Odysseus

Like all sirens, her love contains the salt-water certainty

of death for those who leave the safety of the shore,

or foolishly scuttle the little boat of their own

happiness.

But who would want to live a life dependent upon 

bees wax and old rope?

With his bourgeois longing for home and his

hatred of the sea, Odysseus ... disappoints!

On Sadism and the Case of Ian Brady

For a genuine sadist any form of legality is anathema and deserving of contempt; they are simply not aroused out of flaccid indifference and apathy by the thought of a consensual exercise of sexual violence. This is what makes such an individual far rarer, far more dangerous, and far more philosophically problematic than a masochist for whom cruelty is always contracted, rather than criminal.

And so it is that whilst the latter hangs about looking slightly ludicrous and self-conscious at the local fetish club, the former is out burying the bodies of murdered children on Saddleworth Moor. 

What I'm conceding here is that Simon Thomas was perhaps - perhaps - right to insist that Ian Brady cannot be ignored or dismissed simply as a bad reader.

No-Pan Kissa

Whatever the problematic sexual politics of such places, there was something undeniably charming about the Japanese coffee shops known as no-pan kissa that flourished in the 1980s, where the waitresses wore short skirts without underwear and served drinks and snacks to customers fascinated by what they saw reflected on the mirrored floors. 

Alas, such establishments rapidly declined in number as their owners made the fatal error of moving ever-further in the direction of naked truth and full-exposure: this trend terminating in the vaginal cyclorama wherein nude women would sit on the edge of a platform with their legs apart, inviting their male admirers to closely inspect their genitalia. 

As Baudrillard writes, all forms of seduction and traditional striptease pale before this spectacle of absolute obscenity and visual voracity that goes far beyond erotic playfulness towards extreme pornographic idealism. The men who pay to push their faces between open thighs and stare with mortal seriousness, never smiling or trying to touch, are participants within an orgy of realism.

The cunt, meanwhile, made monstrously visible, has simply become another empty sign in a hypersexual realm of simulation. That is to say, the object of desire is itself lost in close-up just as myopic voyeurs end by staring themselves blind. Without a little distance and ambiguity, a little secrecy and even, yes, a little romance (i.e. a metaphorical dimension) there can be no gaze, no seduction, and no sex.

Obscenity means nothing other than that the body and its sex organs are literally and often brutally shoved in your face; there is, says Baudrillard, a total acting out of things that ought to be subject if not to privacy, then to dramaturgy, a scene, a game between lovers.  

 

Bad Romance

The Fall of the House of Usher, by Kristyla at deviantart.com

What was it about incest that so obsessively fascinated the Romantics? 

Although only Byron had experience of it as a practice, the theme was imaginatively explored by many other poets, including Wordsworth and Shelley, for whom it seemed to function as a spiritual principle of absolute identification of the self with the non-self or other. 

The tragic psychodrama of Wuthering Heights, is founded upon an incestuous bond formed between Catherine and Heathcliff. For whilst they are not blood-siblings, they are nevertheless brought up as brother and sister within the Earnshaw family home. Thus their mad striving for an impossible union is somehow shocking and toxic; giving off a kind of 'chthonian miasma', as Camille Paglia writes, which infects and corrupts the social world.        

Like Emily Bronte, Edgar Allan Poe is also concerned with love, the limitations of love, and the fatal transgression of those limits. For whilst we might live by love, we die or cause death if we take love too far; be it in either a spiritual or a carnal direction. Thus, whilst it's perfectly legitimate to be interested in the object of one's affection and quite natural to want to know a good deal about the person one is perhaps planning to marry, it's profoundly mistaken to totally identify with another and attempt to suck the life out of that being. Each of us kills the thing we love most when we love with the terrible intimacy of the vampire.

In his brilliant reading of Poe, Lawrence writes:

"When the self is broken, and the mystery of the recognition of otherness fails, then the longing for identification with the beloved becomes a lust. And it is this longing for identification, utter merging, which is at the base of the incest problem."

                                                

- D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allan Poe' (Final Version 1923), Studies in Classic American Literature, (CUP, 2003), p. 75.

