Seven Little Geese and One Little Greek

Seven Baby Geese

 Raphael Park, (May 2024)

 

 

Watching Maria interact with seven recently hatched goslings in the local park, I was reminded of that scene in Lady Chatterley's Lover when Connie encounters the pheasant chicks: 

 

"Life! Life! Pure, sparky, fearless new life. New life! So tiny, and so utterly without fear!" [1]

Like Connie, M seemed fascinated by the adorable young birds; golden-coloured and bobbing about on the green water, whilst watched over by anxious parents.

I only hope she wasn't feeling the same agony of forlornness felt by the former. 

 

(I didn't notice any tears, so that's a good sign, I suppose.)     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 114.  

 

 

Reflections on Gauguin's La Vague (1888)

Paul Gauguin: La Vague (1888)

Oil on canvas (60.2 x 72.6 cm)

 

"As they neared the shore each wave rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water 

across the vermillion sand. The sea paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper 

whose breath comes and goes unconsciously." [1]

The Little Greek is right: Gauguin's painting La Vague is an astonishing work ...

Painted whilst living in Brittany, Gauguin was as captivated by the primeval character of the North Atlantic coastline as D. H. Lawrence was during his time in Cornwall, from where he wrote the following magnificent passage:

"It is quite true what you say: the shore is absolutely primeval: those heavy, black rocks, like solid darkness, and the heavy water like a sort of first twilight breaking against them, and not changing them. It is really like the first craggy breaking of dawn in the world, a sense of the primeval darkness just behind, before the Creation. That is a very great and comforting thing to feel [...] I love to see those terrifying rocks, like solid lumps of the original darkness, quite impregnable: and then the ponderous cold light of the sea foaming up: it is marvellous. It is not sunlight. Sunlight is really firelight. This cold light of the heavy sea is really the eternal light washing against the eternal darkness, a terrific abstraction, far beyond all life, which is merely of the sun, warm. And it does one’s soul good to escape from the ugly triviality of life into this clash of two infinites one upon the other, cold and eternal." [2]

 

Having found himself an interesting vantage point from which to work [3] - one which could only be accessed during low tide - Gauguin probably made a number of preliminary sketches, before beginning the actual canvas at his lodgings. 

 

Whilst Guaguin's abiding fascination with Japanese prints is clearly evident in La Vague, he was also inspired by a young artist called Emile Bernard, who was working nearby and buzzing with creative ideas. Through his discussions with the latter, it became clear to Gauguin that it was vital to find a new (post-impressionistic) form of expression; one that was more subjective, more primitivist, more visionary, and, above all, anti-naturalist. He and Bernard would call their new conception synthétism. 

 

Gauguin was now free to experiment and to dream. No longer under any obligation to simply copy what he saw, he could reimagine the landscape as he deemed necessary; in La Vague, for example, the third rock (in the upper-left corner) is an invention added purely for visual effect. 

 

And, most outrageously of all in the minds of those who demand realism, Gauguin painted the sandy beach an unearthly shade of martian red, affirming his increasingly idiosyncratic sense of colour. Further to this, the bright redness of the beach also relates to an optical phenomenon that Gauguin cleverly introduced into his work:  

 

"Detectable in the surging, foamy surf, is a prismatic phenomenon, in which the water appears to separate the reflected sunlight into its component chromatic wavelengths - pale violet, blue, green, and yellow - which, completed by the vermilion sand, yields a curving, rainbow-like effect along the upper edge and right-hand side of the painting." [4]

 

Finally, perhaps the thing I most admire about Gauguin's picture (as an object-oriented philosopher) is the addition of two tiny female figures, fleeing the incoming waves which threaten to overwhelm them and possibly carry them out to sea. This just intensifies the brutal elemental power of the painting; the ancient rocks and crashing waters care nothing about human bathers, or the warm softness of their flesh. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] A slightly modified couple of lines from the beginning of Virginia Woolf's 1931 novel The Waves. 

      I don't know if Woolf borrowed the title of her book from Gauguin - just as he took the title for his canvas from Hokusai’s famous woodcut The Great Wave of Kanagawa - but I do know that Roger Fry's introduction to Britain of works by Post-Impressionist painters, including Gauguin, had a significant impact on Woolf's own thinking and that The Waves might best be regarded as a work of literary abstractionism; a synthesis of poetic myth and external realism. 

