The Case of Evelyn McHale (The Most Beautiful Suicide in the World)

Photo of Evelyn McHale, by Robert C. Wiles. 

For poets, there is nothing more romantic than the suicide of someone young; particularly if they take their lives with an element of style and manage to leave behind them a good-looking corpse. And no one has managed to achieve this feat with more success than an attractive, twenty-three year old bookkeeper, called Evelyn McHale, in 1947.

Hers is often described as the most beautiful suicide in the world and I’m happy to share this view. What makes her case so magnificent and not merely tragic (or mundane), are the following six points:

1. She chose a magical date, May 1st, an ancient spring festival, on which to make her self-sacrifice, thereby lending her death a certain mythical aspect or celebratory pagan splendour.

2. She chose the right method for her location. When in Berlin, for example, one should swallow poison or use a gun; in London, it’s appropriate to throw oneself from a bridge into the Thames, or onto the tracks of the Underground before an approaching train. But, as Serge Gainsbourg observed, New York is all about the astonishing height of its buildings. And so, when in NYC, one simply has to jump.

3. Having chosen, rightly, to jump, Evelyn then selected one of the two truly great and truly iconic modern structures from which to leap: the Empire State Building. This 102-story skyscraper, located in Midtown Manhattan, is, with its beautiful art deco design, the perfect place from which to fall to one’s death and since its opening in 1931 only a select number of lucky souls have had the privilege (and fatal pleasure) of plunging from this iconic site.

4. She was impeccably dressed for the occasion, with gloves and a simple, but elegant, pearl necklace. Before jumping she calmly removed her coat and neatly folded it over the wall of the 86th floor observation deck. She also left behind her a make-up kit, some family snaps, and a suicide note written in a black pocketbook, in which she asked to be cremated without any kind of fuss or service of remembrance. In other words, even in death, Evelyn kept her composure - which brings us to our fifth point:

5. She didn’t land with an undignified splat on the pavement of 34th Street; but, rather, with a crash onto the roof of a waiting car. And it wasn't just any old car - it was a UN Assembly limousine, as if she wanted to make an impression on the entire world. And impression, as we see from the photo above, is the key word here. For Evelyn literally impressed herself into the roof of the Cadillac, so that it seemed to fold round her, with metallic tenderness. There is almost nothing to suggest the terrible violence of the scene - apart from the ripped stockings and the absence of shoes.

6. She conspired with fate to ensure there was a photographer nearby to instantly capture the event of her death on film; thereby ensuring her place within the cultural imagination. Indeed, fifteen years later, Andy Warhol would incorporate her image into his work, just as he did images of other beautiful women, including Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor.

As for the student photographer, Robert C. Wiles, he also struck it lucky that day; his astonishing photo of Evelyn was published in Life Magazine as a full-page 'Picture of the Week' in the May 12 issue. It was his first - and last - photo ever to be published and one likes to imagine he hung his camera up after taking this perfect shot, but I don't know if this is true or not.

I'll stop here - but I could of course talk about (and darkly caress) this topic forever. For Camus was right: there is only one truly serious philosophical question - and that is the question of suicide.

On the Whistling of Birds at Midnight

Image taken from Cathy Fisher's blog: Diary of an Account Manager

It's 'round midnight: but I can't sleep.

The robin who seems to live in my mother's back garden is singing still and, of all the sounds in the world, I love best the whistling of birds; more than whale song and more than even the most accomplished human voice. 

Thus, when there's a robin still filling the air with his silvery sound of defiance and affirmation, I'll always lend an ear to listen, whatever the hour. As Lawrence says, the song just bubbles through them, as if they were little fountain-heads of vitality and new creation.

But the question arises as to why the city-living robins have taken to nighttime singing; they are not naturally nocturnal birds, like nightingales, even if they like to sing well into the evening as the sun sets. 

The experts seem undecided. They used to think it was due to the increase in noise during the day - that the birds literally couldn't hear themselves think (or in this case sing) above the roar of traffic. But now the consensus seems to be that the real problem is light pollution; that it's no longer dark enough for our feathered friends to know when night has fallen and it's time to shut the fuck up and go to sleep. 

Either way, it can't be much fun being an urban robin; trapped in a perpetual electric twilight and forced to endure a constant hubbub during the day. Their numbers, unlike other species of once common garden birds, may not (so far) be declining, but they must be constantly exhausted, poor things.