Via incest, lovers can achieve sensational gratification with the minimum of resistance. But it gradually leads to madness, breakdown and death - as we see with Heathcliff and Catherine, or Roderick and Madeline in Poe's classic tale, The Fall of the House of Usher. Both Catherine and Madeline die having had the life and the love sucked out of them, whilst still unappeased. And so both return from the dead in order to drag their lovers with them into the grave:

"It is lurid and melodramatic, but it really is a symbolic truth of what happens in the last stages of inordinate love, which can recognise none of the sacred mystery of otherness, but must unite into unspeakable identification ... Brother and sister go down together, made one in the unspeakable mystery of death."

- D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allan Poe' (First Version 1918-19), Studies in Classic American Literature, (CUP, 2003), p. 238. 

Both Poe and Emily Bronte were great writers, doomed to die young. Was it, one might ask, the same thing which ultimately killed them? For both experienced the same heightened consciousness of desire taken to its furthest extreme as they entered what Lawrence describes as the 'horrible underground passages of the human soul', grimly determined as they were to discover all that there is to know about the obscene disease that ruins so many idealists: Love. 

The Case of Jessica Ahlquist: Evil Little Thing

Christianity, we are told by its adherents, is a religion of love. And forgiveness. And understanding. A religion that prefers to turn the other cheek and to judge not. But the case of Jessica Ahlquist once more provides shocking evidence to the contrary.

A teenage student at Cranston High School West in Rhode Island, Ms Ahlquist inadvertently made herself the pin-up girl of secularists everywhere in 2012 following a successful lawsuit to remove a religious prayer banner from her school auditorium, thereby defending the United States Constitution which expressly separates church and state (those who are interested in this should take a look at the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment).

During the two years of the law suit, Ahlquist was subject to vile abuse in the media and online; received further hate mail in the post - including a number of rape and death threats - and required a police escort to and from her classes. To top it all off, on the day after Ahlquist won her ruling a Rhode Island State Representative, Peter G. Palumbo, described her on local radio as an "evil little thing".

Thankfully, she has continued to speak up as an atheist and a champion of civil liberties and has received a number of awards for her activism. Further, sales of a t-shirt produced by supporters with the words evil little thing printed on the front raised over $62,000 and this money was presented to Jessica in order to provide her with a college education fund. 

In a sense, she's our Malala, standing up to religious fanatics and insisting on her right to an education that values freedom of thought over superstition and dogma. One can only hope that she needn't take a bullet to the head before her bravery is officially recognized not only in the Playboy Mansion, but in the White House too.   

Negritude

Image from madamenoire.com

I love everything about you -

not least the impossible blackness of your skin

and the way you walk bare-foot 

at the cocktail party

arousing

a mixture of desire and disapproval

in your white host who fantasises

about your 'exotic otherness'

but fears

you might laugh 

at his nakedness.

Breast Relief for a Dying God

Madonna for Dolce and Gabbana (AW 2010)

Look! there's Jesus hanging on a little golden cross,
snuggled obscenely between a warm pair of tits.

What would his mother Mary have made of this;
or she whose embrace he so cruelly refused?

Would it have secretly satisfied them to know
how son and saviour is finally reconciled with
the softness of female flesh?

Gender Patterns

One of the things that is often overlooked in debates about the sexual objectification of women in the arts, media and society, is the fact that it does not just attempt to impose a restrictive model of femininity and a norm of female behaviour. It also - just as insidiously - constructs male identity, determining how men should view women, as well as understand their own selves and their relationships to others.    

Thus the so-called lads' mags - to take an example that has been much discussed of late, thanks to a campaign co-organized by UK Feminista - do not merely objectify the girls stripped naked on their covers and within their pages; they also subjectify their adolescent male readers and provide a masturbatory and misogynistic channeling of what is wrongly assumed to be an instinctive and innocent flow of desire.

Lawrence was only half-right when he said that women need to follow ever-changing patterns of femininity and to constantly adapt themselves to male fantasies and theories of womanhood. Young men also seek codes of conduct to which they might subscribe and conform; they learn how to sit, how to stand, how to walk, how to talk, how to love, how to hate ...

The truth is there are no real men any more than there are real women. Gender is entirely a matter of cultural artifice and whilst the patterns we construct of manhood and womanhood may sometimes be very beautiful and sometimes truly grotesque, they're never "perverted from any real natural fulness of human being". This is simply a piece of idealistic naivety: for no such underlying metaphysical essence exists.

