on earth to subscribe to the contemporary cult of victimhood. 

But what is the terrible deluge that is supposed to have happened? Obviously, it's a reference to the Great War. But, as a Nietzschean, I also conceive of this cataclysmic event as the death of God - a tragic but also joyous event that changes everything and creates opportunities to build new little habitats and opens new spaces for thought in which we might also allow ourselves to dream again and form new little hopes.  

Nietzsche famously (and cheerfully) writes of this event in The Gay Science and the rejuvinating effect it has upon free spirits who feel themselves "irradiated as by a new dawn" by the news that God is dead:

"Our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment and expectation. At last the horizon seems open once more, granting even that it is not bright; our ships can at last put out to sea in face of every danger; every hazard is again permitted to the discerner; the sea, our sea, again lies open before us; perhaps never before did such an 'open sea' exist."

Thus, to be among the ruins needn't be thought negatively; needn't oblige one to give in before one starts. Indeed, whilst Lawrence doesn't quite go so far as the Situationists and believe in the ruins, I think he understands their appeal and the fun to be had with fragments - or bits as he calls them in Kangaroo. Indeed, one could read the cataclysm as the collapse of grand narratives and understand the building of new little habitats as the attempt to find more localised, more provisional, more relative truths that aren't coordinated by an ideal of Wholeness or swept up into an Absolute.

Almost one is tempted to suggest that in the following paragraph from Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari are rewriting Lawrence's opening to Lady C. and theoretically expanding upon his thinking on plurality and multiplicities: 

"We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers. We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting for the last one to be turned up, so that they may all be glued back together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original unity. We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. We no longer believe in the dull gray outlines of a dreary, colorless dialectic of evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off their rough edges. We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all of these particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately." 

Finally, we come to the last line: We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. I suppose that's true - even if it's factually not the case. For we could, of course, choose to die; as Gerald chooses to die at the end of Women in Love, rather than accept being broken open once more like Mellors, or voluntarily leave the tomb like the man who died.

And learning how and when to die at the right time is as much an art, requiring just as much courage, as living on regardless of the circumstances and becoming one of those unhappy souls; individuals like Clifford who are afraid to die and fall silent, determined to continue asserting themselves even when they have fallen out of touch with others. 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 5.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 42.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Press, 1974), V. 343, p. 280. 

See also: Catherine Brown, 'Resisting Tragedy: A Report on the International D. H. Lawrence Conference, Paris, 2018', in the D. H. Lawrence Society Newsletter (Winter 2018/19), or click here to read in a pre-edited version on her website.

Interestingly, Dr. Brown argues that Lawrence adopts various literary means and devices in order to resist tragedy, whereas the narrator calls for a refusal - something that those researching this topic might like to consider. As a nihilist, I'm more attracted to a strategy of active negation (refusal) than offering a dialectical form of (often complementary) opposition (resistance): click here for an explanation why.  

Morgenröthe: Nietzsche's Red Dawn

Alicia Dunn: Red Dawn No. 5 (2017)

aliciadunnart.com

I. If Passion Ends in Knowledge then Nietzsche is the Best-Read Man in Town

According to Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's 1881 work Morgenröthe - usually translated into English as Daybreak or Dawn - is the most neglected of all his texts.*

If that's true, then it's a real shame. For it's a brilliant and beautiful book which illustrates how philosophy is, first and foremost, a form of erotics. For what is the pursuit of knowledge if not a passion, suggests Nietzsche; an intense desire to shatter established patterns of thinking and abandon the fears and consoling fictions that have for the greater part of history reduced man to the status of a herd animal.

Nietzsche anticipates "a new dawn in human existence" in which individuals are free to "cultivate their lives in a manner that is conducive to themselves and beneficent to others" [44]. He proposes ways of becoming who one is that involve thinking differently and, just as importantly, thinking critically with regard to the self. It's philosophy as a playful and experimental practice; what he'll term in his next work die fröhliche Wissenschaft.


II. Say Yes to a Single Joy and You Say Yes to All Woe

Nietzsche completed Daybreak in the Italian city of Genoa. He had by this time retired from his professorship at Basel University due to ill health and was living on a very modest annual pension in an unheated garret. His diet was as restricted as his income and consisted mostly of porridge and risotto, followed by more porridge.

Not only did he have to endure extreme cold and isolation, but Nietzsche spent a lot of his time suffering with blinding headaches that lasted for days at a time and caused him to vomit. His only relief was provided by that solitary vice much favoured by Diogenes, but condemned by Kant as an unnatural form of self-abuse. "And yet", writes Ansell-Pearson, "it was under these harsh conditions that he wrote over the course of a year one of his 'sunniest' books" [65].

And this is why one loves Nietzsche: for the fact that he says Yes to life in all circumstances and under any conditions; affirms, in other words, life as an economy of the whole and gives even the most terrible aspects of existence his blessing. It takes an almost inhuman degree of courage to affirm even a single moment or joy, when it's in the knowledge that by so doing we affirm all eternity and every pain, every sadness, every evil.

In sum: Nietzsche constructs a harsh philosophical ethic not only beyond good and evil, but, as Ansell-Pearson argues, beyond solitude and compassion as well; one that rests upon endurance and cruelty. Free-thinking, as he conceives of it, "will, initially at least, plunge people into despair and grief" [111]. But it results at last in happiness and in greatness.

Obviously, this isn't a philosophy that everyone might choose to live by, or be capable of living by: 

"I think it is clear, both from hints he gives in Dawn and says in other texts, that Nietzsche thinks the tasks of free-spirited thinking are ones reserved, and perhaps best reserved, for a few individuals who will constitute what we might choose to call a moral (or 'immoral') avant-garde." [112]


*Note: Ansell-Pearson reminds us that the original German title literally means 'morning redness' and specifies "the precise but fleeting moment at which the sky is aflame with colour and before the red yields to the customary blue or grey. It suggests a time of possibility, invention, inspiration and renewal, in which the freshness of the day augurs a new way of life." [67] 

See: 

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2018). All page numbers given in square brackets refer to this book. 

Nietzsche, Dawn: Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality, trans. Brittain Smith, (Stanford University Press, 2011).