      For an interesting essay on this, see Bernadette McCarthy; 'Denying the Dichotomy: Word Images in The Waves', in Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, 64 (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, 2006): click here. 

      Readers might also be amused by a post entitled 'Virginia Woolf as Gauguin girl' (27 Dec 2013), published on Paula Maggio's blog - Blogging Woolf - which relays the tale of how Virginia and her sister, Vanessa Bell, attended a party thrown in conjunction with Roger Fry’s 1910 exhibition of Post-Impressionist painters at the Grafton Galleries, dressed as figures from Guaguin's Tahitian paintings: click here.

  

[2] These beautiful lines are in a letter written by Lawrence to J. D. Beresford, dated 1 Feb 1916. See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 519-520. 

 

[3] Commenting on the peculiar nature of Gauguin's vantage point, an anonymous critic writing for the British auction house Christie's notes: 

      "Gauguin often composed landscapes from elevated and other unusual vantage points, allowing him to dispense with a stabilizing horizon [...] Instead of gazing into the typically broad expanse of the landscape format, the viewer in La Vague experiences a vertiginous plunge into vertical depth, the psychological effect of which is like peering into the inner recesses of one's own emotional self." 

      Readers who are interested, can click here to read the full essay on the Christie's website. 

 

[4] Lot Essay on the Christie's website: click here.

 

 

This post is for Maria Thanassa (MLG).

Desperate Farmwives

The Farmer's Wife (SA/2023)

 

 

As the Little Greek poses at the gate of a nearby farm, I'm reminded that the (often sentimentalised) figure of the farmer's wife is a popular trope in art, literature, and cinema. 

 

I suppose some might even insist she's a figure with archetypal significance; an embodiment of the Earth Mother, representing ancient ideals of fertility and homestead, etc. Early rising, hardworking, resiliant and reliable, she is the kind of woman who loves her chickens and her vegetables almost as much as her husband and children.   

 

D. H. Lawrence famously provides a description of such women in whom the past (and perhaps the future) unfolds, in what many regard as his greatest novel, The Rainbow (1915). 

 

However, Lawrence subverts the conventional stereotype of 19th-century farmwives by suggesting that, in crucial contradistinction to their heavy-blooded, slow-witted menfolk, they are increasingly tempted by the life afforded by the encroaching world of modernity. 

 

Thus, whilst the men were content to put their very being into farming, the women were different:

"On them too was the drowse of blood-intimacy [...] But the women looked out from the heated, blind intercourse of farm-life, to the spoken world beyond. They were aware of the lips and the mind of the world speaking and giving utterance, they heard the sound in the distance, and they strained to listen.

      It was enough for the men, that the earth heaved and opened its furrow to them, that the wind blew to dry the wet wheat, and set the young ears of corn wheeling freshly about; it was enough that they helped the cow in labour, or ferreted the rats from under the barn, or broke the back of a rabbit with a sharp knock of the hand. So much warmth and generating and pain and death did they know in their blood, earth and sky and beast and green plants, so much exchange and interchange they had with these, that they lived full and surcharged [...]

      But the women wanted another form of life than this, something that was not blood-intimacy." [1]

  

What is it, then, that these women wanted exactly? Ultimately, it's the same thing that so beguiled Eve: knowledge. 

 

For despite occupying the supreme position in her own home - her husband deferring to her on almost all points - the Lawrentian farmer's wife is desperate to know "the far-off world of cities [...] where secrets were made known and desires fulfilled" [2]. 

 

She craved to know more and experience more; to have greater freedom and achieve a superior (more spiritual, less bestial) level of being. And if she couldn't achieve this, then she determined that at least her children would be educated and encouraged to aspire towards a different life - a bigger, better, finer life. 

 

Sadly, we know where all this leads: today, farmers are increasingly prone to mental ill health and suicidal tendencies, and often have to resort to online dating services in order to find a woman willing to marry them [3]. To paraphrase Nietzsche, all meaning has gone out of modern farming; yet that is no objection to farming, but to modernity [4].

 

However, like Lawrence, I can't quite bring myself to condemn those desperate farmwives. For whilst I might not wish for the triumph of the mind and the machine, I'm not sure I would be happy living a rural pre-modern life on the farm, rooted in blood, soil, and agrarian bullshit.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 10-11.

 

[2] Ibid., p. 11.

[3] Whilst the quality of data is an issue, research has suggested that farmers are at higher than average risk of mental illness and suicide and the UK Government acknowledges this is an issue of concern. 

