Tell Them the Cross is a Tree Again

The Budding of the Cross  

Stephen Alexander (2016)

For Nietzsche, innocence is the power to accept oneself as a mortal creature and to forgive oneself for crimes ranging from scrumping to deicide. Indeed, the innocent human being has the ability also to forget past deeds, past shames, past horrors; to forget, ultimately, that there is anything to forgive.

When man can forget and rise in innocence before the present, then the past has no claim over him. And what is man's self-overcoming if not an overcoming of an historically constructed and determined subjectivity? By liberating himself from the past, he is able to reinvent himself in the present and project himself differently into the future.
 
It's fatal, argues Nietzsche, to be unable to close oneself off from history; just as it's vital that we learn to discriminate and evaluate amongst memories - for this is a sign of a healthy will to power. The stronger an individual or a people, the more history it will be able to recall and assimilate without developing a bad conscience and the less it will be obliged to forget.
 
Nietzsche refers to this as the plastic power of an individual or people. Those who could incorporate the entire historical experience of humanity as their own and endure such would exhibit a plastic power of almost superhuman proportion and would constitute, says Nietzsche, a new nobility "the like of which no age has yet seen or dreamed of". Not only would such a new nobility be innocent, they would be happy.

Nietzsche writes: "if one could burden one’s soul with ... the oldest, the newest, losses, hopes, conquests, and the victories of humanity; if one could finally contain all this in one soul and crowd it into a single feeling - this would surely have to result in a happiness that humanity has not known so far: the happiness of a god full of power and love, full of tears and laughter ..."

This godlike feeling is what Nietzsche understands to be the humaneness of the future.

It seems to me that D. H. Lawrence closely follows Nietzsche here and agrees that it's vital for mankind, having bitten and swallowed the fruit of temptation, to find a way to digest the apple. When this is achieved - when the Old Adam is able to rid himself of belly ache and bad conscience - then, and only then, will man be free to re-enter paradise and the New Eve pick fresh fruit and consort with serpents as she pleases.

Although Lawrence chose to discard the following passage from the final version of The Plumed Serpent, it is particularly pertinent to our discussion here. Ramón tells Kate:

"'Go! Tell them the Cross is a Tree again, and they may eat the fruit if they can reach the branches. Tell them the snake coils in peace around the ankle of Eve, and she no longer tries to bruise his head. The fruit of Knowledge is digested. Now we can plant the core.'"

The symbolism could hardly be clearer: the Cross is a Tree again - i.e. an instrument of torture and sacrifice upon which mankind has been fatally self-divided for two millennia has been transformed back into the sacred Tree of Life. And the fruit of this tree may be eaten, for with the death of God there's no longer any divine law or categorical imperative to prevent us - providing that is that we can reach the branches, which is to say, surpass ourselves as a species, overcoming our old humanity.

As for the second line concerning the relationship between the Eve and the snake, this is telling us that in her new nakedness and innocence the woman has overcome the burden of shame which robbed her and all the world of its joy, and that the serpent of desire has finally been accepted as having its own raison d’être and its own beauty.

In an essay entitled 'The Reality of Peace', Lawrence had some years earlier entered into his own slightly uneasy truce with the serpent:

"I must make my peace with the serpent of abhorrence that is within me. I must own my most secret shame and my most secret shameful desire ... Who am I that I should hold myself above my last or worst desire? My desires are me, they are the beginning of me, my stem and branch and root. ...
      I shall accept all my desires and repudiate none. It will be a sign of bliss in me when I am reconciled with the serpent of my own horror, when I am free from the fascination and the revulsion. For secret fascination is a fearful tyranny. ... The serpent will have his own pure place in me, and I shall be free."

The fruit of knowledge is digested: this means not only can we now move beyond good and evil, but so too can we overcome our obsession with having to know everything in our heads and exert our fanatical will to truth. For now we can plant the core and that means we can be free to experience life directly and come into full being as creatures with bodies, not just minds. And so too can we develop a new culture based on innocence, laughter, and forgetting and a new society in which men are more than well-trained house pets.

