'Tis Whiter Than an Indian Pipe ...

Zena McKeown: Ghost Flowers (2023) [1]

Instagram: @zeddybear

 

 

What do you get if you cross a floraphile with a hauntologist? The answer, of course, is someone who loves ghost flowers ...

 

As the name Monotropa uniflora implies, the ghost plant - a flowering herbaceous perennial native to temperate regions of Asia and the Americas - is one of a kind and uniquely beautiful. If usually the flowers have a waxy white colouration, some specimens are marked with black flecks or seem to glow with an eerie pinkish hue.

 

Unlike green plants rich in chlorophyll and which synthesise nutrients via photosynthesis, ghost plants are mycoheterotrophic, meaning that they parasitically feed off underground fungi (which live in turn on the root systems of trees). Since they are not directly dependent on sunlight, therefore, it means that ghost plants can grow in very dark environments, such as the undergrowth of dense forests. 

 

All this adds to their spooky reputation - as does the fact that the plant contains glycosides which can be toxic to humans (though not the bumblebees and other insects that disperse their pollen). Having said that, if cooked correctly, ghost plants are perfectly safe to eat and are said to have a flavour similar to asparagus.  

 

The renowned American poet Emily Dickinson loved ghost plants and they feature in several of her verses. She drafted this poem in her own fair hand on a fragment of paper in 1879: 

 

'Tis whiter than an Indian Pipe - 

'Tis dimmer than a Lace - 

No stature has it, like a Fog 

When you approach the place - 

Not any voice imply it here - 

Or intimate it there - 

A spirit - how doth it accost - 

What function hath the Air? 

This limitless Hyperbole 

Each one of us shall be - 

'Tis Drama - if Hypothesis 

It be not Tragedy - [2]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This is an early sketch (pastel on paper) by Miss McKeown (used with kind permission of the artist). The finished work can be viewed on her Instagram account: @zeddybear

 

[2] Emily Dickinson, 'Tis whiter than an Indian Pipe, poem, 1879, Amherst College Archives & Special Collections. Click here to see the handwritten original at the Morgan Library & Museum (New York).   

Loving the Alien (Notes on Exophilia)

Dream-sketch by Zena
(untitled, undated)

As Roland Barthes once pointed out, the art of love has no history. And so there's no progress in pleasures - nothing but mutations and perverse deviations. So it can't be said that exophilia is simply an unearthly development of xenophilia; loving the alien is not merely a substitute for loving foreigners.

Rather, it's a unique form of desire that deserves to be considered in its own right, even if its devotees share traits with other paraphiles who have a penchant for inhuman and non-human lovers and long for a sexual experience that is truly out of this world (what the journalist Annalee Newitz charmingly describes as an alien fuckfest).   

What, then, is exophilia, in essence, if you will ...?

Obviously, such a question is difficult - perhaps impossible - to answer; who can truly say what love is (particularly forms of love that are by their very nature queer and which often involve extreme as well as abnormal activities)? 

However, for those who imagine the phenomenon of alien abduction to involve human test subjects being taken secretly and against their will by extraterrestrial biological entities in order to be experimented upon in ways that include a non-consensual sexual component, I suppose exophilia might be said to be primarily a sci-fi rape fantasy or close encounter of the kinky kind. 

Procedures such as vaginal and anal probing, the collection of semen and harvesting of ova, etc. all speak of medical fetish transplanted out of the lab or hospital and projected into the still more sterile and even more hi-tech environment of a spacecraft. It's intergalactic masochism in which submission is made to an alien overlord rather than a woman in furs.            

Of course, not all exophiles are so passive in their pleasures; some dream of violently penetrating alien bodies and inflicting a maximum amount of pain and suffering upon creatures from outer-space ...

Supervert, for example, is the author of a philosophically-informed, pornographic work entitled Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, in which the protagonist, Mercury de Sade, is a serial-killer looking to make contact with EBEs - not to befriend them, learn from them, or submit to them; but so that he might rape, torture and murder them. 

It's a deeply unpleasant read. But it's also a necessary counternarrative to the moral idealism of Star Trek in which humans and non-humans all rub along together in a kind of rainbow alliance; or, again to paraphrase Annalee Newitz, the playful cosmic permissiveness of Barbarella in which everyone fucks, but no one is ever fucked-up or fucked-over.                    


Notes

Those interested in knowing more about Supervert's Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish (2001) can click here. Or, to read a sample chapter, here. 

Those interested in reading Annalee Newitz's review of the above as it appears on AlterNet (18 Aug 2002), can click here. 

This post was inspired by (and is dedicated to) Zena, who provided the lovely illustration above.  