      For example, whilst 64% of farmers recently surveyed by Farmer's Weekly were happy with their physical wellbeing, only 55% felt positive about their mental health and in 2019, there were 102 registered suicides in England and Wales by individuals working in the agricultural sector in England and Wales (this accounts for over 2% of suicides that year, whilst agricultural workers only make up around 1% of the workforce). 

      As for farmers having trouble finding wives, the magazine Country Living launched a unique dating service decades ago, based on the simple premise that if you live and work on the land it can be especially hard to find a partner. This grew into an online service and even spawned an award-winning TV series in more than twenty countries. If you are a farmer and wish to sign up, then click here. 

 

[4] I'm paraphrasing what Nietzsche writes in Twilight of the Idols of modern marriage; see 'Expeditions of an Untimely Man', §39.

 

 

For a related post to this one on the farmer's daughter, click here.   

 

Scattered Pictures of the Smiles We Left Behind: In Memory of Four Treadwellians

Thomas, Meni, Mark & Bianca

Treadwells, 34, Tavistock Street, London, WC2 [1]

(c. 2006) 

  

I. 

 

I rarely think back to what might be termed the Treadwell's period (2004-2008), but, when I do, I find it is with increasing fondness for the curious little bookshop and its owner Christina Harrington, and, of course, for the handful of people who used to assemble in the basement to listen to my philosophical reflections on topics including sex/magic, thanatology, and zoophilia [2].  

 

Some of the regular attendees to these lectures soon formed a magic circle with whom I would go for drinks and discussion afterwards. As this group had around a dozen members [3], the Little Greek used to jokingly refer to them as the disciples, though I'm sure none of these highly individual characters recognised themselves as such or thought they had anything to learn from me. 

 

 

II. 

 

Sadly, very few pictures were ever taken at the Store when I was there; 2004-08 was just prior to everyone carrying a smartphone and sharing photos and video footage on social media.

 

However, in a rare snap reproduced above, we see four members of the Treadwell's contingent all looking surprisingly cheerful for some reason [4]. 

 

The gang of four are:

 

(i) Thomas the Austrian; an artist and genuine oddball, whose chief pleasure was telling me how wrong I was about everything and whom I used to imagine as a bald-headed bird of prey picking at my entrails ...

 

(ii) Melpomeni Kermanidou; a beautiful and talented singer-songwriter from Down Under, who, knowing how I hated the sight and sound of people clapping, once threw rose petals at the end of one of my talks - an act for which I will always adore her ...

 

(iii) Mark Jeoffroy; an occultist, poet and illustrator with finely curved lips and a boyish, slightly sinister charm; his eyes sparkling with the conceit of his own corruption, he told me once he was the spiritual heir (if not the actual reincarnation) of William Blake.     

 

(iv) Bianca Madison (aka the Great Dane); a former model turned therapist, nutritionist, activist, author and public speaker, who encourages everyone to learn how to love themselves and live inspired, healthy and compassionate lives (i.e., become a bit more like her).    

 

Wherever they are and whatever they're doing now, I hope they're just as happy as they seem to be in this picture and that - one fine day - we all get to meet up once more ... 

 

Notes

 

[1] Treadwell's moved from this address to 33, Store Street, WC1, in 2011. Those who cannnot visit one of London's friendliest and most fascinating bookshops in person, can go to treadwells-london.com

 

[2] See the post from 4 December 2012 entited 'The Treadwell's Papers' for details of the thirty papers presented at the store during 2004-08 (and the four additional stand-alone papers presented in 2011-12): click here. 

      Readers might also find Gary Lachman's 2007 article in The Independent on Treadwell's interesting, providing as it does an insider's insight into the store at this time. Lachman is spot-on to argue that what set Treadwell's apart from other occult shops is that it was a centre where people from different intellectual and artistic backgrounds could meet and exchange ideas. For this, all credit must be give to Christina, who conjured up an environment in which the world of philosophy and literature could flirt with occultism and pagan witchcraft.

      See: Gary Lachman,  'Pagan pages: One bookshop owner is summoning all sorts to her supernatural salons', The Independent (16 September 2007): click here.

 

[3] Other Treadwellians in my little circle included Steve Ash, Tom Bland, David Blank, Dawn Garland, Annette Herold, Simon Image, Sara the Satanist, Fiona Spence, and - of course - Simon Thomas. 

