And No Birds Sing

This could be heaven ...

Having moved back to my childhood home, it's forgivable to be feeling a little nostalgic for a time and a place - and even a people - now vanished. For although Harold Hill remains Harold Hill, it's not the Harold Hill I remember with such fondness. It's changed. And not for the better.

To be honest, it was never a pretty place. A large, post-War estate on the far fringes of Greater London, Harold Hill was developed on 850 acres of formerly private land to house ex-servicemen like my father and those cockneys (as my mother always called them rather disparagingly) looking to leave behind the bombed-out ruins of the East End and start a new suburban life in leafy Essex. 

Construction of over seven-and-a-half thousand new homes began in 1948 and was completed ten years later. The development, however, was fairly low density; mostly two or three bedroom houses built of brick with lots of open spaces, including woodland, parks, greens and, perhaps most crucially, gardens at both front and back that the original residents not only delighted in but prided themselves upon.  

Needless to say, most of the playing fields and wild areas have now been built on. But it's the loss of the front gardens which has, I think, dealt a mortal blow to any sense of community and reduced the estate to stony silence.

It's not simply a case of no birds singing - a prospect which has long troubled poets from John Keats to John Lydon - but also of no insects buzzing, no flowers blooming, no frogs spawning, no hedgehogs hiding, no lawnmowers gently humming, no neighbours chatting, and no children laughing ...

The idyllic world above has been buried alive under concrete and gravel in order that the nation's 35 million vehicles can have space to park.

Beneath the crazy-paving stones lies the past. And future hope lies with the weeds that defiantly grow between the cracks ...

O Wonderful Machine: Nihilism and the Question Concerning Technology (Part II)

"What is dangerous", writes Heidegger, "is not technology. ... The essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger." Developing this crucial point, he writes:

"The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in his essence. The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth."

In other words, the essence of technology - something that exists long  before the modern machine age - is a way of revealing so monolithically powerful and expansionist that it threatens to overwhelm man and prevent him from discovering any other possible becoming. Heidegger calls this revealing Ge-stell, a term commonly translated into English as ‘enframing’. He argues that this revealing that rules with technology doesn’t allow anything to come forth in its own right. Rather, it acts as a ‘challenging’ or ‘provocation’ [Herausfordern] “which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such”.

Thus, for example, a tract of land “is challenged in the hauling out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district”. But, more than this, it also reduces man to the status of ‘human resource’ or ‘standing reserve’ [Bestand] in service to technological purposes.

Interestingly, Lawrence also illustrates his thinking on the question concerning technology with reference to the coal mining industry. In Women in Love, for example, Gerald Crich acknowledges his destiny as someone caught up in an ideal-material struggle “with the earth and the coal it enclosed ... to turn upon the inanimate matter of the underground, and reduce it to his will”.

Prior to this, in The Rainbow, we encountered Tom Brangwen, another coal boss of the view that men belong entirely to their jobs and that outside of the great social-industrial machine of work man had become “a meaningless lump – a standing machine”.

Ursula, fundamentally hostile to her uncle's thinking and keen to imagine a different human future, nevertheless understands the horrible fascination of lives subjected to technology and the power of money; aware that there is a perverse satisfaction  to be gained from such subjection. Even, it is suggested, via machinic servitude man achieves his consummation and immortality, Lawrence arguing not that technology makes us less human, but, on the contrary super-human. Thus it is that Gerald Crich is transformed into a modern Prometheus and fulfils the great promise of science; namely, that man too can attain infinite power (or, perhaps more accurately, infinite knowledge, which, for modern man, is one and the same thing).

The question becomes: what will man do with this unlimited power-knowledge? Will he use it to transform himself and his world, or destroy himself and the natural environment? On the level of utility and abstraction we have made ourselves into lords of production, but we have also arrived at the very edge of an abyss: “Present-day man is of the lowest rank", writes Blanchot, "but his power is that of a being who is already beyond man: how would this contradiction not harbour the greatest danger?”