As victors, then, we travel to Eden home; victors over God and over our own humanity. For too long have we roamed in the land of Nod, that twilight zone of sleep and death, suffering from mad dreams and hallucinations: "'Who sleeps shall wake! Who sleeps shall wake!'" cry the men of Quetzalcoatl. And men shall awaken in the way of the snake; i.e. into earthly, sensual life.

This, then, is how Lawrence develops the Nietzschean project of revaluation in The Plumed Serpent. Via moral transgression, a revolutionary politics of cruelty and the substantiation of religious mystery, Lawrence suggests we can regain an earthly paradise.

Obviously, I now have difficulties with this line of thinking - how could I not in an age of militant Islamofascism? But I thought of all this once more as I sat eating a bunch of grapes last night and reflected on the strange beauty of the stem ... 


See: 

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), IV. 337.

D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 547 and 128.

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 36-8.

In Happy Memory of Coal

One of the things that I most looked forward to as a young child was the arrival of a man at the door: the milkman, the postman, the bin man, the gas man, the electric man and - my favourite man of all - the coal man, carrying his great, heavy black sacks of fuel.

My mother - who I don't think ever quite trusted any of these men - always gave me the job of supervising the delivery. I would count in every bag as it was emptied with a lovely crashing noise around the back of the house, piling up into a magical mountain of fossilized carbon that sparkled with all the dark glamour of the underworld and provided a wonderful play area to climb upon.  

It was a sad day when, finally, my parents succumbed to the lure of modern convenience and decided they'd had enough of going out into the cold and shoveling coal into a scuttle and raking over the ashes each morning, installing an ugly new gas fire which warmed the house, but not the heart.

I say my parents, but I really just mean my mother, for I believe my father loved (and subsequently missed) the open fireplace as much as I did. Certainly he loved to stand before it, warming his legs, as he would say, and loved also to poke at the red hot coals, as if attempting to divine the elemental mystery of fire.    

Floraphilia Redux (With Reference to the Case of Rupert Birkin)

Floraphilia 

YouTube (2009)

 

Flowering plants don't just grow in soil: they are also rooted in our hearts and blossom in our poetry; from Wordsworth's daffodils to Sylvia Plath's poppies. We love flowers and our love is like a red, red rose; just as the columbine is the emblem of our foolishness, the marsh-lily the symbol of our corruption and the narcissus conveys our conceit.

In language, as in art, we have formed an unnatural alliance with flowers and some, like Oscar Wilde, fervently hope that in the next life they might even become-flower - which is to say, beautiful but soulless. Here, I would like to examine this literary-erotic entanglement with flora and the manner in which we, like insects, become implicated in their sex games just as they are utilized in ours ...

What are flowers?

Flowers are the obscenely colourful sex organs of the flowering plant and they are what distinguishes angiosperms from other earlier forms of seed producing plant. Without flowers, an angiosperm would be just another gymnosperm: all leaf and naked of seed. Arguably, the same is true of people: they either blossom into full being like a bright red poppy, or they remain closed up within a mass of foliage and growing fat like a cabbage.

What is pollination?

Pollination is the process by which one plant receives the pollen from another: it is the botanical term for fucking. Some angiosperms are pollinated abiotically by the wind, some by water. And some rely upon small animals, such as bats or hummingbirds. But the majority, around 80%, exploit the labour of roughly 200,000 different types of insect. It is, if you like, a perfectly natural form of artificial insemination.

But insect pollination might better be viewed as a form of paid sex work, rather than erotic enslavement. Because when plants are fucked by insects the latter get something sweet in return for their services: nectar. However, this is not to say that the insects are entering into the relationship with full consent (whatever that might mean in the world of bugs and bees and cigarette trees) and most seem blissfully unaware that they are playing such a crucial role in plant reproduction.

Further, there are instances of male insects being sexually duped by a plant with sex organs that have evolved to look like the female of their species. The insect is attracted not by the pretty colours or the alluring scent of the flower, nor even the promise of a sugary drink, but by the prospect of being able to mate. The French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari discuss this in A Thousand Plateaus, with particular reference to the case of an orchid and a wasp. However, they argue that it should be understood in terms of becoming and not in the more conventional terms of mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.

