Two Postcards from Catalonia

Blanes

How queer it is in February -

the snow-still month of my birth -

to stroll beneath the orange trees

and through the cactus groves

whilst the souls of Spanish sailors

fly overhead and far out to sea

in search of little fish.

Sitges

Black rocks
housing cats with sea-spray on their whiskers
and forming catwalks for homosexual lovers
strolling hand-in-hand.

Sex on the Beach

Many people seem to be excited by the thought of sex on the beach, despite the gritty reality of sand. But considerably fewer people desire to have sex with the beach.

And yet, the latter seems infinitely more pleasurable and full of possibility than having to penetrate another human body with all the usual built-in features: the same limbs, the same organs, the same expectations and responses. How dreary even love becomes when it never flickers or wavers or changes and becomes a mechanical exercise in pure repetition: in-out, in-out and shake it all about. If that's what sex is all about then, frankly, it's hardly worth the effort.

But, of course, sex needn't be so limited and repetitive: so human, all-too-human. It can become bestial, or object-oriented, elemental or even cosmic in character. I know of a woman, for example, who took the sun as a lover. And in The Trespasser, Lawrence describes with all his usual perverse brilliance the inhuman and purifying erotics of sun, sea, and sand.

Although ostensibly on a short holiday on the Isle of Wight with his young mistress in order that they might spend some time together and momentarily forget about his domestic entanglements, Siegmund seems to get more satisfaction from the beach than he does from the body of Helena. One day, whilst the latter frolics in the waves, Siegmund swims off to explore a tiny hidden bay, inaccessible from the land:

"He waded out of the green, cold water  ... Throwing himself down on the sand ... he lay glistening wet ... The sand was warm to his breast and and his belly and his arms. It was like a great body he cleaved to. Almost, he fancied, he felt it heaving under him in its breathing. Then he turned his face to the sun, and laughed. All the while, he hugged the warm body of the sea-bay beneath him. He spread his hands upon the sand: he took it in handfuls, and let it run smooth, warm, delightful, through his fingers.
      ... And he laid his hands again on the warm body of the shore, let them wander, discovering, gathering all the warmth, the softness, the strange wonder of smooth, warm pebbles, then shrinking from the deep weight of cold his hand encountered as he burrowed under the surface, wrist-deep. In the end, he found the cold mystery of the deep sand also thrilling. He pushed in his hands again and deeper, enjoying the almost hurt of the dark, heavy coldness. For the sun and the white flower of the bay were breathing and kissing him dry ... holding him in their warm concave, like a bee in a flower ...
      Siegmund lay and clasped the sand and tossed it in handfuls till over him he was all hot and cloyed. Then he rose and looked at himself and laughed ... and began to rub himself free of the clogging sand. He found himself strangely dry and smooth. He tossed more dry sand, and more, over himself ... Soon his body was dry and warm and smooth ... his body was full of delight and his hands glad with the touch of himself. He wanted himself clean. ... He went painfully over the pebbles till he found himself on the smooth rock bottom. Then he soused himself, and shook his head in the water, and washed and splashed and rubbed himself with his hands assiduously. ... It was the purification. ... He felt as if all the dirt of misery were soaked out of him ... So white and sweet and tissue-clean he felt, full of lightness and grace."

- D. H. Lawrence, The Trespasser, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield, (CUP, 1981), pp. 88-89.

When was the last time you felt like that after a quick fuck on the beach with some local picked up in a bar? 

Aux armes et caetera

 Photo of Serge Gainsbourg by Jean-Jacques Bernier (1985)

Allons enfants de la Patrie / Le jour de gloire est arrivé! 

It's Bastille Day - one of the few dates in history genuinely worth celebrating.

I pretty much love all things French: the wine, the women, the food, the literature, the philosophy, the fashion, the music, the arrogance, the joie de vivre and the je ne sais quoi. But most of all I love Serge Gainsbourg who, somewhat ironically, most beautifully and brilliantly embodied the very essence of France and the spirit of 1789.

And perhaps my favourite Gainsbourg story (amongst several possible contenders) concerns his reggaefied version of the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, which so outraged and disgusted the paramilitary forces of the French far-right. It was an obvious provocation, with affinities to both the Jimi Hendrix version of The Star Spangled Banner and the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen and there were calls made for Gainsbourg to be stripped of his citizenship. 

Events came to a head when Gainsbourg went on tour with his Jamaican musicians to promote his new album, Aux Armes Et Caetera (1979). In Strasbourg, an ex-paratrooper presented the mayor with a petition demanding that the show be cancelled and threatening violence if it went ahead. 

Despite this - and in courageous defiance of the forces of reaction and racism - Serge took to the stage, alone, and sang the anthem in its original version, much to the confusion and consternation of those in the crowd who had come to disrupt proceedings, before walking off with a gesture of 'Fuck you!'

Two years afterwards, just to ensure he would have the final word in the affair, Gainsbourg purchased the original manuscript of La Marseillaise by Rouget de Lisle. It almost bankrupted him to do so, he said, but it was a question of honour.

