Suicide Note

Photo: Adam Rowney, Suicide Rainbow, 2009

I have always been attracted to the idea of suicide. Not because I feel particularly world-weary, or prone to morbid thoughts, but because the act of suicide seems to me to be one that shows tremendous courage and which, paradoxically, takes away life out of a love of life. That is to say, in choosing to die freely and in a manner of their own devising, the suicidal subject offers a form of vital affirmation.  

I would happily kill myself tomorrow were it not for the fact that a very great deal of time and effort is required to produce an originally stylish suicide and I am, alas, fundamentally lazy. Thus whenever I begin to imagine the meticulous preparation that is required - arranging all the details, finding all the right ingredients, shaping the entire enterprise into a true practice of joy - then too do I think: 'Well, maybe the day after tomorrow ...'

And I remember also the following verse by Dorothy Parker:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren't lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

Torture Garden

I'm not a great lover of fetish fashion as it has developed within the BDSM community: it's a little too black, too shiny, and too tied to old-fashioned notions of sex and power for my tastes. And, as so often amongst those who pride themselves on being queer and looking extraordinary, there's a surprising conformism and rubbery-sameness amongst the kinky crowd. This became clear after a visit to Torture Garden (TG), the world's leading fetish venue.

The owners and founders of TG, Messrs Pelling & Wood, like to portray it as an achieved utopia wherein people are free to play, perform, and experiment with practices that challenge norms of social and sexual identity - which they are, just so long as they adhere to the club's strict dress code: No jeans! No trainers! No natural fabrics! 

Of course, it's not street wear or casual clothing that really threatens the TG aesthetic. Rather, it's the kind of inexpensive fancy dress worn by fun-loving girls on a hen-night. Pelling & Wood understand how their up-market fetish business risks being made ludicrous by a bawdy counter-aesthetic that delights in exaggerated bad taste and self-mockery. Thus, whilst they insist that TG's dress code strives to avoid narrow limitations and is primarily in place to encourage "individual imagination and diversity", they nevertheless concede that it ultimately serves to protect the club's status as "edgy and avant-garde".

As good capitalists, Pelling & Wood might want to see their business expand and sell as many pairs of latex knickers to as many people as possible, but they also need to protect their brand image. And so they bemoan the fact - without the slightest hint of irony - that as the fetish scene becomes more mainstream "there has been a commercial element creeping into sections of the crowd".

Continuing, in a paragraph that betrays the full extent of their snobbery and moral allegiance to the principle of the Real, they declare:

"This looks shit and makes TG look shit ... If you have the bad taste to wear ... cheap and cheesy fancy dress please go somewhere else, we don't want you at TG! ... We want the diversity and the fun, but we want authentic costumes that are real ... not cheap fancy dress copies."

www.torturegarden.com

They further warn that Dress Code Staff will ensure that everyone inside TG is dressed "appropriately at all times". What this means is forget about wearing whatever might turn you on and just make sure your outfit conforms to the aesthetic and commercial ideal of the owners - or watch out for the fashion police!

Clearly, Pelling & Wood need to lighten up a little: they should, if you like, smile and say cheese. For as long as they remain faithful to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, TG will remain a haven of art school pretension rather than superficial delight.  

Houellebecq Variations

I'm not really a poet, even if I'm interested in the possibilities and limits of language. Nor am I a qualified translator. 

And so the verses that follow should probably best be thought of as idiosyncratic transformations and deformations of the original poems written by Michel Houellebecq and published in the 1996 collection, Le Sens du Combat. 

I post them here only because I wish to bring greater attention to Houellebecq as a poet in the English-speaking world and in the belief that any embarrassment they might cause will be mine alone.

[Untitled]

Whenever she saw me she'd push her pelvis in my direction
And say with suggestive irony: 'It's kind of you to come ...'
I'd glance vaguely at the curve of her breasts
And then leave. My office was bare.