The question remains, however, what this aparallel evolution or game of becoming, has to do with us: how are we implicated in the sex life of flowers? The answer is hay fever. For what is the allergic reaction to pollen suffered by many millions of men, women and children other than a sexually transmitted condition? Every spring we are sexually pestered by flowering plants that promiscuously allow their sperm-producing cells to be carried by any passing breeze into the eyes, ears, nose and throat of any passing creature.

As with herpes, there is presently no cure for hay fever. However, an article in The New Scientist several years ago suggested that 'organic masturbation' with fruit and vegetables might alleviate the problem. It turned out to be an April Fool's Day joke. But, many a word spoken in jest ... The revenge of the flowers starts with a runny nose, but who's to say in what humiliating circumstances it might end?

Of course, not all plant-human penetration is non-consensual. Whilst no one wants a nose full of pollen, many men and women are happy to insert carrots, cucumbers, and courgettes into those places usually reserved for cocks, tongues, fingers, and toys. But just because a woman might choose to insert a banana into her vagina, it doesn’t necessarily mean that she is on the road to building a body without organs, or that she's had done with the judgement of God.

In D. H. Lawrence's novel, Women in Love, the central male protagonist, Rupert Birkin, is a confirmed floraphile, as this scene illustrates:

"He was happy in the wet hill-side, that was overgrown and obscure with bushes and flowers. He wanted to touch them all, to saturate himself with the touch of them all. He took off his clothes, and sat down naked among the primroses [...] then lying down and letting them touch his belly, his breasts. It was such a fine, cool, subtle touch all over him, he seemed to saturate himself with their contact.
      But they were too soft. He went through the long grass to a clump of young fir-trees [...] The soft sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles. There was a thistle which pricked him vividly, but not too much, because all his movements were too discriminate and soft. To lie down and roll in the sticky, cool young hyacinths, to lie on one's belly and cover one's back with handfuls of fine wet grass, soft as a breath, soft and more delicate and more beautiful than the touch of any woman; and then to sting one's thigh against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one's shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch-trunk against one’s breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges - this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying. Nothing else would do, nothing else would satisfy, except this coolness and subtlety of vegetation travelling into one’s blood. How fortunate he was, that there was this lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, waiting for him, as he waited for it; how fulfilled he was, how happy!"

Lawrence continues:

"Really, what a mistake he had made, thinking he wanted people, thinking he wanted a woman. He did not want a woman - not in the least. The leaves and the primroses and the trees, they were really lovely and cool and desirable, they really came into the blood and were added on to him. He was enrichened now immeasurably, and so glad.
      ... Why should he pretend to have anything to do with human beings at all? Here was his world, he wanted nobody and nothing but the lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, and himself, his own living self.
      It was necessary to go back into the world. That was true. But that did not matter ... He knew now where he belonged. He knew where to plant himself, his seed: – along with the trees, in the folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves. This was his place, his marriage place. The world was extraneous."

It might be suggested that in this extraordinary scene Birkin is in the process of forming a rhizome between himself and the vegetal world, similar to that formed between the wasp and the orchid. It's a deterritorialization of sex from its traditional object and aim; a setting free of desire to roam and eventually reterritorialize on all kinds of new things, in all sorts of strange new ways. The great and intoxicating truth that Birkin demonstrates is that we can form loving relations not just with anyone - but anything and everything.

Admittedly, it's not love in the conventional and orthodox sense of the word, which is to say love that has been sanctioned by God and which involves the right persons doing the right things at the right time in the right place with the right organs - a model that is so restrictive and so reductive that it makes one want to immediately run outside and commit acts of erotic atrocity like Diogenes in the market place.

However, let it suffice for me to point out to those law-abiding individuals who think that love should circulate exclusively within a system of moral legislation, that were it not for Eve daring to consort with serpents and eat of whatever fruit she pleased, then none of us might have attained to carnal knowledge, or experienced the full range of earthly delights. Ultimately, love is tied to transgression and to crime - not to obedience or conformity with social convention.