Chairman Mao and the Swindle of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Image of Chairman Mao:
uncyclopedia.wikia.com

Traditional Chinese Medicine is, of course, an entirely bogus modern phenomenon; a pseudoscience promoted by Chairman Mao that possesses no valid mechanism of action or evidence for its treatments. It's no more effective than the equally dubious remedies offered within European witchcraft.  

Not that this stops millions of believers around the world using obscure herbal remedies, ingesting ground up animal parts - such as tiger bone and rhino horn - or having pins stuck in them in order to release a flow of vital energy along the body's meridians. Attempts to locate these mysterious pathways, or to identify this potency known as qi, have so far proved fruitless. Primarily, this is because they don't exist.

   

Practitioners of alternative medicine, however, don't allow such minor details or anatomical facts to stop them peddling their services and products. If modern knowledge of human physiology and pathology proves problematic to their teachings, they simply start talking about cosmic notions of yin and yang, patterns of harmony and disharmony, or the five phases. Such traditional Chinese wisdom is also, of course, entirely false - if pleasing to metaphysicians everywhere.

Happily, at least some Chinese philosophers are prepared to admit as much. In 2006, for example, Zhang Gongyao published an article entitled 'Farewell to Traditional Chinese Medicine', arguing that TCM in both theory and practice was absurd and should be exposed as such. The Chinese government, however, keenly aware of global export revenues, insisted that it had an important role to play in healthcare and deserved future development. 

And this brings us back to Chairman Mao, who, almost single-handedly invented TCM as we know it today. Let me elaborate by summarizing a recent article by Alan Levinovitz, who is an assistant professor of Chinese Philosophy and Religion at James Madison University ...

Initially, following their victory in the Civil War, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party ridiculed TCM as irrational and backward; something contrary to the Party's programme of modernization and scientific progress. However, when it became clear that they would never be able to afford to establish a national healthcare programme reliant upon highly skilled doctors, expensive drugs, and advanced surgical techniques, Mao revised this position. Now TCM was proudly held up as a great national resource to be developed in opposition to the bourgeois medicine of capitalist imperialism. 

Further, Mao realised that if only the traditional methods could be marketed in the right manner, they could be sold to gullible foreigners. And so the Chinese Communist party set about standardizing TCM into a single theoretical and practical system that could be taught as an alternative (holistic) science concerned with preventative and complimentary healthcare. 

Next, they set about providing Westerners with sensational - but faked - evidence of what TCM could do. Eager to subscribe to the myth of the ancient wisdom of the east, this was, outrageously, accepted at face value by large numbers of the public, as well as many professionals who really should have known better. Before long a craze for TCM - particularly acupuncture - boomed and today you can get all kinds of quack treatments on the NHS! 

Levinovitz nicely puts this into a cultural and historical context:

"The reason so many people take Chinese medicine seriously, at least in part, is that it  was reinvented by one of the most powerful propaganda machines of all time and then consciously marketed to a West disillusioned by its own spiritual traditions. The timing couldn't have been better. Postmodernism was sweeping the academy, its valuable insights quickly degrading into naïve relativism. Thomas Kuhn had just published his theory of paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions ... Alan Watts was introducing hippies to mind-blowing Eastern philosophy; Joseph Campbell was preaching the power of myth. Sick of Christianity and guilty about past imperialist sins, the West was ready to be healed by Mao's sanitized version of Chinese medicine."  

He concludes:

"Ultimately, however, the existence of qi, acupuncture meridians, and the Triple Energizer is no more inherently plausible than that of demons, the four humours, or the healing power of God. It's just that Mao swindled us ..."

Notes: 

Alan Levinovitz's article in the online magazine Slate entitled 'Chairman Mao Invented Traditional Chinese Medicine', can be found by clicking here.

My thanks to Zena McKeown for inspiring this post following a recent conversation on the topic.  

Richard Dawkins on Rape: Good Logic, Bad Thinking

In an attempt to illustrate what philosophers know as a syllogism (i.e. a statement of comparison between two terms that does not necessarily endorse either), Richard Dawkins tweets: "Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse."

As a piece of logic, it's fine. But as an example, it's extremely unfortunate and one does wish he had simply stuck with the algebriac formula of x and y. For whilst clearly not sanctioning date rape, Dawkins nevertheless perpetuates the myth that it's a less serious crime because carried out by someone known to the victim in what are deemed to be less aggravating circumstances.

Such circumstances, however, remain external to what essentially constitutes the crime itself; i.e. fucking someone against their will. If consent is not fully and freely given to sexual penetration (or, in the case of minors, cannot legally be given) and you stick your dick where it isn't wanted and shouldn't be, then that's rape professor!

