Lose This Skin: Thoughts on Theodore Roethke's Epidermal Macabre

Juan de Valverde de Hamusco: 

La anatomia del corpo humano (1556)

According to D. H. Lawrence, Whitman was the great American poet-pioneer; the first to smash the old moral conception of man in which the body is conceived as but a shoddy and temporary container for some kind of ghostly essence; the first to seize the soul by the scruff of the neck and insist on her corporeal nature.   

This, for Lawrence, is crucial because he believes that the key to achieving what the Greeks termed εὐδαιμονία is "remaining inside your own skin, and living inside your own skin, and not pretending you're any bigger than you are."

Nietzsche also insists that man's self-overcoming does not correspond to the rapturous possibility of transcendence. The overman is not more spiritual, but more animal; complete with teeth, guts and genitals and all those things which idealists are embarrassed by and hope to see shrivel away. 

So, what's a reader of Lawrence and Nietzsche to make of the following poem by Theodore Roethke:


Epidermal Macabre

Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes -
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.

Initially, one is triggered - as people now like to say - by the narrator's physical self-loathing and his desire to make an ecstatic break from his own biology, conceived in terms of clothing that conceals true being in all its naked immateriality and innocence.

However, even the narrator - and, for convenience's sake, let's call him Roethke - recognises that such mad metaphysical exhibitionism in which one strips oneself of flesh and bone until one effectively becomes untouchable, invisible, and non-existent, is indelicate; i.e. not only insensitive, but also slightly indecent.

Further, whilst Roethke's hatred for his epidermal dress and the rags of his own anatomy is so profound that he considers willingly dispensing not only with his modesty but all vital feeling, he's honest enough to acknowledge that in death there's no liberation of the soul. All that remains is a decomposing corpse; that incarnadine and carnal ghost that refuses to disappear into thin air.

Noble spirit, Roethke concedes, is entirely dependent upon - is an epiphenomenal effect of - base matter. And just as truth needs to be concealed behind lies and illusions in order to remain true, spirit needs to be wrapped in flesh.

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman', in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 161. 

Theodore Roethke, 'Epidermal Macabre', from the debut collection Open House (1941). See The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, (Anchor Books, 1975).

Musical bonus: The Clash, 'Lose This Skin', from the album Sandinista! (CBS, 1980); written and with vocals by Tymon Dogg: click here. 


Thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting a post on this poem.

Release the Bats: Notes on the Genre Distinction between Poetry and Pop

Release the Bats (4AD, 1981)

Click here to play on YouTube

As regular readers of this blog will know, I have a real penchant for poems about bats and have previously written about D. H. Lawrence's work in this area, as well as Theodore Roethke's (see links below). 

However - push comes to shove - I think my favourite lines on these fascinating creatures are found in a song written by Nick Cave and Mick Harvey as members of the seminal post-punk band The Birthday Party and released as a single in the summer of 1981:


Release the Bats

Whoooahh! Bite! Whoooah! Bite!
Release the bats! Release the bats!
Don't tell me that it doesn't hurt
A hundred fluttering in your skirt
Don't tell me that it doesn't hurt

My baby is alright
She doesn't mind a bit of dirt
She says horror vampire bat bite
She says horror vampire
How I wish those bats would bite
Whoooah! Bite! Whoooah! Bite!

Release the bats! Release the bats!
Pump them up and explode the things
Her legs are chafed by sticky wings
Sticky sticky little things

My baby is a cool machine
She moves to the pace of her generator
Says damn that sex supreme
She says damn that horror bat
Sex vampire, cool machine

Release the bats! Release the bats!
Release them!

Baby is a cool machine
She moves to the pulse of a generator
She says damn that sex supreme
She says, she says damn that horror bat
Sex horror sex bat sex horror sex vampire
Sex bat horror vampire sex
Cool machine
Horror bat. Bite!
Cool Machine. Bite!
Sex vampire. Bite!


Lyrically, things just don't get much better than this - even if, ironically, the song was written by Cave's own admission as a gigantic piss-take of those who reduced the queer and complex splendour of gothic horror (in art, literature, film and fashion) down to a few lazy stereotypes and tropes.