Last thing Friday I would bin the old files only to
Receive an identical work-load on Monday.
And I liked her very much: she was pitiful; as a piece
Of secretarial meat she had passed her use by date.

She lived somewhere or other near Cheptainville
With a red-haired child and some video tapes.
She was unaware of the rumblings of the city
And on Saturday nights she rented porn films.

She typed the mail and I liked her face:
She very much wanted to be down on her knees.
She was thirty-five or maybe fifty,
She journeyed towards death without concern for her age.


Differentiation, Rue d'Avron

Scattered across the table like droppings are all
The usual signs of life: soiled tissues, spare keys,
And elements of despair reminding me that you
Were once desirable.

Sunday shrouded the local chippy and the bars
Full of immigrants with the same stickiness.
We strolled for a while, happy, before returning home
So as not to know, preferring to stare at one another.

You stripped naked in front of the sink and
If your face lacked the taut beauty of Botox,
Still your body remained firm and seemed to
Cry: 'Look at me! I'm still in one piece -

My limbs are still attached and death hasn't yet
Closed my eyes like those of my brother.
You taught me the meaning of prayer,
Look at me, look! Fix your eyes on my flesh!'


[Untitled]

A sun-exposed soul is threatened
By coastal waves that crash and
Reawaken the dull ache of
Underlying pain.

What would we do without the sun?
Grief, nausea, suffering and all of
Life's stupidities vanish beneath it.

The blue of noon purrs with the
Bliss of physical inertia; the joy
Of death and forgetfulness as
Eyes close in sensitive sleep.

Pitiless, the sea stretches
Like a rousing animal; this
Universe has no law.

What would we do without the sun?

The Woman Who Married the Eiffel Tower

"Things are not only structures with closed contours that lend themselves to manipulation and whose consistency constrains us. They lure and threaten us, support and obstruct us, sustain and debilitate us, direct and calm us. They enrapture us with their sensuous substances and also with their luminous surfaces and their phosphorescent facades, their halos, their radiance and their resonances."

          - Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common.

Thus it is that when we encounter the Eiffel Tower, for example, standing so tall and magnificent amidst the city landscape, what we see before us is not just a large metal structure onto which we might hang all kinds of personal attributes like so many Christmas tree baubles. Rather, amidst the urban chaos of Paris and the noise of the traffic, we encounter an object with its own irresistible imperative, "radiating over us like a black sun, holding us in its orbit, demanding our attention", as Graham Harman rather nicely puts it.  

The object, therefore, is primarily and above all else a force and our love for the object is an effect of this force and not something freely entered into and determined by the amorous subject. And so, when Erika Eiffel speaks of her love for the Tower she indicates she has submitted directly to the sensual power of the latter. For just like living organisms, inanimate objects also have something commanding about them which compels us to acknowledge their uniquely seductive presence and understand them for what they are: actual entities, or real things-in-themselves that exist independently of us.

For this is what the world is: an inhuman arena of innumerable objects that encounter and affect one another in a violent and immoral orgy of existence. To believe that we play a decisive role in this is, of course, merely anthropocentric conceit. Dasein might possess unique ontological insight and so be 'richer in world' than a lizard or a rock, but all objects exist equally within what Lawrence might term a democracy of touch.

To be clear, I've nothing against experiencing the world through the eyes: it's lovely to look at the Eiffel Tower glittering in the sunlight. And it's wonderful to write about the Tower in the manner of Roland Barthes, as sign and symbol. But it's fatally mistaken to think of it as something that exists only as an effect of photons on retinal cells, or within language.

Graham Harman is on the money once more when he writes that the essential being of an object is a "capital X that forever recedes from all contact with human meaningfulness". It cannot, therefore, be seen, or snapped with a camera, or known in full - not even if you love the object dearly and have a  long-term romantic relationship with it.

All objects - including our human lovers - withdraw into the darkness of their own primal reality and even our most brilliant thoughts, intimate fantasies, or tender kisses can ever fully reveal their truth or exhaust their being. The desire for total transparency and the dream of ultimate union with those we love is futile and mistaken.