It is for this reason that Nietzsche predicts that modern nihilism will result in great wars and violent upheaval on an unprecedented scale. However, oblivious or indifferent as men like Gerald Crich are to such dangers, they press on in their quest to see life entirely dominated by mind and a will that is negative in direction and composed of predominantly reactive forces seeking the ego’s triumph over all that lies external to it. By bringing everything into the realm of knowledge and reducing the world to information, Gerald is able to master and manipulate existence, determining its truth via reference to his own learning. Thus, in this manner, as George Steiner correctly notes, the self becomes “the hub of reality and relates to the world outside itself in an exploratory, necessarily exploitative way”. 

But no matter how much Gerald knows, still he feels strangely empty; “as if the very middle of him were a vacuum”. And as this feeling becomes increasingly acute, his voraciousness grows: “And to stop up this hollowness, he drags all things into himself”. Such rampant egoism and greed is condemned repeatedly in the writings of both Nietzsche and Lawrence and yet it remains almost definitional of modern man who, it seems, will not rest content until he has “killed the mysteries and devoured the secrets”.

Clearly, if a change is to be made to a new mode of living then modern man must find someway to overcome his conceit and what Keith Ansell-Pearson describes as his “paranoid and phobic anthropocentrism”. To do so will not be easy and will involve a self-overcoming and a confrontation with our deep-rooted idealism. And yet, to return to Heidegger’s text concerning the question of technology, we have already seen how hope lies precisely where and when we might least expect it; the hope of a radically different revealing to the one that presently holds sway.

Heidegger names this with the Greek term poiēsis and indicates by this a revealing that brings forth without provocation, having, as it does, an entirely different relation to matter. It is a revealing that may enable us to confront the essential unfolding of technology and survive our prolonged flirtation with nihilism.

However, to reiterate, it is the supreme danger of the above unfolding and flirtation which harbours the possible rise of the saving power. Thus instead of simply gaping at the technological as that in which we see our own diabolical genius reflected, we must attempt to glimpse that which is ambiguous and other contained in the essence of technology.

Of course, to simply catch sight of this does not mean we are thereby ‘saved’ - but we are “thereupon summoned to hope in the growing light of the saving power” and we are reminded that there was once a time and a place (i.e. ancient Greece) when poiēsis was also understood as belonging to technē and the fine arts, undifferentiated from any other technical ability, “soared to the supreme height of the revealing granted them”.

For Heidegger, as for Nietzsche, it was the arts that uniquely allowed the Greeks to enter into a direct relationship with the world of being and not merely a world of knowledge and representation; the arts which allowed them to dwell poetically on the earth and not merely live prosaically.

Can they do so again, now, for us? Heidegger is uncertain.

But, despite his pessimism, he seems to remain hopeful that one day the arts may once again be granted this highest possibility. Providing, that is, that there are still profound thinkers who remain astounded by and before this other possibility and who, via their questioning, may be able to incite a new becoming.

And so there remains a vital task for philosophy. For whilst the latter cannot itself provide the new, it can prepare the conditions under which the new might emerge. And whilst philosophy is neither able to predict or guarantee the future, still it allows for the possibility “that the world civilization that is just now beginning might one day overcome its technological-scientific-industrial character as the sole criterion of man’s world sojourn”.

Bibliography

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life, (Routledge, 1997). 

Maurice Blanchot, 'The Limits of Experience: Nihilism', essay in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison, (The MIT Press, 1992).

Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1994).

Martin Heidegger, 'The End of Philosophy and the Task for Thinking', essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994). 

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', essay in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

George Steiner, Heidegger, (Fontana Press, 1989).

Note: Part one of this post can be read by clicking here.

O Wonderful Machine: Nihilism and the Question Concerning Technology (Part I)

Charlie Chaplin: Modern Times (1936)

According to Blanchot, Nietzsche is quick to grasp that all the modern world’s seriousness is confined to science and the "prodigious power of technology". Lawrence refers to this (poetically) as the triumph of the machine.

Whilst Nietzsche doesn't entirely deplore this fact, happy, for example, to support the experimental practices of science, he is by no means able to affirm the above development without reservation; not least of all because he identifies modern science as the descendant and heir of Christian moral culture. In other words, it's a machine-embodied unfolding of the ascetic ideal; an expression of mankind's pathological will to truth.