In fact, one might argue that the highest forms of love are precisely those branded as paraphilias in which strange connections are sought out and one dreams of establishing an inhuman relationship with alien forces, or heterogeneous terms and territories. Quite clearly, Birkin is caught up in a process of becoming-plant via a series of perverse participations none of which involve imitation or identification. It's a question of extracting from his own sex the particles that best enter into proximity with those emitted by the plants and which produce within him a micro-florality.

If usually when we love we do so in order to seek out ourselves, that's almost certainly not the case here. For Birkin is not depositing his sperm amongst the foliage in the same way as he might come inside a woman and one suspects that he isn’t even that concerned with his own functional pleasure or the banality of orgasm. What really excites Birkin, even more than the delicious touch of the plants on his bare skin, is that he might enter into a new way of being and release the flows and forces and strange feelings presently overcoded by his humanity. Or, put more simply, that he might blossom and unfold into his own poppiness.

The problem with having a human being as a lover, is that their body often doesn’t serve to set anything free; rather, it gives impersonal desire personal expression and in this way it acts as a zone of containment, or a point of blockage - a dead end if you like, no matter how you choose to penetrate it. In other words, the anus is a cul-de-sac and, as Bataille reminds us, the vagina is a freshly dug grave.

There is, I admit, something utopian in this belief that we might discover via molecular-desire a new world in which we each contain an infinite number of impersonal selves and the anthropomorphic representation of sex is shattered once and for all: a future in which love will no longer mean boy-meets-girl, but boy becomes-girl, boy becomes-animal, boy becomes-plant, etc. But, even after the orgy, it surely remains true to say that perversions make happy.

This, however, is not to argue that the only way to form an intimate relation between yourself and the world of plants is to roll around naked like Birkin in the wet hill-sides, saturated with a mixture of pollen and semen. Nor does it mean having to masturbate with the contents of your vegetable drawer. For art also serves as a method of becoming and when Van Gogh paints sunflowers "he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as a man, and the sunflower, as sunflower". The canvas acts as a zone of proximity wherein something is exchanged between the two terms: the artist becomes-object, just as the object becomes pure line and colour.

This is the power of painting: it gives us the third thing, which, in this case, is a kind of human-flower hybrid that blossoms in the fourth dimension as a form of perfected relationship and becoming "where no Kodak can snap it". And, for Lawrence, our life hinges upon this relationship formed between ourselves and the world around us. Via an infinite number of different contacts we enter into the kingdom of bliss.

Alas, it’s not easy to come into touch in this way. To form a new relation with the world is invariably painful, if only because it involves the breaking of old connections and loyalties and this, as Lawrence reminds us, is never pleasant. But, nevertheless, we live in bright red splendour like the poppy via acts of infidelity and not by staying true to old attachments like a fat green cabbage forever stuck in the same old cabbage patch.

See:

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 106-07.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Morality and the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 171.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Art and Morality', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, p. 168.

Note: A much longer version of this work was first presented at Treadwell's, London, on 19 June, 2012.

Notes on Object Imperative and Pantheistic Sensuality

17thC print depicting a happy dendrophile

Lawrence loves trees and although he concedes they're mindless, he excitedly writes of sap-consciousness and root-lust and assigns them a unique soul. They are, he says, powerful, inhuman beings reaching up to the sky and reaching down into the dark earth. And reaching also into us.

Speaking of an American pine, Lawrence writes:

"Our two lives meet and cross one another, unknowingly: the tree's life penetrates my life, and my life, the tree's. We cannot live near one another, as we do, without affecting one another.”

Confronting the forceful reality of the tree, Lawrence speculates what might be thought of as a form of object imperative which, to paraphrase Graham Harman, radiates over him like a black sun, holding him in its orbit, demanding his attention and insisting that he reorganise his life along it axes:

"Something fierce and bristling is communicated. The piney sweetness is rousing and defiant ... the noise of the needles is keen with aeons of sharpness. ... I am conscious that it helps to change me, vitally. I am even conscious that shivers of energy cross my living plasm, from the tree, and I become a degree more like unto the tree ... And the tree gets a certain shade and alertness of my life, within itself. ...