 

[4] We know from the clock on the wall that my presentation would have just finished, so perhaps that explains their joy; now they were free to go off and enjoy themselves in the pub.         

 

 

 

Always Be Kind to Cats!

Φοῖβος [Phoîbos] the Cat

 

 

When the Little Greek found a kitten trapped in the engine of an old car abandoned on the streets of Athens, she had no choice but to rescue him, take him home, clean him up, feed him, and generally provide him with care. 

I say she had no choice, but, of course, she could have just walked on by, ignored his cries, and left him to perish. But that wouldn't have been very kind. Nor would it have been the Christian thing to do - one is reminded of this teaching from St. Francis:

 

All things of creation are children of the Father and thus brothers of man. God wants us to help animals if they need help. Every creature in distress has the same right to be protected. 

 

Not that the patron saint of animals is much cared for in the Orthodox tradition in which the Little Greek was raised as a child [1]; in fact, some within this tradition view Francesco as a rather suspect character, given to a model of spirituality that veers towards a form of humanistic paganism. 

 

And even an animal-loving Quaker friend of mine found something objectionable in the above quotation, suggesting that this, from the American writer and naturalist Henry Beston, is preferable, as it recognises and respects the otherness of the animal:

"For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not bretheren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth." [2]

Ultimately, with or without scripture or other textual support, we need to rethink our relation to animals - and always be kind to cats! 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] As far as I know, the only Orthodox church which venerates St. Francis of Assisi is the monastery at New Skete (Cambridge, NY).   

[2] Henry Beston, The Outermost House, (Doubleday/Doran, 1928).  

Amechania

Reworked image from

A Guide on Greek Mythology 

by chubbyeol_jones on wattpad.com

I. Help!

 

In an interview with Playboy in 1980, John Lennon confessed that far from being simply a commercially upbeat number, the song that served as the title track for both a 1965 feature film and album was, in fact, a genuine (if subconscious) cri de couer from someone who felt he was no longer in control of events following the Beatles' rise to global superstardom: 'I was fat and depressed and I was crying out for help.'*

 

Funnily enough, after 1,634 days in Essex exile caring for my mother (who is in her 90s and in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's) - that's 1,634 days continuously, without a break, and without any professional assistance, training, or experience - I understand exactly how Lennon felt ...

When I was younger, so much younger than today

I never needed anybody's help in any way

But now these days are gone, I'm not so self-assured ...

 

And now my life has changed in oh so many ways

My independence seems to vanish in the haze ...

 

Yep, that's about it - you nailed it John!

 

And although I do appreciate the Little Greek being 'round (most of the time), I'm increasingly obliged to turn to the Ancient Greeks for extra support when I'm feeling down ...

II. Aμηχανία

 

When I say the Ancient Greeks, I mean in particular the Sophists; i.e. those teachers in the fifth and fourth centuries BC who specialised in subjects including rhetoric, music, and mathematics and instructed young men in the art of virtue and how to live to their full potential.

 

The Sophists were particularly interested in providing philosophical protection against the feeling of helplessness; i.e., a dreadful feeling of being overwhelmed by events outside of one's control: 

 

"Suddenly all the trappings of competence [and agency] we have built up against the blows of fate seem useless, and from one moment to the next people sink back into a state of almost archaic helplessness."**

Naturally, the Sophists had a name for this feeling of powerlessness - amechania - and, whilst little discussed today within philosophy, it was one of the most important concepts within ancient ethics: "It literally describes the lack of mechané, which means the cunning or the device [...] we can use to get out of a situation of existential difficulties ..." [266]  

 

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, whom I'm quoting here, goes on to explain:

 

"Amechania describes the situation in which human beings are denied what the Greeks believed made them wholly human, that is, the ability to retaliate against attacks, being equipped with options for action or, as we would say today, being in full control of their agency. As soon as people sink into amechania, they land in a situation that just doesn't seem appropriate for human beings. Ancient Sophism thought more profoundly on this point than the Academy. According to Sophism, the meaning of all training, both spiritual and physical, is that people react against the extreme situation of amechania [...]" [266-67] 

 

Sloterdijk concludes:

"The legacy of Sophism became part of Stoical ethics that wanted to develop human beings as creatures that would never be helpless. This ethics is based on the postulate that humans should always be able to do something, even in situations in which the only possible thing they can do is to remain calm and composed." [267]

- Or break up the band ...