I could - and one day might - critically analyse these lines at length. But what I want to discuss here is a question that often arises in relation to the wider topic of genre distinction: What's the difference between poetry and a finely composed pop lyric?

It certainly seems to be the case that many people accept this distinction as a given and believe that the former, poetry, is not only more serious, but also inherently superior to any pop song. To me, however, this distinction is as dubious and as problematic as the one that others within the Academy would maintain between philosophy and literature.

It's patently absurd, is it not, to think that even a poorly written poem - and heaven knows there are many such in existence - is essentially more valuable in an ideal and rarefied cultural sense than even the greatest of pop songs. In the end, we are more often than not simply dealing with a form of snobbery that does a disservice to both poetry and pop.

Having said that, I agree with the American poet Matthew Zapruder that whereas the poem is born of (and aspires to) silence, the pop lyric is designed to unfold and communicate within a context of sound (i.e. it comes with a musical accompaniment or backing track). That's a real difference and an important difference. But it doesn't justify establishing a hierarchy of forms in which one is privileged over the other. 

In brief - and as we used to say in the old days: Fuck art - let's dance!

Notes

Matthew Zapruder 'The Difference Beween Poetry and Song Lyrics', Boston Review (06 Dec 2012): click here to read online.

Those who are particularly interested in this topic might also like to see Zapruder's book Why Poetry (Ecco Press, 2017) and/or Adam Bradley's The Poetry of Pop (Yale University Press, 2017). 

Related posts: D. H. Lawrence's Becoming Bat (click here); Reflections on the Bat 1 (click here); Reflections on the Bat 2 (click here); Roethke and the Bat Boy (click here).   

Reflections on The Bat 2: Germaine Richier and Her Art of Becoming-Animal

Germaine Richier: La Chauve-souris (1946) 

Dimensions: 89 x 91 x 59.5 cm

Theodore Roethke's uncanny verse, The Bat, brings to mind many things; D. H. Lawrence's own poetic encounters with bats; Dick Kulpa and Bob Lind's journalistic fiction, the Bat Boy; and, of course, Germaine Richier's terrifying sculpture from 1946, also entitled (in English) The Bat.

Having written about Lawrence's chiropteran poetry and the Bat Boy elsewhere on this blog, it's Richier and her work I wish to discuss here ...     

Germaine Richier was a highly individual 20th century French sculptress. Whilst she had a rather classical approach - preferring, for example, to work from a live model before then reworking the finished piece - her work was often anomalous in theme; she loved to model spiders and insects, as well as monstrous human-animal hybrids. After the War, her style became less conventionally figurative; the bodily deformations that often characterized her work became ever-more accentuated and extreme in an attempt to convey her ever-greater sense of existential angst.

Her Christ figure, for example, although originally commissioned by the Church and designed for the Chapel of Assy, caused outrage and was eventually removed by order of a bishop, who objected not only to the fact that the body of Christ was indistinguishable from the Cross on which it hung (the wood and flesh having fused into one object), but that the figure was also faceless (readers of Deleuze and Guattari will understand why this is so profoundly problematic).

Interesting as this work and the controversy surrounding it are, it's her experimental 1946 piece, La Chauve-souris, that fascinates me most, however, created shortly after returning to Paris from Zurich, where she and her husband had spent the war years. In making The Bat, Richier employed a new technique of dipping rope fibre in plaster, before then draping it over a metal frame.  

As indicated, Richier had a real penchant for portraying (usually female) figures with insect or arachnoid characteristics. But this work was the first time she'd attempted to produce a mouse with wings wearing a human face. Just looking at the small, recognisably human head atop the elongated neck of this creature gives me the willies, in the same way that Roethke's poem creeps me out.

For like her American contemporary, Richier seems to have a great love for things belonging to the natural world, but it's a love that goes way beyond nostalgia for her childhood in rural southern France that some critics insist upon. Richier, like Roethke, appears to have discovered an unsettling, Lovecraftian truth about the latter - what we might term the perverse immorality of nature; the fact that nature is paradoxically invested with elements that are unnatural and preternatural (just as we also contain within our humanity aspects that are nonhuman, inhuman and, perhaps, overhuman).    

What excites Richier as an artist, I think, is not the fact that things naturally evolve, but that they are also subject to a process of becoming, with this latter understood not as the slow unfolding of an essence towards fixed identity, but the affirmation of difference conceived as a multiple process of transformation and an opening up of the self to outside forces (be they animal, alien, or daemonic in character).