Vive la France! Vive la Revolution! Et vive Gainsbourg! 

A Short Sermon on Anti-theism

The creeping religiosity of everyday life here in the UK - not to mention the appalling acts of violent atrocity carried out by the faithful all over the world - means that it unfortunately becomes necessary to voice a view on the subject. 

And so, for the record, my view is this:

(1) All the world's major religions wholly and often wilfully misrepresent the origins of the cosmos and of life on earth. Where they don't get things wrong due to the ignorance of their founders and prophets, they lie due to the desire of their priests and spiritual leaders to keep everyone else ignorant. 

(2) All the world's major religions are based upon anthropomorphic conceit and human arrogance and yet they all aim to make men, women and children subservient and fearful.

(3) All the world's major religions are forms of cruelty that exercise power over the mind by punishing and torturing the flesh via practices that include sexual repression, blood sacrifice, and genital mutilation.   

(4) All the world's major religions are nihilistic death cults that fantasise and call for the end of the world so that they might then establish a reign of saints and zombies afterlife, or achieve a state of total non-being. 

(5) Inasmuch as points 1-4 are true - and it seems to me that they are irrefutable - then we might legitimately conclude that all the world's major religions (and not just the monotheisms of Abrahamic origin) are forms of violent psychosis, or a hatred of the real. 

Thus, in my view, it is not sufficient to declare oneself agnostic on the question of religion, although, obviously, it is always preferable that an individual honestly admits their ignorance, rather than absurdly claim to know God's will. Nor is it enough, today, to simply call oneself an atheist: one has to actively declare an interest and take up the challenge by affirming nothing short of anti-theism in the courageous manner of Christopher Hitchens, for example, who wrote:

"I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effects of religious belief, is positively harmful."

- Letters to a Young Contrarian, (2001)

Like Hitchens, I think religion poisons everything and has been the one great curse upon mankind. If I could, I'd happily tear down every church, mosque, synagogue, temple, shrine or holy place and build schools, science museums, libraries, observatories, art galleries, theatres, gymnasia, dance academies and botanical gardens on the sites.  

As I am unable to do so, however, I simply encourage everyone to keep reading, keep thinking, keep laughing, and keep challenging all those who would establish earthly authority in the name of heavenly power.

On the Stuttering of Language

I recently had an interesting and enjoyable evening at Europe House, where bilingual Spanish/English writers Isabel del Rio and Susana Medina were discussing their work and promoting new books.

Both women seemed keen to advance the idea that by writing in two languages simultaneously they were evolving a new literary genre that was beyond simple translation. Although their argument was coherent and their experimental practice of writing in the space between different cultures perfectly commendable, I'm afraid I wasn't convinced that anything radically new was on offer.  

In fact, I agree with Deleuze that great writers always and already inhabit their native languages like foreign agents and bring writing to a crisis in some manner by carving out a nonpreexistent language within their own tongue:

"This is not a situation of bilingualism or multilingualism. We can easily conceive of two languages mixing with each other, with incessant transitions from one to the other; yet each of them nonetheless remains a homogeneous system in equilibrium, and their mixing takes place in speech. But this is not how great authors proceed ... they do not mix two languages together, not even a minor language and a major language .... What they do, rather, is invent a minor use of the major language within which they express themselves ... They are great writers by virtue of this minorization: they make the language take flight ... ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium .... They make the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur."

- Gilles Deleuze, 'He Stuttered', Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael E. Greco, (Verso, 1998), pp. 109-10. 

Language Death

 Language Death, by Orooo on deviantart.com

Is English just a language like any other? 

I don't think so: rather, it seems to me that English is a kind of monstrous metalanguage. Even we might think of it as a kind of voracious black hole into which other tongues collapse and die, leaving behind a few words like seeds, which will blossom as part of an ever-expanding global English or übertongue.

And this is why English-speakers are notoriously monolingual: for they already speak every other language under the sun. 

  

Dr Bayard's Cough Drops

Some of the things that make happiest in life are small and inexpensive pleasures carried forward from and reminiscent of childhood. Such as a bag of sweets. 

The very names are often enough to trigger delight: black jacks, sherbet pips, kola cubes, love hearts, lemon bonbons, strawberry bonbons, pear drops, glacier mints, jelly tots, wine gums, humbugs ... the list is a long and delirious one of lip-smacking, gob-stopping wonder. 

Heaven, it seems, is sugar-rich and full of artificial colours.  

But these days, having succumbed to middle-age, I must almost shamefully confess that my confectionery of choice happens to be a very smooth aniseed-flavoured cough drop invented by a French physician in 1949 and still made to his original secret recipe at a factory in Portugal. 

Recommended by pharmacists the world over, Dr Bayard's cough drops are more than just medicinal wonders; they are also - like Ferrero Rocher - a welcome addition to any social occasion. Or so we are told by the manufacturers in their rather charming attempt at English: "Even in a friends gathering they're always a success!" 