 

 

Notes 

* To read David Sheff's September 1980 interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono (published in the January 1981 issue of Playboy), click here. The section in which he discusses writing 'Help!' is on page 3.

 

** Peter Sloterdijk, 'Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought', a conversation with Ulrich Raulff, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), p. 266. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the text. 

 

Play: The Beatles, 'Help!', single released (July 1965) from the album of the same name (Parlophone, August 1965). The song was written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and recorded 13 April, 1965. Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing. A black and white promotional film, dir. Joseph McGrath, was made in November 1965 for use on a Top of the Pops end of the year special: click here. 

 

Athenian Street Dogs

Two Athenian street dogs outside McDonald's near Syntagma Square

Photo by Matt Cardy / Getty Images

When the Little Greek told me that - as a result of The Crisis - Athens had gone to the dogs, I thought she was speaking figuratively. But, as it turns out, she was giving literal reference to the problem of street dogs - or free-ranging urban dogs as they are known in the scientific literature - whose numbers have grown enormously in the city during the last decade.   

Of course, what is true of Athens is true of many other cities and dogs can be found living in any urban area where the human population is prepared to accept them roaming about the streets and searching through garbage for food. Some are pets that have strayed or been abandoned, others are the descendents of feral animals; some are pure breeds, others are true mutts.

Obviously, they can be a real nuisance and pose genuine health and safety issues; pissing, shitting, fighting, fucking, barking, biting, as they do. However, the dogs seem to understand that in order to survive they have to keep conflict with humans to a minimum. And so, mostly, they're surprisingly well-behaved and extraordinarily well-adapted to an urban lifestyle; happily using the pedestrian crossings on busy roads, for example.  

Even I have to admit - and I don't like dogs - their intelligence, adaptive behaviour and sociality is pretty impressive and as long as they don't give me any trouble when I'm wandering around Plaka, I'm perfectly happy to share space with them. Indeed, there are plenty of people I'd sooner see neutered or rounded up and shot than these dogs.

Notes

Anyone interested in donating to a charity that provides food, shelter and veterinary care for stray cats and dogs in Greece can click here. 

Thanks to Katxu for inspiring this post.

Reflections on the Snail

Henri Matisse: L'Escargot (1953) 
Gouache on paper, cut and pasted on paper 
mounted on canvas

The Little Greek hates snails, because they eat her plants. But I like them ...

Perhaps it's because I grew up watching The Magic Roundabout and had a particular fondness for Brian. But it's also because, like other molluscs, they seem to me to be fascinating creatures, gastropodding about in the dampness of the garden and leaving a silvery slipstream of mucus in their wake, an ephemeral trail that points the way for the beaks of birds that love to eat them. 

The fact that snails have little tentacles on their head, a primitive little brain, and possess both male and female sex organs (i.e., are hermaphrodites), also inclines me to view them favourably; they are both alien and perverse when considered from a human perspective. 

I particularly like the tiny baby snails, newly hatched, with a small and delicate shell already in place to conceal their nakedness. They are very pretty and very sweet. Francis Ponge speaks of their immaculate clamminess. The fact that people can kill them with poison pellets without any qualms is astonishing and profoundly upsetting to me. 

To her credit, the Little Greek only tries to dissuade the snails from eating her plants by using (mostly ineffective) organic solutions, such as coffee granules and bits of broken eggshell sprinkled around. Alternatively, she sometimes rounds 'em up and relocates the snails to the local woods - though this enforced transportation of snails also makes me a little uneasy, as it's all-too-easy to imagine little yellow stars painted on their backs.   

Not that this prevents me from eating them, prepared with a garlic and parsley butter when in France, or cooked in a spicy sauce when in Spain ... 

Note: the Francis Ponge poem to which I refer and from which I quote is 'Snails', trans. by Joshua Corey and Jean-Luc Garneau, Poetry, (July/August, 2016). Click here to read in full on the Poetry Foundation website.  

Reflections on Cat Cognition and Feline Intelligence

Black cat looking out of window 
Stephen Alexander (2018)

I.

I don't have a cat: but I like cats. And I particularly like the friendly black cat who comes to visit - even after the Little Greek accidently trod on his paw.

Sometimes he sits in the garden; sometimes he prefers to stretch out on the back porch, sharpening his claws on the doormat. But he also likes to nose around the house and rub himself against the furniture. This morning, he jumped on the windowsill and stood staring out of the window.