      Of course, if I like to cut myself off, and say it is all bunk, a tree is merely so much lumber not yet sawn, then in a great measure I shall be cut off. So much depends on one’s attitude. One can shut many, many doors of receptivity in one’s self: or one can open many doors that are shut.
      I prefer to open my doors to the coming of the tree. Its raw earth-power and its raw sky-power, its resinous erectness and resistance, its sharpness of hissing needles and relentlessness of roots ...”

Lawrence describes this as a form of pantheistic sensuality, thereby indicating how his dendrophilia has a religious aspect and is not merely an erotic fascination.

Trees, we might say, give him a sense of god as present in all things and not merely wood. Thus Lawrence wants to venerate them as well as rub up against them (enjoying the feel of their bark and depositing his seed, like Birkin, in the folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves).

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Pan in America', Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Lines quoted are from pp. 158-59. 

For a related post on Lawrence's dendrophilia, click here.

Charles, Prince of Piffle

Torpedo the Ark opposes all forms of monarchy, including the House of Windsor.

I wouldn't say I hate them, but I want them to go away - far, far away - and cease to exert any influence upon public life or the cultural imagination.  

And if there's one member of this ghastly family of privileged, parasitic inbreds that I want to go further away than the others, it's Charles, Prince of Piffle and would-be King of the Crackpots.

For whilst I can forgive him many things - his love of The Goon Show, his penchant for talking to plants, his fantasy of becoming a tampon, etc. - what I can't overlook is the very real power he has to shape government policy and popular opinion on a wide range of issues, from farming and the environment, to art, architecture and - most worryingly of all - healthcare.

A committed defender of faith and self-professed enemy of the Enlightenment, Charles is clearly a crank who subscribes to some deeply foolish ideas. But, like his former guru, Laurens van der Post, he's also someone with a rather sinister aspect, not above harming others should they challenge these anti-scientific beliefs or frustrate his attempts to have them implemented, as the case of Edzard Ernst demonstrates.

It's nothing short of scandalous that the Prince has been able to pass himself off as an expert in integrated medicine and persuade members of parliament - including government ministers - to take homeopathy, herbalism and other complementary or alternative treatments seriously enough to invest large sums of public money in researching and promoting them.

I don't want the Department of Health to use its limited financial resources on various forms of quackery at the behest of a meddling member of the royal family and whilst I'm all for choice within the NHS, I don't want that choice to include witchcraft, faith healing, or snake oil thank you very much - even if the latter comes with an official royal warrant. 

As David Colquhoun, Professor of Pharmacology at University College London, writes: "Questions about health policy are undoubtedly political, and the highly partisan interventions of the Prince in the political process make his behaviour unconstitutional."

Not only does Charles jeopardise the future of the monarchy with his behaviour (which I don't care about), he endangers the health of the nation (about which I do care). As Christopher Hitchens warns: "An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific."


See:

David Colquhoun, 'Quacktitioner Royal is a menace to the constitution and public health', The Conversation, (July 30, 2013): click here. 

David Gorski, 'Prince of Pseudoscience', Slate, (March 17, 2015): click here. 

Christopher Hitchens, 'Charles, Prince of Piffle', Slate, (June 14, 2010): click here:  

I am grateful to Maria Thanassa for suggesting the topic of this post.

Endgame: the Case of Nazi Paikidze

nazipaikidze.com

Russian-born, US-living, 22-year-old chess-master, Nazi Paikidze, is one of those women who invites use of the sexist cliché concerning an apparently rare combination of beauty and brains (I say apparently because I have no way of knowing what percentage of women are both very attractive and very intelligent, though suspect it's much higher than commonly believed - and almost certainly higher than the number of men who are gifted with good-looks and a brilliant mind).

However, Nazi is not only beautiful and brainy, but someone prepared to actively take a stand in public against the religious oppression of women, having recently announced that she will boycott the 2017 Women's World Chess Championship in Tehran, due to the enforcement of an Islamic dress code that requires all participants to wear a hijab or face action from the morality police.

