On Non-Referential Aesthetics and the Politics of Silence

Lawrence writes that, as a novelist, it's his primary task to conduct a molecular exploration of the feelings and not comment on molar politics and the great social issues of the day. Besides, other people understand these things much better than him. 

In other words, like Richard Somers, the apolitical protagonist of his novel Kangaroo, Lawrence wants to fight out something with mankind in order to make an opening into the future, but he doesn't want to become hopelessly entangled in history and great events.

Thus Lawrence comes to an understanding that - as a man of letters - his alienation from public life is something he has no choice but to actively sustain; particularly if he wishes to secure a degree of intellectual freedom and transmit in his thinking something that does not and will not allow itself to be codified within conventional political discourse.

Of course, Lawrence is not the only author to display ironic indifference (or insouciance as he calls it) to the world at large. Jane Austen is another novelist whom I admire precisely because she chose to write about the micropolitics of daily life and affairs of the heart whilst staying wonderfully silent on the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, or the massive upheaval caused by industrialization. 

Push comes to shove, I'd rather re-read Pride and Prejudice than War and Peace. And hopefully this explains why I've not written a post on the EU referendum being held in the UK today ...       

Quizás, Quizás, Quizás

Nietzsche: Philosopher of the Perilous Perhaps

I have just read a rather ridiculous article on Yahoo to do with words that make the speaker sound stupid. For the most part it was a predictable list with few surprises; we can all agree, for example, that only a moron uses the word awesome.

However, I was intrigued to see the list included the word maybe on the grounds that it showed the speaker to be unsure of his own views or unable to make up her own mind (i.e. to lack intellectual confidence and decision making ability).

For maybe is perhaps one of my favourite words; just as perhaps functions as the most privileged of all qualifiers in my philosophical lexicon. For the term perhaps doesn't express my uncertainty, so much as create unease in the listener via a suggestion of ambiguity when there was an everyday expectation of clarity and coherence.

It thus subverts and, more radically, deconstructs an entire system of metaphysics based upon a fundamental belief in the opposition of values and an eternal game of either/or (Either you love me or you don't, goddammit!)

For those who believe in the truth - and who believe, what's more, that they know the truth when they hear it - everyone is expected to speak truthfully (i.e. with sincerity, conviction, and logical coherence). Only liars, cheats, swindlers, women, poets, and Continental philosophers refuse to call a spade a spade and like to beat about the bush.

Philosophers such as Nietzsche, for example, who eagerly anticipated the arrival of a new style of thinker; one who has a very different taste and inclination to the adherents of the Truth as a categorical imperative. He calls such thinkers to come philosophers of the dangerous Perhaps.       


See: Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990). Part I, Section 2. 

On the Politics of Beach Body Readiness

D. H. Lawrence wrote a series of poems sneering at modern sunbathers in all their beach body readiness. Yes they looked fit and healthy (healthy, healthy, healthy). And yes, they even looked good enough to eat. But somehow their flesh lacked meaning and vitality; their great inert thighs leading nowhere.  

So, far from feeling bad about his own emaciated and disease-ravaged physique when confronted with those bodies deemed biologically admirable, Lawrence defiantly affirmed his own contrasting quickness.  

I thought of this last year when there was a great hoo-ha over a poster for Protein World's weight-loss collection featuring a perfectly formed bikini-clad model (Renee Somerfield). The Advertising Standards Authority received almost 400 complaints from those who found the campaign objectifying and socially irresponsible. There was also a protest in Hyde Park and an online petition that attracted more than 70,000 signatures.   

Eventually, the fuss died down and everyone either forgot about the case, or found something else to get het up over. But now this issue of body shaming is back in the headlines thanks to the new London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, who has said he will ban all ads on the Tube and bus network that might offend commuters or make them feel pressured to conform to an ideal body type.

Speaking as a father of two teenage daughters, Khan warned that images such as the above demeaned women and caused confidence issues among young people. It is high time, he said, that such advertising came to an end.         

Obviously, this is an astonishing and, to my mind, rather worrying development. For it means that the Mayor is making policy on the basis of a Helen Lovejoy approach to decision making; one that effectively turns all Londoners into Sadiq's little girls in need of daddy's protection and wise authority.    

Ultimately, I'm no more beach body ready than Lawrence. But nor am I ready for Khan's progressive paternalism which offers a soft form of sharia and censorship in the name of feminism and thinking of the children.   

