Dancing Barefoot (with Reference to the Case of Alice Howells)

From Zarathustra to Patti Smith, there has long been a perverse fascination with the thought of young women dancing barefoot and defying the Spirit of Gravity. One evening, for example, when the former was walking through the forest with his disciples, he came upon a group of girls dancing together in a meadow. When, upon realising that they have been discovered, they cease their movements, Zarathustra approaches them in a friendly manner and implores them to continue:

'Please, I beg you, do not stop, you nimble creatures! I'm no killjoy who looks upon you with an evil eye; no enemy to divine dancing, or to girls' feet with fair ankles.'

I've no doubt, therefore, that had he lived and retained his sanity, Nietzsche would have enthusiastically supported the barefoot dance movement of the early twentieth century, which not only challenged received ideas of what constitutes classical dance, but also wider notions of social decorum. For bare feet had long been regarded as obscene within Western culture, no matter how passionately the advocates for such made reference to the ancient world or the enlightened practices of the Far East.

Indeed, for many Edwardians any form of public nakedness remained profoundly shocking and when Maud Allan performed her barefoot Dance of the Seven Veils in 1908, it scandalised London theatre goers. Critics regarded her as the embodiment of uninhibited sexuality and, as such, a threat to public decency. But it would take another dancer, Isadora Duncan, to really shake things up, however. Duncan, a feminist and self-declared communist, revolutionized dance and liberated the naked female foot; divorcing the latter from perceptions of obscenity and linking it instead to ideas of freedom, innocence, and natural harmony.

Finally, we come to the (fictional) case of Alice Howells, a young widow in D. H. Lawrence's short story, 'The Blue Moccasins' (1928), who seduces a married man, Percy Barlow, by dancing barefoot before him on stage in a play entitled The Shoes of Shagpat.

In the play, writes Lawrence:

"Alice was the wife of the grey-bearded old Caliph, but she captured the love of the young Ali, otherwise Percy, and the whole business was the attempt of these two to evade Caliph and negro-eunuchs and ancient crones, and get into each other's arms."

In her role as Leila, Alice wears white gauze Turkish trousers and a silver veil. She also wears a pair of blue moccasins that belong to Mrs Barlow (and which have been borrowed without permission): "The blue shoes were very important: for while the sweet Leila wore them, the gallant Ali was to know there was danger. But when she took them off, he might approach her."           

Seeing Mrs Barlow sitting in the front row, so calmly superior, suddenly let loose a devil in Alice Howells: "All her limbs went suave and molten, as her young sex, long pent up, flooded even to her finger-tips Her voice was strange, even to herself, with its long, plaintive notes. She felt all her movements soft and fluid, she felt herself like living liquid. And it was lovely."

Lawrence continues:

"Alice's business, as the lovely Leila , was to be seductive to the rather heavy Percy. And seductive she was. In two minutes, she had him spell-bound. He saw nothing of the audience. A faint, fascinated grin came on to his face, as he acted up to the young woman in the Turkish trousers. ... And when, at the end of Act I, the lovely Leila kicked off the blue moccasins, saying: 'Away, shoes of bondage, shoes of sorrow!' - and danced a little dance all alone, barefoot, in her Turkish trousers, in front of her fascinated hero, his smile was so spell-bound that everybody else was spell-bound too."

Apart from the outraged wife, obviously, whose indignation knew no bounds. Unfortunately, she has to sit throughout Act II, as the imaginary love scenes between Percy and Alice become ever more nakedly shameful. As the second Act comes to its climax, Leila again kicks off her shoes of bondage and flies barefoot into the arms of Ali: "And if ever a man was gone in sheer desire, it was Percy, as he pressed the woman's lithe form against his body ..."       

Not surprisingly, Mrs Barlow doesn't stay for the third Act. By then, however, it is too late: her husband's podophilia has got the better of him and he's crucially transferred his allegiance to Alice. Leaning down, backstage during the interval, "he drew off one of the grey shoes she had on, caressing her foot with the slip of his hand over its slim, bare shape".


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Blue Moccasins', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 165-79. All lines quoted are from this edition. 

Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1969), see 'The Dance Song' in Part Two of this work. Note that the line spoken by Zarathustra as it appears here is a paraphrase rather than an accurate quotation. 

On Loving Enemies and Hating Friends

The poet and translator Simon Solomon

(mon meilleur ami et meilleur adversaire)

The philosopher, says Zarathustra, must not only be able to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.

The first part of this proposition obviously echoes the Christian imperative, but Nietzsche doesn’t mean by it what Jesus meant. For he’s not thinking in terms of forgiveness and reconciliation and peace on earth. Rather, he wants the lover of wisdom to recognise the vital need for enmity.

Unlike Hegel, therefore, he’s not positing difference only so he might then dream of synthesis. Dionysus versus the Crucified is not a dialectical opposition; the pathos of distance between terms is real and needs, if anything, to be furthered - not closed or even bridged.

But across this gulf that separates, antagonists should respect and even revere one another and know that they find their best strength in the struggle between them; to desire the extermination of one’s enemies, to think of them in vicious moral terms as evil, is profoundly mistaken and a sign of ressentiment. The noble human being always finds in their adversary something to honour (and to love), not despise and fear.

As for the second part of this proposition, Nietzsche is simply alerting us to the danger of those who love us for who we are, rather than for what we might become; for those who follow us on social media and like what we do and say, rather than challenge it; those who want the best for us, rather than wish us a life of hardship, conflict and worthy enemies.

In sum, for Nietzsche, one’s best friend and one’s greatest opponent is often one and the same person. (Oh, Simon, what would I do without you?)

D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo and Some Transpolitical Musings

Garry Shead, Lawrence and Kangaroo, (1992)

Although I'm interested in politics and regard my work as politically informed, I am not one of those individuals who could ever belong to a political party or follow a party line.