I don't know what caught his attention and I don't really know what he thinks of things - or me for that matter. But, clearly, he's exercising an intelligence of some kind as he familiarises himself with a strange environment and interacts with new people, learning how to exploit and manipulate both.  

II.

Apparently, the brain of the average domestic moggie is just about large enough in size for cats to qualify as big brained animals - though of course, this doesn't necessarily mean they are intelligent; for whilst a correlation has been shown between these things, correlation does not mean causation.

However, thanks to behavioural observation, I think we can take it as a given that cats are smart - they dream, they scheme, they solve problems and they play. And even when told that dogs have twice as many neurons as cats, I refuse to accept that mutts are twice as intelligent. For whilst dogs can be vicious, only cats are sophisticated enough to derive pleasure from cruelty. Give a dog a bone and it's perfectly happy; but a cat only really gets excited at the thought of live prey.       

Apparently, cats also have excellent memories. Indeed, one of the reasons that stray cats adapt so well to extremely demanding urban environments is because they are able to retain and recall information and learn from past experience. They have also memorized their hunting and survival skills - unlike dogs, that have become almost completely dependent upon their human masters.

Ultimately, it's because cats have retained their indifference, mistrust, and contempt of man that they have also kept their savage beauty and seductive mystery across the millennia. They live alongside us, but have never really been domesticated; they have, as anthrozoologist Dr John Bradshaw says, three out of four paws still firmly planted in the wild and can easily revert within only a few generations back to the independent way of life enjoyed by their ancestors 10,000 years ago.


III.

Finally - and perhaps most interestingly of all - it's clear from extensive research that dogs pereceive us as different (superior) beings. They don't behave around us as they behave around other dogs and they know they live in our world. 

But cats, however, seem to regard people merely as bigger, clumsier versions of themselves and have thus not bothered to adapt their social behaviour; they act towards us in a manner that is indistinguishable from how they would act towards others of their kind.

Essentially, for cats there is only one world - and its theirs.

See: John Bradshaw, Cat Sense, (Basic Books, 2013). 

In My Secret Garden

Bust of Epicurus against a background of wild flowers 

One of the very few consolations of living in isolated exile here in Essex is having a small garden in which to sit, drink wine, and listen to the birds sing whilst the Little Greek tends to her plants and battles with the snails.

One suddenly feels a real sense of kinship with Epicurus, who, famously, established his school of philosophy in a beautiful garden on the outskirts of Athens, c.307 BC. This green oasis - not far from the site of Plato's Academy, but far enough and of such a contrasting character as to suggest it belonged to a very different world - symbolised the idyllic yet worldly nature of Epicureanism.

Inscribed above the garden gate was a sign that read: Welcome dear guest - please stay a while and discover for yourself that the highest good is happiness. Men - and women - came here to practise and cultivate an ethics immanent to existence that valued reason, pleasure, friendship, and flowers.  

Modern scholars are not quite sure of the exact location of the garden, but, given the fondness amongst early Christians for building churches upon ancient sites of learning and pagan temples - and considering the hostility that many medieval theologians exhibited towards all forms of material hedonism - it's very possible that the Byzantine Church of Haghios Georgios [St. George] was erected upon it.     

That's a shame. Because no matter how beautiful the church or magnificent the cathedral, the sky above and the earth below remain more beautiful and more magnificent. This is something that even the devoted Christian Will Brangwen is forced to accept in D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow:

"He listened to the thrushes in the gardens and heard a note which the cathedrals did not include: something free and careless and joyous. He crossed a field that was all yellow with dandelions, on his way to work, and the bath of yellow glowing was something at once so sumptuous and so fresh, that he was glad he was away from his shadowy cathedral.

      There was life outside the Church. There was much that the Church did not include. He thought of God, and of the whole blue rotunda of the day. That was something great and free. He thought of the ruins of the Grecian worship, and it seemed, a temple was never perfectly a temple, till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs." [Ch. 7] 

Epicurus would, I'm sure, thoroughly endorse this passage by Lawrence, which promotes belief in the ruins and affirms the joy of living amidst the natural world having seen through the false promise of the Absolute.