How long will it be, I wonder, before something of this fatigue creeps into their song?

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Whistling of Birds', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 19-24. 

Francesca Woodman: An American Genius

Francesca Woodman: Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 (1976)

Tate / National Galleries of Scotland (AR00352)

© George and Betty Woodman

I have to confess that I only recently came across the work of American photographer Francesca Woodman, but I was immediately fascinated by her beautiful (often disturbing) black and white images which have a queer, gothic and surreal quality that is seductive in the sense that Baudrillard gives the term. That is to say, the photos partake of a game of slow exposure that is all to do with appearance and disappearance, and playing with the signs of sexuality and self-hood.

Woodman works in a manner that is not only highly stylized and disciplined, but also ritualistic and fetishistic; a combination of primitive magic and aristocratic aestheticism. She turns her own body into just another object, semi-exposed, but mostly withdrawn and concealed, existing in relation to other things (chairs, doors, mirrors, a bucket full of eels) that are equally real, equally fragile, and equally mysterious.

Born in 1958, Woodman was only twenty-two when she committed suicide in 1981, pissed, apparently, with the slowness with which her work was garnering critical attention or achieving commercial success. In a letter to a friend (written around the time of an earlier attempt to end her life), Woodman says she’d rather die young and leave behind her a delicate body of work, than see herself and her pictures fade away or be slowly erased by time.

Death, she realised, would be the making of her; for hers, like Nietzsche's, would be a posthumous existence. And this tragic realisation, coupled to her precocious talent for blurred image-making, makes me very fond of dear Francesca: an American genius.

Ben Carson: An American Idiot

Ben Carson by Gage Skidmore (2015)

Donald Trump is clearly not stupid: ignorant, perhaps, but he's mostly just a nasty piece of work; or flamboyant, as his new Russian buddy, Vladimir Putin, would say.

Ben Carson, on the other hand, who is also a candidate for the Republican Party nomination for President in the 2016 election, is not an out-and-out shit, but he does believe (and say) some very, very stupid things.

This is almost entirely due to the fact that, sadly, this retired (and much respected) neurosurgeon suffers from religious fundamentalism; a degenerative brain disorder that turns fine minds to mush.

Carson, as one commentator has put it, is an African-American who downplays the reality of slavery and continuing problems of racism in the US, and a man of medicine and higher education who denies many of the modern scientific facts and discoveries upon which our knowledge of the world is based.

Thus, for example, Carson not only thinks that evolution is a mistaken theory, but one to which Darwin was led by Satan! His argument is that something as beautifully complex as the human brain couldn't have arisen from a slime pit full of promiscuous biochemicals. In addition, Carson ridicules the idea of the Big Bang and rejects the validity of evidence provided by carbon dating.

Of course, many amongst the electorate seem to share Carson's prejudices - not to mention those who identify strongly as creationists, young-earthers, or proponents of intelligent design. But surely, even in America, there can't be many people who also subscribe to the popular medieval belief - as Carson does - that the Egyptian pyramids were not in fact ancient tombs, but elaborate grain silos, built by Joseph, son of Jacob, in preparation for a famine described in the book of Genesis.

Not only are archaeologists fairly certain that the pyramids were used for funerary purposes, but, as they also point out, they would have made pretty poor storage units for grain - as they aren't hollow!

Couple these (and many other) crackpot and controversial views to his reactionary positions on issues such as abortion, homosexuality, health care, immigration, and climate change and it becomes clear why Carson is, in the words of the song, an American idiot.

On the Truth of Things

Artwork by Tyler Feder

roaringsoftly.com

According to Foucault, the ancient Greeks were mostly interested in a conception of public and political parrhesia that obliged them (and accorded them the privilege) of speaking the truth to others (including those in authority), in order to guide them and help facilitate wise government. 

The early Christians, on the other hand, were more concerned with a personal-psychological form of parrhesia (eventually institutionalized as a system of penitence); the moral obligation of each individual to confess the truth about themselves, in order to be freed from the burden of sin and thereby saved.

This, as Foucault says, is a significant moment of transformation in the long history of parrhesiastic practice; a history that he goes to great pains within his late lectures to reconstruct in order that he may better analyze the relations between subjectivity, language, and power - this essentially being his philosophical project in a nutshell. 