If they lack the anarchic and childlike character of the best of British sweets and trade instead on grown-up bourgeois credentials, they remain eccentric enough in a European manner to make one smile and delicious enough to ensure I keep sucking them. I do worry though that I'm on a slippery slope towards Werther's Originals.

Storming the Angel-Guarded Gates

There has been such a long and intimate relation between philosophy and anal sex that one might almost wonder if there isn't some level of causality involved; does the perverse love of wisdom result of necessity in a desire for the apples of Sodom?

What even those who shy away from such a conclusion cannot deny is that the history of the former might easily be conceived in terms of the latter, as happily confessed by Deleuze, who tells us that his own early method of doing philosophy involved the taking of an author from behind and in this way producing monstrous offspring.
 

D. H. Lawrence also values the anus as a site of libidinal and philosophical experimentation. Indeed, he boldly suggests that it might provide a gateway to paradise and several of his novels contain scenes in which buggery is promoted as a way of overcoming organic shame and rediscovering a kind of bestial innocence.  

It requires a cock in the arse, decides Connie, even to purify and quicken the mind.

We Belong to our Bacteria

Thanks to recent discoveries in microbiology, it is now known that we are composed of 90% bacteria. Thus, in cellular terms, we are just 10% human. 

This means we are not quite the self-contained, self-sufficient individuals made in the image of God that we pride ourselves on being. Rather, we are germ collectives and might do best to think of our bodies as elaborate vessels specially evolved for the growth and spread of our bacterial inhabitants, rather than designed to house an immortal soul.      

For creationists and other believers in human uniqueness, this must surely be a challenge to their faith. It was tricky enough when they simply had our genetic closeness to apes and a single common ancestor to contend with. Now they have to deny - or explain - the presence of 100 trillion bacteria, on our skin, in our mouths and intestines, or swimming across the surface of our eyes, many of which serve in the vital business of sustaining our life, but some of which, given half-a-chance, will kill us.

Have pathogens also been designed by a loving God? It's unlikely.

And so it's probably best if we put aside the bible and forget notions of intelligent design. Even we might finally decide to abandon the idea of Almighty God and learn to love our bodies in all their alien complexity: I, for one, welcome our microbial overlords.

Even the Dead Don't Rest in Peace

Georges Bataille was not mistaken when he spoke of death as a shipwreck into the nauseous and repeatedly emphasized the excremental nature of the corpse which, thanks to putrefaction, rapidly dissolves into noxious base matter. 

First to go, as home to the greatest number of bacteria, are the digestive organs and the lungs. The brain also soon liquifies, as it is nice and soft and easy to digest. The massively expanding numbers of bacteria in the mouth chew through the palate and transform grey matter into goo. Quite literally, it runs out of the ears and bubbles like snot from the nose; in this manner, we're all destined to lose our minds. 

After three or four weeks, all of the internal organs will have become soup. Muscle tissue is frequently eaten not only by bacteria, but also by carnivorous beetles. Sometimes the skin gets consumed as well, sometimes not. Depending on the weather and other environmental conditions, it might just dry out and naturally mummify. Whatever remains, however, will be obliged to lie in a stinking pool of organic filth, or a coffin full of shit. 

Burial might serve to prolong the process of decomposition, but it certainly doesn't prevent it or delay it indefinitely. As Mary Roach in her amusing study, Stiff (2003), writes: "Eventually any meat, regardless of what you do to it, will whither and go off." Only the skeletal structure beneath the soft pathology of the flesh will last for any significant period of time. But bones too - just like laws and monuments - are ultimately destined to crumble into dust.

Thus we have little real choice but to accept the biological fact that life dies. But is this the end of the story? No. The truth is, we never stop dying because, in a material, non-personal, inhuman manner, we never stop living. In other words, it's mistaken to confuse our individual death with non-being.

"Is it because we want to believe in the loyalty of our substance that we make this peculiar equation?" asks Nick Land.* Probably the answer to this is yes. But it's a somewhat shameful answer. 

For whether we like to believe it or not, matter is always struggling to escape essence and to abandon complex existence; always seeking to return to a state of inanimate and blissful simplicity. Our bodies have no allegiance to life and do not seek to stave off disintegration or shut out death. They grow into the embrace of the latter (we term this ageing) and our mass of atoms enjoy a veritable orgy of delight after having broken free from their temporary entrapment in life.

Unfortunately for them, they don't get to enjoy their freedom for long. For death proves to be but a "temporary refreshment ... before the rush back into the compulsive dissipation of life".* Which is to say, atoms are so vigorously recycled at death that they don't ever get to rest in peace. 

It further means that we, the living, all house and reincarnate the carbon atoms of the departed and in this way the souls of the dead might be said to re-enter and pervade the souls of the living. Thanks to the conservation of mass, we can legitimately declare ourselves to be 'all the names in history'.    

* See: Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992), p. 180.