And Nietzsche too would approve. For, as Keith Ansell-Pearson reminds us, there was nothing Nietzsche loved more during his mid-period than the thought of strolling in a peaceful garden:

"He wants a new vita contemplativa to be cultivated in the midst of the speed and rapidity of modern life; we need to [...] go slowly and create the time needed to work through our experiences. Even we godless anti-metaphysicians need places for contemplation and in which we can reflect on ourselves and encounter ourselves. However, we are not to do this in the typical spiritual manner of transcendent loftiness, but rather take walks in botanical gardens [...] and look at ourselves 'translated', as Nietzsche memorably puts it, 'into stones and plants' (GS 280)."

Ansell-Pearson concludes, in an absolutely crucial passage for those who would understand Epicurus-Nietzsche-Lawrence and their non-idealistic (in fact, counter-idealistic) Naturphilosophie:

"We free spirits have more in common with phenomena of the natural world than we do with the heavenly projections of a religious humanity: we can be blissfully silent like stones and we have specific conditions of growth like plants, being nourished by the elements of the earth and by the light and heat of the sun."

Notes

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 141-42. Note that GS 280 refers, of course, to section 280 of Nietzsche's The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974).  

Epicurus, The Art of Living, ed. and trans. George K. Strodach, (Penguin Books, 2013).

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

For a sister post to this one on the notion of ataraxia, click here. 

Musical bonus: click here to play a much under-appreciated track by Madonna, from the album Erotica (Maverick Records, 1992), which supplied the title to this post. 

Always Pet a Cat When You Encounter One

The mysterious black cat in my backgarden

It would be easy to mock controversial clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson and his 12 Rules for Life; a work in which he offers a series of 'profound and practical principles' that enable readers to combat the suffering and chaos that is intrinsic to human existence and construct meaningful - though not necessarily happy - lives.

Indeed, John Crace has already provided a magnificent spoof of the above in a digested read which appeared in The Guardian shortly after the book's publication in January of this year. I doubt that I could better this comical critique, which, to his credit, even Peterson found very amusing. Nor am I going to try.

Rather, I'm writing here to praise Peterson, whom I admire and respect - even if I don't necessarily share his moral-political views, or his quest to identify eternal truths and archetypal patterns of behaviour.

For one thing, he's very intelligent and very articulate. He also seems to be courageous; a man prepared to take a stand and fight for what he feels to be right, no matter who this might upset or offend. I also think he's good-looking and that always helps. But what really won me over was an experience I had a few days ago with a black cat that came into the garden ...      

She was very friendly and clearly wanted to be stroked; so much so, that she even followed me from the garden into the kitchen, where she allowed herself to be petted (and fed) by the Little Greek. Even my mother - who doesn't feel comfortable around cats or much like animals in general - was charmed by this beautiful stranger who had come visit from out of nowhere and bring a few moments of joy. 

And so, it seems that Peterson's Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one, is worth serious consideration.

I certainly agree that it's often the smallest of things and the briefest of moments that seem to matter most in life - i.e., those redemptive elements of being that spontaneously arise when we least expect them amidst all the relentless horror and suffering and banality of everday existence. Peterson's right: you have to enjoy these soul-sustaining things and opportunities when you can.

Of course, just because he's right here, it doesn't automatically validate or legitimise his other eleven points. But I'll leave it to others, however, to assess the truth value of propositions that include Stand up straight (Rule 1) and Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world (Rule 6).   

See:

Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, (Allen Lane, 2018). Click here to watch Peterson discuss Rule 12 concerning the cat with Dave Rubin.

John Crace, '12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B Peterson - digested read', The Guardian (28 Jan. 2018): click here.

On Convalescence

Oy, I don't feel so good! Coughing, aching, lemsipping, etc. Still, whilst I might not have Zarathustra's animals to look after me, I do have the pigeons on the balcony for company and the Little Greek to make some chicken soup. So I can't complain. 

Also, I have a period of convalescence to look forward to during which colours, sounds, etc. all seem to become clearer and more vibrant and one feels momentarily perkier than usual. Doubtless this is simply a physiological effect of returning strength, but Heidegger prefers to see it in slightly different terms, relating it as he does to questions of nostalgia and being:

"The convalescent is the man who collects himself to return home - that is, to turn inwards, into his own destiny. The convalescent is on the road to himself, so that he can say of himself who he is."

Obviously, this is anathema to me; a rootless cosmopolitan who knows no home, scorns notions of interiority and prefers anonymity and masquerade to self-confession and the revelation of true identity. In fact, I'd rather stay sick and self-alienated than convalesce in a Heideggerian manner.