I suppose, primarily, this has something to do with wishing to safeguard my reputation as a nomadic thinker; i.e. one who cares for those ideas that don't allow themselves to easily be codified or coordinated by an ideology, or made subject to authority. For this reason, I'm very sympathetic to Richard Somers, protagonist of Lawrence's novel Kangaroo (1923).

For Somers too is something of a Nietzschean free spirit, struggling to rid himself from all forms of dogma and doxa, desperately trying to reinvent each gesture and finally find a way in which to say something in his own name without asking permission (albeit a name which designates no ego whatsoever).

Thus, although he writes essays on social questions - and although he flirts with parties on both the far-left and far-right of the political spectrum, fantasizing about being a revolutionary man of action - Somers ultimately chooses to stand aside and stand alone, remaining loyal to his own demon (no matter how wilfully perverse this makes him look in the eyes of others) and exercising what Foucault describes as a decisive will not to be governed.

He very early on in the novel makes his transpositional position clear when he states that politics isn't his real concern and that he'd rather wander in a homeless fashion without a friend in the world than belong to any nation, church, or cause. Somers knows and comes to accept that he is fated to be one of those who must remain silent, lonely, and resolute - individuals content to engage in invisible activities outside the gate.

Heidegger talks about the need for such people engaged in reverent contemplativeness which might keep open the slim hope of a new revealing for man; a form of transcendence that has been purged not only of its conventional ties to morality and metaphysics, but also to the very possibility of direct action.

Ultimately, despite what militant political fanatics and religious terrorists believe, the greatest events are not our loudest or bloodiest but our stillest hours and "The world revolves not around the inventors of new noises, but around the inventors of new values; it revolves inaudibly."

Like Zarathustra, Richard Somers knows in his heart that change takes time and begins with a new feeling. Thus whilst the commentator Mac Daly is right to suggest that Kangaroo unfolds within a nihilistic universe, he is mistaken to argue that Somers's problem is that he cannot summon up sufficient faith in any cause that might give his life meaning. This, in fact, is Somers's strength and saving grace; it is what prevents him from deteriorating into something dreary and political like a communist or a fascist. It is his lack of faith and his inability to believe in anything or anyone that, paradoxically, is a sign of his spiritual superiority.

For Somers knows that whilst life can be made to march in step with the limited movements of the body politic and mouth empty slogans, it at the same time exceeds these and goes far beyond them: for life makes no absolute statement and sensitive, intelligent men and women don't need metanarratives and remain incredulous before them. If they do think their way into a political party or a faith, so too do they think their way through and out the other side, back into the open, like worms through a rotten apple. 

Kangaroo is a great novel precisely because it encourages us not to belong; to keep moving and abandon all attachments; to understand that it's merely Christian to love your enemies, whilst the really crucial but difficult thing is learning how to hate your friends and betray your masters.      


Notes:

D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, edited by Bruce Steele with an Introduction and Notes by Macdonald Daly, (Penguin Books, 1997).  

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1969). The line quoted is from the section in part two entitled 'Of Great Events', pp. 153-54.  

See also Stephen Alexander, Outside the Gate, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), II. 6, pp. 127-45, for a further discussion of this topic with reference to Kangaroo and Aaron's Rod. 

We Are All Hunchbacks

One must inevitably clash with those individuals - such as my sister - who are beyond reason and kindness; those who are fatally burdened with history and round shouldered with memories of the past, allowing this to deform and define who they are.

To be crippled and subjectified in this manner - to literally have too much behind one - is to suffer cruelly. But, as Zarathustra says, if you take away the hump from a hunchback you take away their soul.

Besides, are we not all of us to a greater or lesser extent hunchbacks? That is to say, are we not all of us made a little monstrous by our parents and our upbringing? 

As Philip Larkin so memorably pointed out in verse, the misery and resentment that we feel and spend a lifetime trying to overcome is passed down the generations just as surely as certain genetic conditions, including debilitating forms of kyphosis: 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.

If only my sister could be made to understand this, then she might learn not only to think a little more philosophically, but be a little happier - which, in turn, would make me a little happier and enable us to develop a connection of some kind.

Notes: 

For Zarathustra's encounter and discussion with a hunchback, see 'Of Redemption', in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Philip Larkin's 'This Be The Verse', from which I quote, can be found in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite, (Faber and Faber, 2003).

Zarathustra and the Nightingale

One has to speak with thunder and heavenly fireworks to feeble and dormant senses, says Zarathustra.

If we interpret this injunction in a generous manner, it can be understood to mean that Nietzsche is interested in constructing a poetic post-metaphysical language that will enable the individual to break free from received conceptual schema and the moral-linguistic conventions of grammar and thereby find new ways of thinking and feeling. 

But, I have to say, it does sound a wee bit fascistic and shouty. Or, in a word, Wagnerian. The sort of thing that Dietrich Eckart might have had in mind when he created the Nazi battle slogan Deutschland Erwache!   

It also anticipates Heidegger, who claims in Being and Time that we must rediscover some form of primordial language from which to assemble a vocabulary of elementary terms that authentically speak Dasein. Philosophy's ultimate task, he says, is to preserve the force of these words and prevent them from being enfeebled and flattened within the common understanding.

I have to confess, there was a time when I found this kind of thing seductive if never entirely convincing: I wanted to believe that there was a universal (though secret) litany of magical words, letters, and phonemes that might somehow tear up the foundations of the soul and shatter eardrums and law tables alike, but I was never quite able to do so.

And what prevented me from embracing this mytho-religious idea of language was the following passage from Lawrence's Sketches of Etruscan Places:

"And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion, the nightingale will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup."

- Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis, (CUP, 1992), p. 36.