Even though this will mean missing an important tournament and risk damaging her career as a professional chess player, Nazi has categorically refused to cover her hair in order to compete and thereby show complicity with a phallo-theocratic regime in which women are denied fundamental rights and freedoms.      

For this, Torpedo the Ark salutes Ms Paikidze. Her protest shames those politicians, commentators, fashion designers, etc. who would normalize the wearing of a veil even in secular-liberal Western society, wilfully turning a blind eye to the fact that it's a symbol of, at best, sexual discrimination and, at worst, violent misogyny.

And shame too on those appeasers and apologists within the chess world's governing body, including Susan Polgar, who have tried to silence Nazi on this issue, insisting she should keep her views to herself and learn to respect cultural differences, rather than standing by the women of Iran who are courageously (often secretly) seeking to reform a society (and a religion) that denigrates them on the on hand, whilst fetishizing their purity on the other. 


Note: Readers interested in the campaign for the right of individual women in Iran to choose whether or not to cover their hair in public, should visit My Stealthy Freedom; an online social movement started by Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad - another brave, beautiful and brilliant woman. 

On the Question of Ensoulment

Soul entering human embryo at point of conception 

Holygraphic quantum-semantic electron microscopy imaging by pixwit.com

D. H. Lawrence wasn't a biologist, but that didn't deter him from sharing his metaphysical speculations on human fertilization and the development of the embryo. And, being primarily a religious thinker, the vital question for him concerned ensoulment; i.e., the moment at which a newly formed human being is animated by the Holy Spirit.
 

For Lawrence, as for the Pope, just as coition is the essential clue to sex, conception is the crucial act here: the instant that the father-quick fuses with the mother-germ is when a new unit of individuality is born, nine months prior to the birth of the actual baby.

However, we might note that - unlike the Pope - Lawrence also believes in a form of reincarnation via which the souls of the dead re-enter and pervade the souls of the living, breeding thoughts and feelings and ensuring that each person is composed of a multiplicity of forces and so isn't absolutely unique or entirely self-contained.

As interesting as the latter belief is, it's the former notion of ensoulment that I wish to discuss here, examining the view that it occurs at conception and not, for example, at the formation of the nervous system, or when there is measurable brain activity; nor when a tiny heartbeat can be heard, or fetal viability is attained; nor when the newborn is rudely slapped on the bottom and draws its first breath.

It's a view, however, that isn't shared universally. Aristotle, for example, subscribed to a model of epigenesis and believed that ensoulment - in a human sense - only occurred forty days after conception in the case of the male embryo and ninety days after conception in the case of the female fetus, when movement is experienced within the womb. Before this time he held that an embryo had the soul of a vegetable, followed by that of an animal and so couldn't be regarded as a fully human individual.     

Aristotle's views on this question influenced many of the great Christian thinkers, including Thomas Aquinas, who, even whilst conceding that the early embryo did not contain a human soul (one capable of rationality and distinguishing between good and evil), still maintained that aborting it constituted a grave sin (a position which, rightly or wrongly, the Catholic Church has been remarkably consistent on over the years).

It's worth recalling, however, that the ancient Greeks and early Christians knew nothing of fertilization; it wasn't until 1876 that Oscar Hertwig conclusively demonstrated that it involved fusion of two parental gametes and resulted in a genetically distinct zygote. Aristotle believed that the embryo arose exclusively from semen and that the female body merely provided a safe space for the embryo to develop.

Compared to this view, the notion of ensoulment at conception doesn't seem so outlandish; provided of course that one is willing to accept the idea of a non-corporeal and immortal essence animating the human being like some kind of divine breath or spark. Personally, I'm not.

I tend, rather, to share Foucault's more negative, more material view of the soul; as a virtual and historical reality that is produced as an effect of power continually shaping and disciplining the body and which ultimately serves to imprison the flesh. And, like Wilde, I hope that if ever I am to live again it can be as a little flower - no soul, but perfectly beautiful. 