Indeed, the law is pretty clear on this. So critical opposition voiced on Twitter by those who were troubled by his choice of syllogism is not necessarily proof of their moral absolutism, or inability to think logically; rather, it might simply demonstrate their superior legal knowledge, their more sophisticated understanding of rape, and their rather more sympathetic sexual politics.

Ultimately, rape is rape, just as murder is murder. The story of someone killed with kindness - perhaps a lethal dose of diamorphine discreetly administered before bedtime thereby allowing the victim to slip away peacefully in their sleep - lacks the sensational horror (and thus newsworthiness) of someone hacked to death with a chainsaw, but either way a vile crime has been committed and there's a body lying dead at the end of it.

Now, whilst speaking about degrees of violence and mitigating circumstances doesn't make much difference to a corpse, for a prominent public figure to imply that if a woman happens to know her rapist (and chances are she will) - and that if he comes carrying flowers rather than a weapon - this somehow makes the crime less serious (i.e. hardly even worth reporting), well, that makes a lot of difference - both to women who have to deal with the reality (and existential threat) of rape and, indeed, to the men who refuse to accept their shameful behaviour for what it is.      

In the end, as my friend Zena rightly argues, it's not up to men - even very clever men like Professor Dawkins - to try and define women's experiences of sexual violence.

Sadly, even good logic can result in bad thinking ... 

London Yawning: Lawrence and the Problem of Big City Boredom

Photo of a London hipster wearing red trousers posted 

by Monsieur Henri de Pantalon-Rouge on 15 Dec 2012

on the brilliant blog look at my fucking red trousers

In an article published in the Evening News on 3 September 1928, Lawrence writes of the queer horror for London that immediately grips his soul whenever he returns to the city:

"The strange, grey and uncanny, almost deathly sense of dullness is overwhelming. Of course you get over it after a while, and admit that you exaggerated. You get into the rhythm of London again, and you tell yourself that it is not dull. And yet you are haunted, all the time, sleeping or waking, with the uneasy feeling: It is dull! It is all dull! This life here is one vast complex of dullness! I am dull. I am being dulled. My spirit is being dulled! My life is dulling down to London dullness."  

One can't help wondering if this isn't simply a sign of weariness and ressentiment caused by early-middle age and rapidly failing health; Lawrence is, by this date, very ill with tuberculosis and has only a year-and-a-half left to live. When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. Or so they say. 

But, perhaps anticipating this response, Lawrence in part refutes it by denying that the sense of excitement and wonder which he used to experience when living in London has in any way faded, or deserted him with age: "True, I am now twenty years older. Yet I have not lost my sense of adventure. But now all the adventure seems to me crushed out of London."

And for this, Lawrence - like many a cyclist or pedestrian today - blames the traffic:

"The traffic is too heavy. It used to be going somewhere, on an adventure. Now it only rolls massively and overwhelmingly, going nowhere, only dully and enormously going. ... The traffic of London used to roar with the mystery of man's adventure on the seas of life ... Now it booms like monotonous, far-off guns ... crushing the earth, crushing out life, crushing everything dead."

Even the cheeky London red buses, says Lawrence, lack fun and crawl along routes which terminate in boredom. For what's to do, he asks, except drift about on your own, or meet up with friends in order to have fun and engage in meaningless conversation: "And the sense of abject futility in it all only deepens the sense of abject dullness ..."

Again, that's Lawrence speaking, but it could be a young friend of mine complaining from the heart of hip and happening Hackney earlier this week. 

I'm not sure what Zena would suggest in order to counter and overcome this urban ennui, but I'm pretty certain she'd not share Lawrence's solution which he arrived at in a related article, also first published in the London Evening News, which involves an ironic dandyism. In other words, for Lawrence, the cure for metropolitan dullness is to be found in humour and fashion.

He writes:

"In the ancient recipe, the three antidotes for dullness, or boredom are sleep, drink, and travel. It is rather feeble. From sleep you wake up, from drink you become sober, and from travel you come home again. And then where are you?"     

This is very true. And, sadly, it's also true that the sovereign solution of love has become an impossibility today, despite what Match.com might pretend. But we can still laugh and learn how to treat life as a good joke; not in a cynical, sarcastic, or spiteful manner - but in a gay and carefree fashion:

"That would freshen us up a lot. Our flippant world takes life with a stupid seriousness ... What a bore! 

      It is time we treated life as a joke again, as they did in the really great periods like the Renaissance. Then the young men swaggered down the street with one leg bright red, one leg bright yellow, doublet of puce velvet, and yellow feather in silk cap.

      Now that is the line to take. Start with externals ... and treat life as a good joke. If a dozen men would stroll down the Strand and Piccadilly tomorrow, wearing tight scarlet trousers fitting the leg, gay little orange-brown jackets and bright green hats, then the revolution against dullness which we need so much would have begun."