Thus, for Nietzsche, science and technology is fundamentally nihilistic in character, full of thinly veiled metaphysical prejudices and productive of reactive knowledge-forms which may yet prove fatal not only to the Christian moral culture from out of which it has grown, but to the possibility of culture per se as it puts on ice all the illusions which are necessary for the sustaining of culture and, indeed, life itself.

In addition to this fundamental antipathy between vital illusion and the pure knowledge drive, Nietzsche claims that science is incapable of serving as the foundation of culture because, unlike art, it knows nothing of “taste, love, pleasure, displeasure, exaltation, or exhaustion” and so cannot evaluate, cannot command, and cannot create. At best, when coupled to the huge resources of capitalism, science is capable of building a tremendous industrial-technological civilization, such as our own, but, for Nietzsche, this is not a genuine cultural formation because, whilst it is certainly capable of organizing the chaos of existence and constructing a monolithic system or network, it lacks style.

Style, insists Nietzsche, always involves the constraint of a single taste. But it is not merely the imposition of universal laws or categorical imperatives; nor does it seek to make all things and all forces familiar, similar, and predictable. The ideal abstractions of science may very effectively allow for the manipulation of the world and the subordination of life to a tyrannical knowledge form - logic - but this is not the same as mastery and the artist of culture is more than a mere systematizer.

Failing to make the distinction, the technocratic man of reason confuses bullying with a display of strength and mistakes force for power. This is perfectly illustrated in  Lawrence's novel Women in Love by the figure of Gerald Crich; a character driven to impose his will and authority over himself and his workers, just as he does over his red Arab mare. Gerald’s world, the world of industrial civilization, has been described earlier by Lawrence in The Rainbow:

“The streets were like visions of pure ugliness ... that began nowhere and ended nowhere. Everything was amorphous, yet everything repeated itself endlessly ...
   The place had the strange desolation of a ruin. ... The rigidity of the blank streets, the homogeneous amorphous sterility of the whole suggested death rather than life. ...
   The place was a moment of chaos perpetuated, persisting, chaos fixed and rigid.” 

If such a mechanical world essentially lacks style, so too does it entirely lack meaning. At best, it retains a strictly functional residue of the latter that allows it to continue to operate. How to give value back to such a world - and a little loveliness - is a concern shared by Nietzsche and Lawrence. They both fear, however, that so long as the nihilistic-scientific perspective retains its authority, there can be no revaluation. For such a perspective has not only made the barbarism of the modern world unavoidable, but it ensures the destruction of all other perspectives and modes of being.

And yet, perhaps there is hope to be found where we might have least expected to encounter it. This is one of the great lessons of encouragement given to us by Heidegger in his essay entitled ‘The Question Concerning Technology’. At the heart of this work are the following lines from Hölderlin: Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch.

Commenting on these lines, George Steiner writes:

“To realize that false technicity has edged the human race to the brink of ecological devastation and political suicide, is to realize also that salvation is possible ... It is in the very extremity of the modern crisis, in the very time of nihilistic mechanism, that hope lies ready.”

It is important that we avoid misunderstanding here; hope does not lie in the fruits of science and technology themselves and it is not, therefore, a question of accelerating the production and proliferation of ever-more sophisticated machines in the erroneous assumption that only a micro-chip can save us. If, on the one hand, technophobes who rebel naively against technology and curse it as the work of the devil should rightly be challenged, then, on the other hand, technophiles and neo-futurists who argue for an ever-greater technological manipulation of life deserve also to be met with critical resistance.

Heidegger would surely have agreed with Lawrence that “the more we intervene machinery between us and the naked forces, the more we numb and atrophy our own senses”. Thus, if we are to find our way into a new revealing, then we will have to find a way to creatively manifest these forces. And if we are to deepen our questioning of nihilism and technology, then we will need to resist the temptation of easy solutions and the blackmail of being either for or against science.

It is only via such a questioning - one that manages to touch on the essence of technology - that we can find hope. For it is only by daring to think the latter, which is to say, move closer to the very danger that threatens us, that “the ways into the saving power begin to shine” more brightly.


Bibliography

Maurice Blanchot, 'The Limits of Experience: Nihilism', essay in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison, (The MIT Press, 1992).
Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1994).
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
D. H. Lawrence, 'Dana's Two Years before the Mast', essay in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Nietzsche, 'The Struggle between Science and Wisdom', essay in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press International, 1993). 
George Steiner, Heidegger, (Fontana Press, 1989).