Even Erika Eiffel seems to me a little greedy in her love. It would be nice if she could just learn to let the Tower be and show a little more respect for the pathos of distance that separates her and the object of her affection, rather than seek some kind of pan-psychic identification or merger into matrimonial oneness.

That said, I sincerely wish her and the Tower all the love and luck in the world.  

Sexy Eiffel Towers

Photo by Petter Hegre: Anna S Eiffel Tower Park (2009)

I'm on the top, with the jump,  jumping to my death,

It's Paris - La Tour Eiffel - the sexiest building left.

Located on the Champ de Mars, La Tour Eiffel is a 320-metre puddle iron construction, weighing some 10,000 tonnes. Erected in 1889, it was named after the engineer, Gustave Eiffel, who oversaw the design and construction.

Initially, many critics - including artists and intellectuals - opposed the building of the Tower. Some feared it would dominate the Parisian skyline and overshadow other much-loved monuments; others derided the proposed structure on the grounds that it lacked any serious purpose or function. Indeed, the Tower's uselessness and frivolity was felt by many to be something of a scandal in an age which prided itself on its utility and seriousness. However, once built it proved an immediate success with the French public and quickly became a global attraction. 

As one of the most recognisable objects on earth, this empty monument has received millions of visitors, served as the architectural inspiration for at least thirty similar towers around the world and featured in numerous films and photographs as an iconic and romantic symbol of the city in which it stands.

Indeed, in a very real sense, La Tour Eiffel is Paris and Paris is La Tour Eiffel and wherever you are in the city you must, as Roland Barthes points out, take endless precautions if you don't wish to see the Tower: whatever time of day, whatever season of the year, whatever might obscure your view and isolate you from it, the Tower is always there. Silently persisting, "it is as literal as a phenomenon of Nature whose meaning can be questioned to infinity but whose existence is incontestable."

                              

But just as every Parisian is obliged to encounter and acknowledge the Tower, so are we all: for it has become present to the entire world, in our dreams and fantasies. Almost the question arises not why some individuals are sexually attracted to the Tower, but why isn't everyone aroused by this virtually pure signifier that paradoxically means everything? 

For La Tour Eiffel excites like no other structure on earth. It is the supreme object and it affords us a multiplicity of pleasures: we can fall in love beneath it and we can fall to our deaths from the top of it. One way or another, it thus promises bliss and stands in all its mysterious thingliness forever beyond human reason. 

In Memory of St Sebastian

The artist and punk-dandy Sebastian Horsley may no longer cruise the streets of Soho, but he continues to haunt my imagination and memory. I miss seeing him sat outside a cafe on Old Compton Street, or strolling along the Charing Cross Road in one of his lurid and ludicrous suits, stovepipe hat, and wide-collared Turnbull & Asser shirts. He was one of the most beautiful and courageous men alive. And he remains so in death. 

For whilst Sebastian never quite mastered the art of painting, he certainly mastered the far more difficult art of dying at the right time. Some die too soon: most die too late. Or so Zarathustra says. But the individual of genius always times their exit to perfection. Thus at the very moment his life became dramatized on stage, Horsely took his leave. He knew that once his persona had become a pure piece of fiction - a role that could be performed just as well, if not better, by actors other than himself - then there was really no need to hang around. It was time to get his coat.

To scorn the thought of one's mortality in this manner - to insist, as Sebastian always insisted, that death doesn't really matter (that it's not the end of the world) - is also to refuse to take seriously all those other judgements of God that weigh down and make gloomy.

And it is precisely this refusal of moral seriousness which so irritates the ascetic idealists who hate dandyism and have no patience with characters such as Horsley. For as long as fashion is concerned only with clothes, bodies, and hairstyles, then there's no problem. But once its playful and perverse indeterminacy begins to affect (and infect) the essential world of values, then there's panic on behalf of those who take these things and themselves very seriously indeed.  