Elephants Can Be Murderous Too

Illustration from An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon (1681), by Robert Knox

I have received an email from someone who read the recent series of elephant posts published on Torpedo the Ark: the tragic tales of Tyke, Topsy, Mary and Chunee.

Describing themselves as an elephant lover and a passionate supporter of animal rights, they write to thank me for displaying "compassion with innocent, gentle and highly intelligent creatures forced to suffer needless cruelty at the hands of man".

Now, whilst it's true that I do sympathise with wild things in captivity and dislike all forms of cruelty to animals, I think it should also be mentioned that elephants - which are undeniably intelligent - are not always so gentle. And I'd never describe them as innocent; certainly not in the way in which I suspect my correspondent is using the term.

For not only are wild elephants - particularly the young males - prone to violent and aggressive behaviour (in India, they regularly enter villages at night, damaging property and causing human fatalities), but beasts co-opted into human society have long been complicit in warfare and capital punishment.

Execution by elephant, for example, was once common throughout SE Asia; the supposedly gentle giants happily crushing, dismembering, or impaling prisoners with weaponised tusks. The animals were not only smart and versatile enough to be trained in the sophisticated art of torture, but seemed to derive pleasure from the opportunity to exercise power, inflict pain and test out their deadly skills on unfortunate victims.

The point is this: you can throw someone to the wolves or to the lions if you simply want them to be torn to pieces; but if you really want to extend their suffering and have them murdered by an animal rather than merely killed, then you're going to have enlist the help of an elephant.    


Note: the spectacle of elephants executing captives both horrified and fascinated European travellers and there are numerous written accounts. The practice was eventually suppressed by the colonial powers that controlled the region in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

On the Dog's Bollocks and the Loss of a Penile Bone in Human Males

One of the things my friend Catherine loves most about her new puppy dog is the soft, subterranean nature of his penis, which she characterizes rather nicely as rhizomatic.

"It runs parallel to and just under the surface of the skin (you can see the bulge), with just the very end of it projecting out into the world, like a lipstick."

She adds: "The balls are also mainly under the surface, just at the far end of the semi-submerged penis", though I think she may have mistaken the spherical knot of erectile tissue known as the bulbis glandis for the dog's testicles (not that I'm an expert in canine genitalia).

Catherine concludes with a confession of aesthetico-sexual preference: "I think it so much nicer to have a secret, shy little organ hidden away, rather than a perpendicular penis."

Were I female, I suspect I might very well feel likewise; there is something displeasing about a large dangling dick. But, being male, what really fascinates me about a dog's penis is the fact that it contains a bone (the baculum); a feature common to many placental mammals which provides sufficient stiffness to enable non-erect penetration and allow for an extended period of coition.

Unfortunately, the so-called os penis is absent in man, although present in other primates including chimpanzees and gorillas. Thanks to a malevolent and mocking God removing such from Adam in order to make Eve, human males have never known the joy and reassurance of a true boner and have had to rely on haemodynamics and the vagaries of desire for hardness.


Note; I am grateful to Catherine Brown for suggesting the subject of this post and for allowing me to quote from her correspondence in which we discussed it. Readers interested in Catherine's further views on man and dog should click here. 

Notes on the Material Remains of My Father

I respect and admire the fact that my father walked naked and light his entire life; owning nothing and leaving nothing behind when he died; no great legacy, no treasured possessions, not even an urn full of ashes.

In fact, his material remains pretty much amass to no more than a few black and white photographs, an old radio (or wireless, as he always called it), a pack of playing cards, and some rusty little tins in the garden shed covered in cobwebs containing assorted nails, tacks, and screws.

What's astonishing about these objects - particularly the old tobacco tins - is how powerfully they resonate when I draw close to them. Even though just humble, everyday, mass-produced items they have an authenticity to them, or a thingness, that any Heideggerean would instantly recognise and appreciate.    

Lawrence describes this as quickness - a quality that can be contrasted to deadness, but which doesn't only belong to living, organic or natural objects. That is to say, even a rather ridiculous-looking iron stove, for example, can be quick. Or, as in this case, an old tin of 2" nails.

Why? Because it exists in perfect relationship to its environment and to the rest of the things in the shed; a pair of garden gloves, a rake, a crack in the wall, a box of matches, a house-spider ... etc.