And this, of course, is what excites me about her ...


Notes

The version of The Bat shown above was cast in bronze in 1996; the fifth in a posthumous edition of six created under the direction of Francoise Guiter (the artist’s niece) by L. Thinot, Paris, the foundry responsible for casting Richier’s sculptures during her lifetime. It is on long term loan to the Tate (Ref. Number: L02176). 

To read part one of this post on Theodore Roethke and the unheimlich, click here. 

To read the post that anticipates or prefigures this one on Roethke and the Bat Boy, click here. 

To read the post on D. H. Lawrence's becoming-bat, click here. 

To read Roethke's poem The Bat, click here. 

Thanks to Diana Thomson for suggesting this post by pointing me in the direction of Germaine Richier.

Reflections on The Bat 1: Theodore Roethke and the Unheimlich

Germaine Richier: Bat (1948-51)

Etching and aquatint on paper (385 x 536 mm)

Several days after first reading and I'm still haunted by Roethke's magnificent poem The Bat ...

It's not the bat by day who disturbs me; the bat who is cousin to the mouse and likes to hang out (literally) in the attic of an aging house and whose fingers make a hat about his head. I'm perfectly fine with the thought of such a creature, whose heart beats so slowly we think him dead.

Indeed, I don't even fear the bat who loops in crazy figures half the night. Just so long as he keeps his distance and, more importantly, keeps his own countenance. It's only when he comes too close and reveals that something is amiss or out of place that I'm disturbed; when, as Roethke writes, it becomes apparent that even mice with wings can wear a human face.

In my mind, such an image is uncanny to the nth degree. So much so, that one is tempted to use the more ambiguous (and thus more troubling) German term, unheimlich, which Roethke, as the son of a German immigrant, might appreciate. For unheimlich means more than outside of one's normal experience and familiar frame of reference (or beyond one's ken, as our friends north of the border might say).

Roethke's human-faced bat is not just a bit creepy or queer: it is that which should have remained forever in the shadows and never been spoken of, but which has - thanks to him - come to light and to language; it is thus the un-secret (and here we recall that heimlich doesn't just mean homely, but also that which is hidden or concealed).

In a proto-Freudian sense that looks back to Schelling, the unheimlich is, we might say - and I'm going to have to consult with my friend Simon Solomon on this - the obscene intrusion of the occult into the known world in such a manner that it curdles the milk and violates the natural order of things.


Notes

To read The Bat, by Theodore Roethke, please visit the Poetry and Literature page of the US Library of Congress: click here.

To read part two of this post on French sculptress Germaine Richier and her 1946 piece La Chauve-souris, click here.

To read the post that anticipates or prefigures this one on Roethke and the Bat Boy, click here.

Germaine Richier's brilliant artwork seen here can be viewed by appointment at Tate Britain's Prints and Drawings Rooms (Ref. number P11286) .

Roethke and the Bat Boy (A Post on American Poetry and Popular Culture)

And when he appears upon a TV screen,

We're afraid of what our eyes have seen.

The highly-regarded American poet, Theodore Roethke, grew up surrounded by natural beauty subject to German discipline in a giant greenhouse. The perfect conditions in which a sensitive young boy's Romanticism might flourish ...

However, as Camille Paglia points out, there was always something queer about Roethke's lyricism; his "portraits of nature are often eerie or unsettling", particularly when he attempted to connect the world of the greenhouse to his own (often profoundly disturbed) inner experience.

Perhaps this explains why the last lines of his poem 'The Bat' have been haunting me for days: 

For something is amiss or out of place

When mice with wings can wear a human face.

Either that, or they caused me to reflect once more upon the terrifying case of the Bat Boy, discovered living in Hellhole Cave, West Virginia, by Dr Ron Dillon, as reported in the pages of the Weekly World News back in the summer of 1992, and now established as an iconic figure within the popular imagination ...

See: 

Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn (Vintage Books, 2006), p. 146. 

Theodore Roethke, The Collected Poems, (Faber and Faber, 1968).

To read 'The Bat', please visit the Poetry and Literature page of the US Library of Congress: click here.