Note: Part two of this post can be read by clicking here. 

On Bolshevism and Immortality: the Case of Arseny Tarkovsky

What I know about the twentieth century Russian poet and translator Arseny Tarkovsky can pretty much be written on the back of a postage stamp - such as this commemorative one issued in 2007 to mark the centenary of his birth:

The fact that he featured on a stamp issued by the new regime whilst also having been posthumously awarded the Soviet Union's State Prize in 1989, shows how admired Tarkovsky was across the political spectrum.  

Where he positioned himself on this spectrum is interesting to speculate. Revolutionary-minded, one wonders for example what Tarkovsky made of the way things developed, politically and in the arts, under Stalin.

He obviously didn't feel all that uncomfortable as he volunteered to work as a correspondent for an official Soviet Army publication during the war years and never seriously considered the life of an exile or dissident - not even after his own writing fell foul of the new guidelines established by Andrei Zhdanov.

(It wasn't until 1962, when he was aged 55, that Tarkovsky was finally able to publish a volume of original verse.)

However, one would like to believe that Tarkovsky secretly recognised communism for what it is; a form of political idealism doomed, like fascism, to end in tears, tyranny and state terror.

One perhaps finds a clue to his thinking on this question in a poem whose title is usually translated into English as Earthly; a work in which the fantasy of being an immortal and transcending limitations is decisively rejected.

In other words, it's the moment when Tarkovsky realises like Tommy Dukes that one has to be human, and have a heart and a penis if one is going to escape being either a god or a Bolshevist ... for they are the same thing: they're both too good to be true. 

Below is a brilliant and startling new translation by Simon Solomon; his alternative title emphasizing the irreverence of the verse:


Soiled Song (after Arseny Tarkovsky)

Were our lives innately fated
to play in gods’ eternal laps
we’d all have guzzled ambrosia
from some Olympian nurse’s baps

and I’d be a river deity or worse,
guarding tombs or blowing corn.
Instead I’m mortal and have no time
for eternity’s celestial porn.

Happy the man whose blistered lips
are not sewn into a ready smile.
So take your polytheologies
and leave me to earth’s salt and bile.


Notes 

Simon Solomon (aka Dr Simon Thomas) is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and currently serves as managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He blogs at: simonsolomon.ink 

The Tommy Dukes line can be found in D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 

  

On the Death of a Wellness Warrior (The Case of Jessica Ainscough)

Jessica Ainscough: Wellness Warrior (1985-2015)

Photo by Peter Wallis

The case of Jessica Ainscough, the so-called Wellness Warrior, who, sadly, but unsurprisingly, died last year from cancer despite her fanatic adherence to a range of alternative treatments based on diet and lifestyle rather than medical science - including the ludicrous Gerson therapy - perfectly illustrates the peculiar mix of denial, dishonesty and desperate self-delusion that those who reject chemo and surgery in favour of fruit juice and coffee enemas all too often indulge in.*           

The beautiful young Australian was diagnosed with epithelioid sarcoma of the left arm when she was aged twenty-two. When an isolated limb perfusion failed to destroy the malignant tissue, Ainscough was told her only remaining option was amputation; a traumatic procedure, but one which significantly increases chances of survival.

Refusing to accept this, Ainscough placed her hopes in quackery and reinvented herself as a wellness guru, becoming a pin-up girl for those who believe there's a global conspiracy by the medical establishment (in cahoots with big business and governments) to cover up the beautiful truth about cancer; i.e. that it can be cured with positive thinking and a bizarre range of practices that are basically forms of faith healing and folk magic despite the pseudo-scientific language they are disguised with.

Despite increasingly obvious evidence that her disease was progressing, Ainscough continued to proselytize for her new religion until the very end of her journey (earning a significant sum of money in the process from books and personal appearances).

It's hard to say how many lives have been touched by her - and by touched, I mean fatally compromised and needlessly lost - but it's worth noting that one of these lives was that of her own mother who was diagnosed with breast cancer in April 2011.