Further, the tobacco tin has had what Lawrence terms soft life invested in it via years of use and transferred touch. It has become one of those lovely old things that sparkles with magical allure and which remains warm with the spirit of a kind and quiet man who loved a smoke.  

True Lies

For those who adhere to moral-rationalism, truth is the highest virtue. And all forms of deception inherently diabolical. Such sincere souls live in fear of being lied to, or led astray into falsehood; they hate ambiguity, concealment, illusion. 

This may make them good parents, good people, or good policemen. But, unfortunately, it means they'll never be great poets.

For it's not simply the case that deception is an art, but, more radically, all art is deception; a game of creative immorality and evil genius which not only delights in untruth, but regards the truth itself to be metaphorical in character and all too human in origin.

Something, in other words, that has been enhanced, transposed, and embellished; something which after long years of obligatory usage seems firm, fixed, and authentic - the veritable Word of God.    

(It's worth recalling at this point that before Nietzsche finally pronounced him dead, God was brilliantly conceived by Descartes as not only omnipotent but malevolent and mendacious: the Deus deceptor.)  


See:

Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense', essay in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Penguin Books, 1976).

Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. and ed. John Cottingham, (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Denise, Denise (In Memory of My Childhood Sweetheart)

Neil Levenson wasn't the only one to have a childhood sweetheart called Denise. My primary object of affection also went by this name and although I didn't write a doo-wop song in her honour, I've never forgotten the happy days we spent together, as here, feeding the deer at Bedford's Park in the summer of '69.

Some clever people with cold hearts sneer at sentimentality and dismiss early forms of love as puppyish. They fail to appreciate what Scott Fitzgerald described as the undesirous medley of joy and innocence that belongs to immature romance and think the experiences and emotions of childhood are best grown-out of and forgotten. Almost they seem embarrassed by such feelings and infatuations and reject nostalgia as indecent or in some way reactionary and escapist.

But Freud knew the crucial nature of first love and acknowledged the psychic importance of returning to the past. Our greatest poets also possess not only a distinct memory of childhood, but retain fidelity with its promise.

Those who believe that paradise can only be re-entered via an act of socio-sexual transgression might like to consider whether such doesn't begin with Lady Chatterley and her lover, for example, but with two anonymous six-year-olds holding hands under the desk, or unashamedly agreeing to show one another their genitalia behind the bushes ...                

Asspresso: A Brief History of Coffee Enemas

I like coffee. Most people like coffee. Coffee is one of the most popular drinks in the world. But very few people choose to squirt coffee into their lower bowel by way of the rectum in the belief that it has miraculous cleansing and healing properties.

The history of enemas or colonic irrigation is a long and well-lubricated one, stretching at least as far back as the ancient Egyptians who, like the Greeks, believed that non-specified toxins accumulate in the gastrointestinal tract causing various health problems.

This theory of auto-intoxication was not finally discredited by medical science until the early twentieth century. But it still has many believers who faithfully stick rubber tubes up their bottoms and in this manner seek to purify the body and enhance their well-being, even though there is no evidence that such a procedure is either necessary or has any beneficial effect - and even though purging may in fact cause serious harm.   

Most practitioners use water; sometimes with added herbs, a slice of lemon, or a saline solution. But some, as I have said, choose coffee and it's this that particularly fascinates (and amuses) me. One has to ask: why coffee? Why not a nice cup of tea?

The answer is because coffee - first conceived as a clyster in 1917 - was said by German physician and alternative therapist Max Gerson to do so much more than merely cleanse; it could also play a vital part in treating (and, indeed, curing) chronic degenerative conditions, including tuberculosis and cancer. Provided, of course, that the coffee was injected anally several times a day in sufficient quantities to stimulate the liver and not merely sipped over breakfast.                       

There's little point in my attempting to explain this claptrap further, as there's no credible evidence to support the claim that someone suffering from an acute illness or terminal condition can regenerate cells and radically improve tissue health, immunity, and circulation by the regular administration of coffee enemas. I'm not even convinced that they help to relieve pain, nausea, and depression, as Gerson's disciples and adherents also insist.  

Indeed, as already indicated, coffee enemas can in fact have some pretty nasty side-effects, including sepsis, colitis, electrolyte imbalance, and heart failure. And of course, if the coffee is inserted too quickly or is too hot, it can burn or result in rectal perforation.

Ouch!


Note: readers who are interested in this topic might enjoy the related post on the death of a wellness warrior: click here.

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 ...