D. H. Lawrence and the Question of Spermism

Although D. H. Lawrence wasn't a biologist in any conventional or objective sense of the term, that didn't stop him from sharing his often peculiar ideas on human reproduction and the development of the embryo. In Fantasia of the Unconscious, for example, whilst confessing his ignorance of the sex cells in terms of chemical composition and function, he's perfectly happy to describe how the parental gametes sparkle with potency and send forth dark currents of vital energy attracting one another.

But if he acknowledges the importance of the large and mysterious mother-germ, one gets the impression that it's the father-spark that really excites his interest and he is at heart something of a spermist. For it's the much smaller sperm cell, writes Lawrence, that is most vivid and even more intrinsic to procreation. So whilst we should readily admit our indebtedness to our mother and her ovum, we should not deny the father-quick of ourselves, which is maybe the most essential element.   
   
Of course, this is not to suggest that Lawrence fully subscribed to the now obsolete and ludicrous-seeming notion that the head of each sperm cell contains a tiny human being - a theory of preformationism, widely accepted in the late seventeenth century after sperm (or seminal animalcules) were first identified under the microscope c.1677.

Although never as dominant an idea as the opposing (and earlier) model of ovist preformationism, spermism nevertheless had some influential supporters, including the German philosopher Leibniz, whose writings on the subject helped shape the development of embryology long into the eighteenth century.

There were major concerns with the spermist theory, however, not the least of which was the fact that it implied a colossal waste of human life on the part of a supposedly loving God: there are around 100 million sperm in each millilitre of semen and a healthy male adult will normally ejaculate between two and five ml. Conception, of course, only requires a single sperm cell. Attempts to get around this problem - arguing, for example, that sperm cells which failed to penetrate the ovum evaporated into the air and floated around until such time they could be recycled - failed to convince most critics.             

Later spermists abandoned this idea of panspermism, and argued instead that the homunculus present in sperm, although perfectly formed physically, had no soul; this would enter either at, or soon after, conception. If this rather neatly solved the moral issue, it unfortunately invoked the competing theory of epigenesis by making both sperm and egg necessary for the development of full human life.  

Ultimately, spermism was abandoned by the scientific community, not least of all because no one ever managed to find a little person existing ready-made in a sperm cell. But it nevertheless forms an interesting and amusing episode in the history of embryology - one that writers such as Lawrence still seem to be drawn to many years after its debunking.      


See: 

Cera R. Lawrence, 'Spermism', entry in the Embryo Project Encyclopedia (Arizona State University, 2008): click here. 

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

On Embryology, Ensoulment and Stem Cell Research

By his own admission, D. H. Lawrence wasn't an objective scientist or a scholar of any kind; neither an archaeologist, nor an anthropologist. Nor was he an embryologist, but that didn't deter him from sharing his thoughts on human fertilization and the development of the embryo and fetus. 

In Fantasia of the Unconscious, for example, whilst not knowing anything about sex cells, he's happy to assert that the parental gametes continue to exist - sparkling and potent - within the zygote, forever sending forth vibrations and dark currents of vital energy. In other words, although Lawrence accepts that the sperm and ovum fuse at the moment of conception, he believes that the original parent nuclei somehow survive within the new diploid cell and function as well-heads of vivid life.

I'm not sure that's the case and, indeed, even for Lawrence this is only a preliminary rather than an intrinsic truth: this, the intrinsic truth - the truth that really matters to him, as to many religiously-minded people - is that emanating from the fusion of the father-quick and mother-germ is a new unit of unique individuality. Lawrence thus shares the papal belief that conception is the crucial  moment at which the Holy Spirit enters and a new human soul is born, nine months prior to the birth of the actual baby.

Such a mystical line of thinking wouldn't really matter or particularly concern me, if it didn't have an effect on public policy and often inhibit scientific and medical research - such as embryonic stem cell research, for example. The problem with this research, from a religious perspective, is clearly a moral one: it entails the destruction of human embryos and the souls they embody and is therefore a form of murder.

In order to demonstrate how unreasonable such a view is, we need to remind ourselves just what stem cell research actually involves and what potential benefits it offers ...