Convinced by her daughter's ascetic idealism - and doubtless not wanting to disappoint or embarrass her - Sharyn Ainscough also elected to pursue an unorthodox health regime in order to take responsibility for her illness and find a natural cure. She died two-and-a-half years later; a period of time consistent with expectations for untreated cases of breast cancer.         

The ugly and unfortunate truth is this: abnormal cell growth is a fact of life and cancer kills millions of people globally each year. And the Gerson therapy - for all its living enzymes and coffee enemas - hasn't cured a single case.


* I'm not trying to be flippant, or making this up; the Gerson therapy that Ainscough decided both to follow and advocate really does involve the daily consumption of thirteen glasses of fresh organic juices and five coffee enemas per day. In addition, one must strictly follow an organic whole food plant-based diet, boosted with additional supplements. These measures are designed to optimize health and purify the body of what believers call toxins (but would have at one time designated as evil spirits). 

I have sketched out a brief history of coffee enemas in another post: click here.  And for more information, readers might also like to check out the entry on Gerson therapy in The Skeptic's Dictionary by Robert T. Carroll: click here.  

Strange Fruit: an All-American Festival of Cruelty

Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, lynched in Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 1930 

Photo by Lawrence H. Beitler

According to Nietzsche, cruelty is one of the great festive joys of mankind. Put simply, we delight in the suffering of others and in witnessing the public exercise of power in all its spectacular brutality.

Not only is human history written in blood, but even human culture is ultimately no more than a refined form of torture; a method of inscribing the body with certain spiritual values on which we ironically pride ourselves as signs of our moral superiority as a race or species.  

In addition, displays of cruelty are also ways of keeping those who are despised as inferior and feared as other in their place.

This is perfectly demonstrated by the lynching of African-Americans in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries; a targeted practice of violence and terrorism, largely tolerated by officialdom, designed to enforce and encode white superiority and traumatize the emancipated black population.              

Between 1870 and 1950 - i.e. the great age of modernity - an estimated 4,000 people were lynched in the (mostly) Southern states. And these murders were not committed secretly or in private, but openly before excited spectators who delighted in seeing strange fruit dangling from the trees.

The sociologists Tolnay and Beck, authors of A Festival of Violence (1995), describe how public these events were:

"Large crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands and including elected officials and prominent citizens, gathered to witness pre-planned, heinous killings that featured prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment, and/or burning of the victim. White press justified and promoted these carnival like events, with vendors selling food, printers producing postcards featuring photographs of the lynching and corpse, and the victim’s body parts collected as souvenirs."

Thus, more than merely an effective mechanism of socio-economic control or a method of killing uppity niggers, lynching has to be seen also as a celebratory act of self-affirmation on behalf of clean-living, hard-working, law-abiding, God-fearing white folk; as American as apple pie.


Notes

The above photo by Lawrence Beitler inspired the poem Bitter Fruit (1937) by Abel Meeropol, which became better known as the song Strange Fruit after being set to music and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. Click here to watch her performing it.  

For Nietzsche's thoughts on culture and cruelty, see On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

See also: Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 1995). 

Executing Elephants Part III: The Case of Chunee (Death by Firing Squad)

Both cases of elephant execution I have discussed so far took place in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century; the case of Mary, in Tennessee, in 1916 and the case of Topsy, in New York, in 1903. But our third and final case takes us back to Regency London a century earlier.

This is the fascinating (but equally tragic) case of Chunee, a large but friendly Indian elephant who arrived in England in 1809 and who, after treading the boards in Covent Garden, found himself part of the famous and much-loved menagerie at Exeter Exchange on the Strand, established by Italian-born Stefano Polito. As we will see, the events surrounding Chunee's execution by firing squad in 1826, became something of a cause célèbre provoking a national outcry.   

One of the amazing tricks Chunee was trained to perform involved taking a sixpence from visitors to the menagerie with his powerful trunk, before gently returning it. Lord Byron, who visited in November 1813, was so impressed by this and so taken with the elephant's general demeanour that he expressed a wish that the seven ton beast might serve as his butler.

(Wordsworth was also charmed by Chunee, but it is not known if he too wanted to make him part of his household.)

Unfortunately, the good times entertaining poets and princes couldn't last forever and as he grew older Chunee grew increasingly aggressive. This was attributed to an annual paroxysm aggravated by a rotten tusk. Whatever the cause, on 26 February 1826, whilst taking his regular Sunday stroll along the Strand, Chunee suddenly rebelled and ran amok, killing one of his keepers.