Now, fascinating as this project is - and one has to invariably return to politics and psychagogy (or questions concerning the governance of self and others) sooner or later - I have to admit that one of the great attractions of object-oriented ontology and other related forms of what Bill Brown terms thing theory, is that they allow one to be seduced by those entities that make up an inhuman and non-human universe and encourage the asking of questions that do not always posit Man as the central subject, final solution, or great point of correlation.

In other words, the beauty and the truth of things is they exist mind independently and it's a real joy to occasionally write about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens (not to mention bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens), rather than just human ideas and human relations.


Note: The lyric quoted in the final paragraph is - as I'm sure everybody knows - from the song 'My Favourite Things', from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The Sound of Music (1959).

Post 555: The Scent of a Woman

The number five has no special significance or interest for me, although I'm vaguely aware of its symbolism within certain circles and that ancient Greek philosophers were endlessly fascinated by the mathematical beauty and symmetry of those three-dimensional shapes (or regular polyhedra) that became known as Platonic solids and of which there are five. 

The French fashion designer and couturier, Coco Chanel, also had a thing for the number five and it was rich with powerful associations for her. Indeed, for Chanel, five was the essential number and one which, she felt, always brought her luck. Thus, for a woman who liked to regularly launch her new collections on the fifth of May, it was only natural that she should choose the name No. 5 for her first (and to this day most famous) of perfumes.

Created by Franco-Russian chemist and perfumer, Ernest Beaux, Chanel No. 5 was released in 1921 and was designed as a scent for a new generation and a new style of independent, post-War women, with their short skirts, bobbed hair, and outlandish behaviour that pushed social and sexual boundaries.

Beaux worked from a rose and jasmine base, but brilliantly managed to make it cleaner and more daring than might be expected, by adding what he described as an element of pristine polar freshness. He also experimented with modern synthetic compounds and notes derived from a new commercial ingredient called Jasophore (an artificial source of jasmine). His complex formula also contained elements of orris root and natural musks. The revolutionary key, however, was Beaux's use of aldehydes; organic compounds which, when skilfully manipulated, can arrest and isolate specific scents, intensifying their aroma.

The bottle that the fragrance came in was also designed to counter the overly-ornate character of Victorian crystal which was then still in fashion and made popular by companies such as Lalique. Chanel wanted a container that would be lovely in its sheer simplicity and pure transparency; what she thought of as an invisible bottle. The perfection of the scent itself, she believed, meant not having to rely upon fancy packaging. As an ad from 1924 put it: Chanel is proud to offer its precious teardrops of perfume - unique in composition and of incomparable quality - in bottles that reveal the personality of their designer and not the customary art of the traditional glass-maker.    

Over the many decades since its release, Chanel No. 5 has managed to retain its magic and its allure, establishing itself as an immediately identifiable cultural artifact, worn by many beautiful women the world over; this despite the fact that the reputation of its creator has been somewhat tarnished by ugly revelations concerning her conduct during the German occupation of Paris ...

A girl, Chanel once said, has to keep her heels, head, and standards high; always remaining classy and fabulous. Quite how that squares with Nazi collaboration is debatable. For as a friend of mine once said, even the finest perfume in the world doesn't mask the malodorous smell of fascism.          

Torpedo the Ark Xmas Message 2015

Actually, as a philosopher, I try to avoid dealing in opinions - particularly personal opinions - and I can't stand opinionated persons who pride themselves on the strength of their conviction; as if something is true simply because they feel it to be so and/or sincerely wish it to be so. 

Nietzsche's often quoted but little understood remark about there being no facts, only interpretations, has had the unfortunate result of providing cheap philosophical comfort to such cocksure individuals, allowing them to assert beliefs about the world without making any reference to objective reality, or provide any verifiable evidence for their arguments. 

In other words, perspectivism - which was intended to make us think more carefully to what extent axioms of logic are adequate to reality and how truth-claims may or may not reflect a healthy will to power - now serves as a sop to those who think they are just as entitled to their views as anybody else and that all views are of equal status and validity within a relativistic universe.

It is, as I say, unfortunate. And it's certainly not my position; I might like a certain degree of pluralism, but I'm not an idiot: some ideas are mistaken or badly thought out; some views are restricted by prejudice; some opinions are simply not worth considering.