First of all, it's important to remember that the embryos used will have been cultured in vitro and are not harvested directly from a woman's body. Secondly, we should recall that they are at an incredibly early stage of development, just a few days old, and consisting of no more than around 150 cells; we're talking blastocysts not babies here.

A small group of the cells inside the microscopic blastocyst are embryonic stem cells and these have two properties that make them of such great interest to scientists: (i) they can remain in an unspecialized state for long periods of time and (ii) they are pluripotent - which means they have the potential to become any specialized cell in the human body.

Clearly such cells have much to teach us about cell division and cell differentiation, which, as Sam Harris points out, would "almost certainly shed new light on those medical conditions, like cancer and birth defects, that seem to be merely a matter of these processes gone awry". Harris also powerfully addresses the issue of embryonic termination. There is not the slightest reason to think that embryos at the 150-cell stage "have the capacity to sense pain, to suffer, or to experience the loss of life in any way at all".

On the other hand:

"What is indisputable is that there are millions of human beings who do have these capacities and who currently suffer from traumatic injuries to the brain and spinal cord. Millions more suffer from Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. Millions more suffer from stroke and heart disease, from burns, from diabetes, from rheumatoid arthritis, from Purkinje cell degeneration, from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and from vision and hearing loss. We know that embryonic stem cells promise to be a renewable source of tissues and organs that might alleviate such suffering in the not too distant future."

But, thanks to the faithful - and to writers like Lawrence who share their superstitions and seemingly endorse their pro-life views - biologists and doctors are dragged before ethics committees and forced to justify their work and explain why a fertilized egg shouldn't in fact be accorded all the rights and protections of a fully developed child.

Again, to quote from Sam Harris if I may and to conclude in full agreement with him:

"Of course, the point at which we fully acquire our humanity, and our capacity to suffer, remains an open question. But anyone who would dogmatically insist that these traits must arise coincident with the moment of conception, has nothing to contribute, apart from his ignorance, to this debate. Those opposed to therapeutic stem cell research on religious grounds constitute the biological and ethical equivalent of a flat-earth society." 

 

See: 

Sam Harris, The End of Faith, (The Free Press, 2006), pp. 166-67. 

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Of Virgins and Raisins

According to Christoph Luxenberg's controversial reading of the Koran, one of the better known inducements offered to young Muslim males prepared to martyr themselves is not, in fact, a heavenly harem of virgins, but, rather, a fistful of raisins. 

However, without wishing to doubt for one moment Luxenberg's scholarly credentials or the painstaking nature of his research, I have to say I'm not entirely convinced by his argument that the Aramaic word hur, meaning white raisins - a great delicacy in the ancient world - was mistranslated into the Arabic term for a fair maiden (and subsequently transliterated into Latin as houris). It just seems a revision too far; that is to say, too good - because so splendidly amusing - to be true.

One fears that Luxenberg has some kind of anti-Islamic agenda in wishing to strip Jannah of its sexual promise. Accused by some of being a Christian apologist, perhaps he can't stand the thought that whilst all that he's offered in the afterlife is, at best, a family reunion, a bit of a sing-song, and the chance to hang about with Jesus, Muslim martyrs hit the jackpot.

Delights on offer include: rivers of wine, milk and honey, young boys of perpetual freshness to attend to one's every need, fine silk garments, and, as mentioned, 72 virgins. And when Allah provides virgins, they're not just any old virgins - they're übervirgins, the purest of all pure beings with lovely gazelle-shaped eyes, naturally large breasts, hairless, translucent bodies and inviting vaginas; immortals who have no need to urinate, defecate, or menstruate.

Despite Luxenberg's etymological argument, it's difficult to assign a raisin - no matter how plump and delicious it might be - such physical attributes. The fact is, the Islamic paradise is a far more sensual and priapic place than the sexless Christian heaven, which is free of pain and tears, but also lacking in erotic joy.

Some might caricature the former as nothing more than a celestial brothel, but that's a slightly more appealing prospect if I'm honest than a great care home in the sky.            


See: Christoph Luxenburg, Die Syro-Aramäische Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koransprache (Verlag Hans Schiller, 2000)