Over the days that followed, Chunee - perhaps in a state of musth - became ever more violent and difficult to handle. Eventually, it was decided that he was simply too dangerous to keep. And so, on March 1st, his keeper was instructed to poison him. Chunee - enraged, but not stupid - refused to eat, however. Soldiers from nearby Somerset House were therefore summoned and instructed to shoot the troublesome elephant.

Kneeling down as commanded, Chunee was shot by 150 musket balls, but still refused to die. He was finally finished off like a brave beast in the bullring when someone plunged a sword into his mighty form. It was said that the sound of Chunee's agonised cries were louder and more alarming than all the soldiers' guns combined.      

Afterwards, the public were invited to pay a shilling to witness his body being butchered and then dissected by medical students from the Royal College of Surgeons. So, even in death, Chunee was the star of one last grisly show.

The disgraceful manner of Chunee's demise was widely publicised and widely criticised. Letters of protest were printed in The Times condemning not only the circumstances of his death, but the cruelty of his former living conditions too. Poems and plays were written in memory of the elephant and many illustrations of Chunee's last moments were printed in the popular press (rather bizarrely and insensitively alongside recipes for elephant stew).

The Exeter Exchange menagerie never quite recovered from the deluge of bad publicity and numbers of visitors fell sharply after Chunee's death. The other animals were eventually moved to Surrey Zoo in 1828 and the building was demolished the following year.

So, arguably, in a sense Chunee had the final (posthumous) laugh; if dead elephants can laugh that is.


Note

Part I of Executing Elephants: The Case of Mary (Death by Hanging), can be read by clicking here. 

And Part II: The Case of Topsy (Death by Electrocution), can be read by clicking here. 

Executing Elephants Part II: The Case of Topsy (Death by Electrocution)

Thirteen years prior to the macabre public execution of poor Mary discussed in part one of this post, was the equally gruesome murder of Topsy at an amusement park in Coney Island, New York by a combination of methods, including electrocution.    

Topsy was a female elephant born in SE Asia around 1875, smuggled into the United States in order to become part of a herd of performing circus animals. Like many others of her kind, however, Topsy didn't enjoy a showbiz lifestyle and rebelled against it, gaining the reputation as a troublesome beast. 

In 1902, after killing an idiot spectator who thought it would be amusing to stub out a cigar on her trunk, she was sold to Luna Park where she again became involved in several well-publicised incidents. Not wishing to tolerate a bolshie elephant, the owners of the park decided to hang Topsy in a pay-to-view, end-of-season public spectacular. This plan was abandoned, however, following objections from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. 

Nevertheless, a new event was quickly arranged; one for invited guests and members of the press only. It was also agreed to use a more certain - and thus arguably more humane - method of strangulation; Topsy was to have large, heavy ropes tied to a steam-powered winch put round her neck. She was also to be given poisoned carrots to consume and electrocuted for good measure.  

On January 4, 1903, in front of a small audience, poor Topsy was duly killed; the 6,600 volts of electricity providing a sizzling coup de grâce. Among those present was a film crew and the resulting snuff movie was released under the title Electrocuting an Elephant. This was available to view via coin-operated kinetoscopes at the time and can still be watched today on YouTube by those with a ghoulish disposition [click here]. 

Doubtless because of the existence of this film, Topsy the elephant has secured her place within the popular cultural imagination.

Finally, it is interesting and I think significant to note that the name, Topsy, was taken from that of a female slave character in Uncle Tom's Cabin - demonstrating how racism and speciesism, as well as violent misogyny, belong to the same matrix of fear and loathing: niggers, women, and dumb animals are all regarded within the white male psyche as dirty and dangerous; creatures in need of taming with a whip and being shown who's boss.  


Note

Part I of Executing Elephants: The Case of Mary (Death by Hanging), can be read by clicking here. 
And Part III: The Case of Chunee (Death by Firing Squad), can be read by clicking here. 