Horsley recognised that what most alarms about dandyism is the fact that it repudiates models of depth. That it is, as he once wrote, a lie which reveals the truth and the truth is we are what we pretend to be. He also knew he was a preposterous and vulgar figure with no social status or role whatsoever: just a futile blast of colour, in a futile colourless world. One of the damned, if you like: but it's better to go to hell well-tailored, than to heaven in rags.

   

Revolt into Style

In an age of terror and impending global catastrophe, there is nothing for it but irony, indifference, and insouciance. What we really don't need right now is a greater degree of earnestness. For fanaticism is always marked by its moral sincerity and is, as Wilde pointed out, the world's original sin: 'If only the caveman had known how to laugh, history might have been different'.

The central argument of any philosophy on the catwalk must surely be that what matters most is that we look good, live dangerously, and love fate; pouring scorn upon all those who fail to recognise their own dullness. D. H. Lawrence provides us with our manifesto:

"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 proceed to internals, 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. ... But it takes a lot of courage to sail gaily, in brave feathers, in the teeth of a dreary convention."  

                                        - 'Red Trousers', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (CUP, 2004), p. 138.

This sailing gaily in brave feathers and the refusal to care is what I understand by the phrase 'revolt into style' - a transpolitical revolt that teaches us to become superficial out of profundity and to appreciate how both society and self are ultimately founded upon cloth, not nature.

Fashion, above all else, is a passion for artifice. This, coupled to its love of empty signs and cycles, is what most alarms the puritan in his grey suit and sensible shoes and not so much its overtly erotic element. For in our culture, tethered as it is to a principle of utility and meaning, the fact that fashion is futile and pointless - and prides itself on such - means that those who like to dress up and mess up are always going to be branded immoral. 

Thus the young man cruising through Soho in brightly coloured clothes for no reason in the middle of the afternoon may well be sexually disconcerting to some people, but this is secondary in comparison to the outrage he causes because of his perceived flippancy, flamboyance, and aristocratic disdain for the world of work.

Ah Sebastian, I miss you!

The Treadwell's Papers

There's an independent bookshop in London called Treadwell's, owned by a very dear friend of mine, Christina. It used to be based in Covent Garden, but is now in Bloomsbury. Over the last eight years I have presented a variety of papers there and I was recently asked if I could compile an index of titles with dates. 

So, for those who might also be interested, here is a list of the 'Treadwell's Papers', beginning with the first series of essays entitled Visions of Excess: A Secret History of Philosophy, from 2004:

I: Sade: The Impossible One (23-02-04)

II: Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ (01-03-04)

III: Bataille: The Accursed One (08-03-04)

IV: Foucault: The Masked Philosopher (15-03-04)

V: Deleuze and Guattari: The Schizonomads (22-03-04)

VI: Among the Ruins: Nihilism, Culture, Art and Technology (29-03-04)

Sex/Magic: Essays on the Erotic and the Esoteric, the Pornographic and the Pagan (2005):

I: Re-dreaming the Dark: Sex, Magic, and Politics (14-02-05)

II: Masturbation: An Invocation of Pan or Sex-in-the-Head? (21-02-05)

III: Cunt Awareness, or Supposing Truth to be a Woman ... (28-02-05)

IV: Anal Sex and the Recovery of Paradise (07-03-05)

V: Ye Shall be Naked in Your Rites: Nature, Truth, and the Quest for Authenticity (14-03-05)

VI: The Whip and the Wand: Fetishistic Aspects of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (21-03-05)

Thanatology: Essays on Death, Sex, Suicide and Sacrifice (2006)

I: On Dissolving the Distinction between Life and Death (14-02-06)
II: All Being is a Being Towards Death (21-02-06)
III: Eros and Thanatos: Love and Death (28-02-06)
IV: Suicide and the Practice of Joy before Death (07-03-06)
V: Solar Economy and Human Sacrifice (14-03-06)
VI: The Death of God  and the Resurrection of the Man Who Died (21-03-06)