Ultimately, I share the Socratic position and think it crucial to discriminate between opinions, always remaining alert to the fact that just because something is popular or persuasive, this doesn't make it true or mean that it serves in the best interests of life.

In accepting the opinions of those who have big mouths and large financial resources with which to control the media - demagogues, such as would-be Presidential candidate Donald Trump, who either do not know the difference between the true and the false, the just and unjust, or simply do not care about the difference - we run the risk of damaging that part of ourselves (whatever we may call it) to which these things are vitally connected.

So, the conclusion of this Xmas message is this: you shouldn't worry about the opinion of everybody and anybody, but only about the well-informed analyses which enable you to decide what is right and wrong. By concerning yourself with the latter and by always asking for the evidence, you'll avoid that corruption of the soul caused by doxa. 

Torpedo the Ark!

Dandelion: D. H. Lawrence and the Question of Care

Dandelion: photo by Greg Hume (2006)

As much as Lawrence may wish to sit like a dandelion on his own stem and concern himself exclusively with those objects existing within his immediate physical environment - refusing to care about abstract issues, faraway places, or unknown peoples - he’s conscious of the fact that such insouciance can lead to parochialism and might easily be mistaken for indifference on his part; something he’d very much regret.

For Lawrence is very keen to sharply differentiate between insouciance and indifference. The former, he says, is a refusal to be made anxious by abstractions, or swept off to into the empty desert spaces inhabited by idealists gripped by a compulsion to care about everything under the sun. The latter, however, Lawrence defines as an inability to care resulting from a certain instinctive-intuitive numbness or nihilism, which, like Nietzsche, he posits as the great malady of the modern age; a consequence of having cared too much about the wrong thing in the immediate past.

The apathetic or indifferent individual, the nihilist, is essentially an exhausted idealist; they have none of the carefree gayness of the insouciant man or woman and do not know how to live on the spot and in the nowness of the actual moment.

That said - and as indicated - insouciance can itself become problematic and serve to isolate the individual, cutting them off from the wider world and from history. We can’t be entirely self-sufficient and concerned only with our own musings and sense impressions. Nor can we only be concerned only about those with whom we have a direct relationship; our immediate family and friends, or kith and kin.

Ultimately, as Lawrence was reluctantly obliged to concede, feeling a sense of solidarity with all mankind isn’t entirely fraudulent and the love of humanity stands for something real and vital; "that feeling of being at one with the struggling soul, or spirit or whatever it is, of our fellow men". Lawrence continues:

"This caring about the wrongs of unseen people has been rather undone. Nevertheless ... still, away in some depth of us, we know that we are connected vitally, if remotely ... [and] we dimly realise that mankind is one, almost one flesh. It is an abstraction, but it is also a physical fact. In some way or other, the cotton workers of Carolina, or the rice-growers of China are connected with me and, to a faint yet real degree, part of me. The vibration of life which they give off reaches me, touches me, and affects me unknown to me. For we are all more or less connected, all more or less in touch: all humanity."

What’s interesting about this passage is that not only does it demonstrate that Lawrence was not an individualist as many critics mistakenly believe, but it also shows that his love of humanity was born not of some transcendental attempt to develop a conceited cosmic consciousness, but out of a sense of class consciousness; it’s the workers and the peasants of the world that Lawrence primarily feels connected to and sympathetic with.

Those who cultivate indifference to the point that they lose any compassion for others are mistaken. Lawrence understands their frank egoism, but refuses to share it - worried by the effect it has on the individual who refuses to care. Their intellectual honesty is fine and it’s good to cast off all spurious sympathy and false emotion, but not if this entails the death of all feeling and one becomes empty inside (believing in nothing, standing for nothing, caring for nobody).

Lawrence admits, however, that some can find perverse pleasure in precisely this becoming-void and take "real pride and satisfaction in pure negation". These he calls the perfect nihilists: those whose shallowness is mistaken for depth; whose false calm is mistaken for strength; whose indifference is mistaken for insouciance. Nietzsche termed them the last men; those who sit grinning furtively in the triumph of their own emptiness.

See: D. H. Lawrence, ‘Insouciance’, and ‘Nobody Loves Me’, in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). The lines quoted are from the latter text.