Executing Elephants Part I: The Case of Mary (Death by Hanging)

Having read the recent post written on Tyke, the so-called elephant outlaw [click here] who killed her abusive trainer and rebelled against a life as a circus performer - briefly enjoying a few moments of rampaging freedom before being shot and killed by the police - Zena writes and asks if I'm familiar with any other similar cases involving captive elephants.

Well, it just so happens - even though I make no claims to being an expert in this area - that I am aware of three such cases, the first of which, the case of Mary, I'd like to briefly recount here.

Mary was a much-loved circus elephant, famous for standing on her head, playing musical instruments and pitching baseballs with her trunk. Tragically, after killing a trainer in Tennessee in September 1916, she was put to death by hanging.

The unfortunate - and unqualified - trainer, Red Eldridge, who drifted in and out of employment when not living the happy life of the hobo, was sitting atop Mary as she led the elephant parade through Sullivan County. After apparently stopping to eat a watermelon by the roadside, Mary was given a sharp prod behind her ear with a bull-hook. This proved to be a fatal, final act of cruelty on Elridge's part. Enraged, Mary snatched the puny human off her back, threw him to the ground and stepped on his head - crushing it, ironically, like a watermelon.

Details of what happened next are confused and contradictory; forever lost in a mix of sensationalist newspaper accounts and popular legend. Although it seems that Mary quickly calmed down and didn't make any attempt to run off or hurt any onlookers, locals demanded violent retribution; an eye for an eye and a tusk for a tooth.  
 
Fearing for the future of his circus if he didn't comply with this demand to punish the elephant, Charlie Sparks reluctantly agreed to a public execution. Thus, on a miserable day in Erwin, Mary was taken to a railroad yard and hanged by the neck from an industrial derrick crane in front of two-and-a-half thousand cheering spectators (including most of the town's children).  

The first attempt to execute poor Mary failed when the chain round her neck snapped, causing her to fall and break her hip. Severely wounded, she was hoisted back up with a new chain and killed on the second attempt. Mary was then buried by the tracks, but only after a vet examined the corpse and discovered that she had a severely infected tooth that would have caused her great discomfort precisely in the spot where Eldridge foolishly prodded her.


Note

Part II of Executing Elephants: The Case of Topsy (Death by Electrocution), can be read by clicking here. 
And Part III: The Case of Chunee (Death by Firing Squad), can be read by clicking here. 

Elephant Rebellion (with Reference to the Case of Tyke)

Tyke the elephant packed her trunk and said goodbye to the circus ...

Photo: Honolulu Star (1994)

Perhaps the most (in)famous recent case of so-called elephant rebellion involved a large, 20-year-old African she-elephant called Tyke, who regularly performed with a circus, before one day deciding that enough was enough.

During a show in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 20, 1994, Tyke killed her trainer, Allen Campbell, and seriously injured a co-worker. She then bolted from the arena and rampaged through the streets of the Kakaako central business district for more than thirty minutes with a trumpety-trump, trump, trump, trump!

Fearing for the safety of the public and of damage to private property - though seemingly unconcerned about Tyke's obvious distress (not to mention the years of abuse and humiliation she'd suffered leading up to the incident) - the authorities immediately issued a shoot to kill policy.

After firing almost a hundred rounds of ammunition at the poor beast, the cops eventually stopped Tyke dead in her tracks; traumatizing many spectators to the event in the process.

The attack on her human captors, her escape, her brief moments running free (if never, alas, running wild), and, finally, her bloody execution, were all captured on video and this shocking footage is central to the excellent if harrowing documentary made by Jumping Dog Productions entitled Tyke: Elephant Outlaw (dir. Susan Lambert and Stefan Moore, 2015).

Anyone moved by the plight of Tilikum in Blackfish (2013) - and you'd have to be heartless and inhuman (in the bad sense of the term) not to be - will rightly be angered and upset by the story of Tyke as well.

Having said that, it's mistaken to think of elephants as gentle giants, or spiritual creatures; even in a natural environment they can display aggressive and destructive behaviour. Hardcore animal rights activists may like to think that man is the only violent and vindictive animal, but that's clearly not the case.

Indeed, one is tempted to suggest that even the most kindly and intelligent elephants can only ever be virtuous in a herd manner or Christian sense; they can display pity and forgiveness, for example, but because they can never forget they're likely to be prone to some form of ressentiment and thus never truly noble.