This, then, is my call (and challenge) to the organizers of and participants in the International D. H. Lawrence Conference which is coming to London in the summer of 2017 - dare to revolt into style like the young man pictured; get yer red trousers on!

Note: The lines by Lawrence are taken from 'Why I Don't Like Living in London' and 'Red Trousers', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 119-22 and pp. 135-38. 

Do You Scroll and Stroll? A Reply to David Sexton

Illustration by Paul Dallimore: Evening Standard (05-11-13)

In an opinion piece entitled 'Do You Scroll and Stroll?' in yesterday's London Evening Standard, a writer by the name of David Sexton argues that due to an increased use of smart devices in public spaces a large number of people have become zombies or phone-drones and scroller trolls. 

Such individuals, he says, are no longer aware of others and only semi-conscious of their surroundings. They have become "little more than human obstacles" that "get in your way" and "collide with you without apology". This, he says, is both insulting and enraging. A form of digital solipsism that has rendered the "sense of shared purpose, of mutual respect in negotiating the daily friction of the city" null and void.

Such individuals, he says, are in "surrogate social worlds, at the expense of the real one."   

Now, all of this, is of course hysterical nonsense and ultimately a form of cheap and lazy journalism, written in an attempt, I suppose, to be amusing and provocative. Philosophically, clinging as it does to the fantasy of a real world, it's embarrassingly naive. But the cheapness, the laziness, the crassness and the naivety pale into insignificance before what follows: a misogynistic incitement to violence. 

For it turns out that Sexton's phone zombies are, "if the truth be told", mostly young women. And, because they are mostly young women caught up in their own "bubble world" of gossip, gaming and googling he is happy to fantasize their deaths beneath the wheels of tube trains and to encourage his readers to yell at girls who dare to use technology in public, or perhaps clap hands in their faces, click fingers, or hold arms out "as if directing idiot traffic". 

Indeed, due to the fact that the capital is such a busy place and - by implication - his is such a busy life - Mr Sexton goes still further and delights in the fact that you can see some men "choosing just not to get out of the way but to make sure they bump hard into the phone addicts walking into them". Indeed, some men "even deliberately try to knock the phones out of their users' hands". 

He admits that such verbal aggression and violent physical assault isn't "nice". But he justifies it on the grounds that a city such as London, full of busy men on important business like himself, "works only when there is mutual tolerance and respect between people sharing a packed public realm" and female phone zombies just don't understand this or give such. And thus these women had "better mind out" - !

Now, I know that the Evening Standard is a paper of such high quality that the publishers have literally to give it away, but, even so ... surely such a shameful article as this can't be acceptable, can it? Free speech is one thing: hate speech is another. 

And so, like Miss Zena McKeown who brought this piece to my attention, I can only call upon the Editor of the Standard, Sarah Sands, to issue some form of apology to all her female readers who have the audacity to carry smartphones and use other devices in Dave Sexton's world.      

Postcard from LA

Scientologists

Dreaming of L. Ron Hubbard

Sun their perfect tits 

As Foucault was at pains to point out, the Californian cult of the self that emerged in the 1960s combining an astonishing level of reactive narcissism with what can only be described as a form of zen fascism was - and remains - far removed from the Classical idea that one's principle duty is to care for the self via the disciplined application of aesthetic values to one's own life and existence.

Epimeleia heautou lies at the heart of Greco-Roman ethics and involves a multitude of complex techniques. But it doesn't mean simply being self-absorbed and self-attached and for Foucault our contemporary obsession with learning how to love our true selves or liberate our inner being from all that might otherwise prevent its unfolding via a combination of psychoanalysis, New Age religion, health foods, jogging, plastic surgery and lying by the pool, is diametrically opposed to what the Stoics might have had in mind for example.

The key difference is perhaps this: in antiquity, the self was an object to be fashioned or given style; in modern society it's a subjective identity to be discovered and in which we are imprisoned. Until we abandon the latter way of thinking based on the concept of soul-substance then we'll never really appreciate what it means to care for the self.   

 

Note: LA Haiku by Zena McKeown was sent on a postcard from Los Angeles dated 12 Aug 2013.

Zena (Written in the Manner of Michel Houellebecq)

Scattered across her bedside table like elements of despair

are the usual signs of life: soiled tissues and rabbit-headed

rings.

Texts from lovers old and new remind her that she's

desirable and her flesh remains firm: that it hadn't

passed its use by date.

Whenever she saw me she'd push her pelvis in my direction

with suggestive irony. I'd glance vaguely at the curve of her

breasts and the bareness of her arms.

On trips abroad she'd visit sex museums and marvel at the

polyamorous exploits of chimpanzees and the prospect of

being pleasured by robots.