Zoophilia: the Bodil Joensen Memorial Lectures (2007)

I: On Dissolving the Distinction between Human and Animal (13-02-07)
II: Ophidicism: Eve and the Serpent (20-02-07)
III: Come Not With Kisses: Leda and the Swan (27-02-07)
IV: Equus Eroticus: Why Do Girls Love Horses? (13-03-07)
V: In the Company of Wolves: Animal Transformation Fantasies (20-03-07)
VI: Becoming-Animal: On Molecular Bestiality (27-03-07)

Reflections beneath a Black Sun: Myth, History, Politics and Paganism (2008)

I: Crackpot History and the Politics of Cultural Despair (11-03-08)
II: From Ariosophy to National Socialism (18-03-08)
III: Only a God Can Save Us Now (25-03-08)
IV: Blood and Soil (01-04-08)
V: Neo-Nazi Mysteries (08-04-08)
VI: On the Spirit of Terrorism (15-04-08)

Finally, and most recently, there have been four one-off presentations (although the three papers given in 2012 have all spun out of a wider on-going project, entitled Sex/Object and so betray a certain sense of continuity and cross-over of materials):

Elements of Gothic Queerness in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' (18-05-11)
Sun-Fucked: On the Dangers and Pleasures of Solar Sexuality (18-01-12)
Floraphilia: The Revenge of the Flowers (19-06-12)
The Pygmalion Syndrome: Sex-Dolls, Solipsism, and The Love of Statues (24-10-12)

Revenge of the Object

And so to Baudrillard's devastatingly cruel story of the woman who asks her lover what part of her he finds the most attractive, thereby seducing him into platitude and towards his own annihilation as a desiring subject. Having replied that it's her eyes that he loves best, the next day he receives in the post a little package tied with a ribbon and containing an eye-ball gauged from its socket by her own fair hand. 

The violence of the act leaves him shocked and speechless. Never again will he cast his objectifying male gaze over the body of a woman with imperious self-assurance. This act of sacrifice has cost her dearly, but it has cost him far more: she loses an eye - but he loses face. 

It is in this manner that the object takes its revenge: via fatal provocation and a senseless act that belongs to the same order of events as a natural catastrophe or terrorist atrocity. 

How then to respond to the gift of the above ring? Doubtless sent with love, but also a certain knowing irony on behalf of Miss McKeown. 

Why I Love Mauro Perucchetti's Jelly Baby Family

There are doubtless many reasons to love Mauro Perucchetti's Jelly Baby Family which, until recently, stood close to Speaker's Corner, challenging and subverting the arrogance and pomposity of John Nash's hateful Marble Arch. Indeed, it was the fact that these colourful resin figures showed such playful indifference to the history of the area in which they stood and seemed to mock said Arch with their post-Pop aesthetic that primarily appealed to me.

It's difficult to convey just how much I loathe Marble Arch. For one thing, it's intimately connected to the British Royal Family and is an open celebration of the violent power of the State. Secondly, it's made of a material which I don't much care for. The fact that marble retains its high-ranking status within a hierarchy of substances and continues to be a privileged medium amongst sculptors and architects keen to produce works within a Classical tradition, means nothing to me: I prefer plastic.

For plastic has none of the cultural pretension of marble and is, in its essence, not only the very stuff of alchemy, as Roland Barthes long-ago pointed out, but it also abolishes the above-mentioned hierarchy of substances, opening the way to a more democratic era. Plastic, if you like, makes free as well as joyful. For plastic affords us the euphoric experience of being able to reshape the world and endlessly create new forms and objects, limited only by our own ingenuity and imagination. It doesn't necessarily allow us to live more beautifully or more truthfully, but that's ok. We are so tired of these things posited as supreme values and of being bullied by our grand idealists who mistakenly equate them with the Good. Today, I prefer the cheap and cheerful over the eternal; the Top Shop mannequin over the Venus de Milo; and the Jelly Baby Family over the House of Windsor.