Making Love to Music

Etruscan dancers in a tomb near Tarquinia, Italy (c 470 BC) 

Provocative dance moves, such as grinding and twerking, are obviously obscene in an everyday sense of the term, but that's not what makes them tiresome and strangely offensive. I really don't care if idiots want to aggressively thrust their hips, wiggle their bottoms, and dry hump in public.

However, far from being sexual, it seems to me these moves are distinctly anti-sexual and obscene also in the very specific manner that Baudrillard uses the term. That is to say, they lack any metaphorical dimension or any stylish, carefully choreographed component.

In grinding and in twerking, as in pornography, "the body, the sex organs, the sex act are brutally no longer mis en scène, but immediately proffered for view" - and for consumption. It's a total acting out of things that have previously been kept off-stage and regarded as part of a seductive game usually played in private between partners.        

Although his concern is with the sublimation of sex, rather than its exorcising through obscenity, Lawrence was also concerned with the relationship between Eros and Terpsichore. In a short article written in 1927, entitled 'Making Love to Music', he identifies the tango and Charleston as modern dances that are secretly averse both to actual copulation and to the ancient magic of dance.

In contrast to the young men and women of the Jazz Age, Lawrence writes of the dancers painted on the walls of Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia:

"There the painted women dance, in their transparent linen ... opposite the naked-limbed men, in a splendour and an abandon which is not at all abandoned. There is a great beauty in them ... They are wild with a dance that is heavy and light at the same time, and not a bit anti-copulative, yet not bouncingly copulative either."

Although free from clothes and moral inhibition, these Etruscan figures are not grotesquely acting out sex in a crude and callous fashion, like Miley Cyrus: they are simply dancing a dance that is full of joy and a delight in movement; dancing their very souls into existence as it were.

It is, alas, we moderns who have "narrowed the dance down to two movements: either bouncing towards copulation, or sliding and shaking and waggling, to elude it", or make of it something vulgar and obscene.

   
Notes: 

Jean Baudrillard, 'The Obscene', Passwords, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 2003). The line quoted from is on p. 27.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'Making Love to Music', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 41-8. Lines quoted can be found on pp. 46-7.

D. H. Lawrence's Philosophy of Mind

The Thinker - Rodin Stylized Pop Art Poster 

By Kim Wang

fineartamerica.com 

On Human Destiny is an interesting short piece written by D. H. Lawrence in which he addresses the question of mind. Lawrence argues that whilst most people don't have original thoughts, we all of us nevertheless have minds that are constantly active, even in sleep, grinding ideas over and over until they turn to dust. 

Whatever else he may be, man is first and foremost a thinking animal and even though we moderns like to assert our spontaneity of feeling and action, our very spontaneity is just another idea, born in the mind having been "gestated in self-consciousness".

Rather surprisingly, Lawrence also claims that this has always been the case: that man has never been a wild, instinctive creature; "even the most prognathous cave-man was an ideal beast ... no more like the wild deer or jaguar among the mountains, than we are". No matter how wild or primitive a man may appear to be, "you may be sure he is grinding upon his own fixed, peculiar ideas, and he's no more spontaneous than a London bus-conductor: probably not as much". 

Thus, it's unfair to claim, as some critics do, that Lawrence subscribes to the Romantic fantasy of a noble savage, beautiful and innocent in his mindlessness and free animality. And it's therefore also mistaken to suggest that Lawrence simply advocates some kind of return to Nature. He knows our becoming-animal is a question of culture and futurity, not regression, and that it certainly doesn't involve the surrendering of human intelligence: "You may, like Yeats, admire the simpleton, and call him God's Fool. But for me the village idiot is outside the pale."

Essentially, then, for Lawrence, mind is what characterizes man as a species and determines human destiny and it's "just puerile to sigh for innocence and naive spontaneity". But, the mind can become a sterile thing without some form of emotional inspiration. That's the key: our adventure further and further into consciousness mustn't become a journey into pure abstraction; we have to think, but we also need to feel and ensure our ideas remain fresh with creative vitality, not fixed and fatal and turned into dogma.

As Lawrence puts it in a poem: "Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness ... a man in his wholeness wholly attending" and not the "jiggling and twisting of already existent ideas".


Notes:

D. H. Lawrence, 'On Human Destiny', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 203-04. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Thought', The Poems, Volume 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 580-81.