And so the real question is: what models of manhood and womanhood are we going to create as a society (if such models there must be); who will determine them; how will they be circulated and encoded; and what variations and infringements will we allow?

I would hope that we might do better than what we are presently stuck with; tired and lame patterns of men and women within a very regrettable system of dualism that shame us all in their emotional and imaginative poverty.     

Note: See D. H. Lawrence, 'Give Her a Pattern', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (CUP, 2004), pp. 160-65.

Two Blue Birds

"There was a woman who loved her husband, but she could not live with him. The husband, on his side, was sincerely attached to his wife, yet he could not live with her. ... They had the most sincere regard for one another, and felt, in some odd way, eternally married to one another. They knew each other more intimately than they knew anybody else, they felt more known to one another than to any other person.

      Yet they could not live together. Usually, they kept a thousand miles apart, geographically. But when he sat in the greyness of England, at the back of his mind, with a certain grim fidelity, he was aware of his wife ... away in the sun, in the south. ...

      So they remained friends, in the awful unspoken intimacy of the once married." 

- D. H. Lawrence, 'Two Blue Birds', in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, (CUP, 1995), p. 5. 

As a matter of fact, this is probably quite common - or at least more common than many might imagine. And I have a good deal of sympathy for Compton Mackenzie and his wife, Faith, whom Lawrence is sardonically taking a pop at here, having personally experienced (and survived) a relationship very similar to this one. 

It's not easy, but, if you can avoid the fall into private bitterness and secret resentment, you can, I'm very happy to say, eventually find a resolution to what sometimes seems an impossible situation: one that leaves you both free to move on and build new lives, but in which you continue to regard your ex with affection.

Doubtless, it's sometimes necessary to make a clean break with the past and discard those who have at one time or another been nearest and dearest. But as Christopher Hitchens points out, one of the melancholy lessons of advancing years is the realization that you can't make old friends.  

Wuthering Heights

No coward soul is mine / No trembler in the world's storm-startled sphere

"We're a long way from Wuthering Heights," as Michel Houellebecq rightly points out. Nevertheless, it remains one of the few truly great works of fiction and continues to implicate its readers in what Bataille calls the crime of literature and by which he refers to the fact that writing has a complicity with evil. For what literature reveals is the possibility of a form of sovereignty that does not negate or exclude morality, but which demands a hyper-morality existing beyond biblical injunction. 

What Charlotte regrets as the immature and immoderate faults in her sister Emily's novel are in fact what lend it such savage beauty and potency. And what is so admirable about the younger sister is that she has the courage to allow the demon to speak directly in her poetry and prose; Charlotte prefers to gently but firmly place her hand over the demon's mouth so that she may at all times speak for him. 

Thus Charlotte, when editing the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, not only changes the paragraphing and punctuation in an attempt to regularize Emily's idiosyncratic style, she also seeks to impose an element of contrived and conventional humanity into the work at the expense of that which is uniquely and diabolically inspired.  

Thankfully, the perversity, the cruelty, the madness, and the morbidity that characterize the novel continue to shine through and Wuthering Heights remains one of those books that readers weary of the narrow limitations imposed by moral or literary convention (not to mention interfering siblings) will continue to find of much value. Emily's understanding of love - based not on worldly personal experience, but impersonal inner intensity - not only linked sex to death, but suggested that each of these contained the essential truth of the other. Her novel thus illustrates the basic premise underlying authors such as Sade and Bataille: eroticism is the affirmation of life all the way to its fatal conclusion.

It is this disconcerting truth that lies at the heart of Wuthering Heights and which gives it an affinity with the great works of Greek tragedy; all of which ultimately concern the violation of the Law (be it divine, human, or natural in origin). Emily dreams of a sacred and transgressive form of violence via which lovers might regain paradise (or childhood innocence). If this was promised by Romantic literature in general, it is Wuthering Heights which most powerfully shows us the full horror of atonement and the tragic character of life (it bleeds, it suffers, it dies, it returns). This may not make it a holy book in a religious sense, but it certainly makes it a great work of art.