Sailing to Byzantium (Notes on Yeats and the Singularity)

William Butler Yeats by Tricia Danby

deviantart.com

Written in 1926, when Yeats was 61 and starting to feel his age, the poem 'Sailing to Byzantium' was published two years later in a collection entitled The Tower (1928).

Composed of four stanzas, each arranged into eight ten-syllable lines with a traditional rhyming scheme (a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c) of Italian origin much favoured by poets who go in for a mock-heroic effect - not that Yeats didn't take himself and his work very seriously indeed - it describes the metaphorical journey of a man musing on his own mortality and attempting to imagine a vision of eternal life that might provide him with posthumous hope.     

In other words, given the problem of a heart sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal, Yeats looks to art for a solution, speculating that he might be able to escape his paltry body and transfer his soul into some non-natural form - such as that of a mechanical golden bird, that sits in a fake golden tree and sings about the mysteries of time.

This quest for immortality is, for Yeats, at the heart of all spiritual yearning; a yearning that becomes increasingly acute - and increasingly desperate - with age.

What's interesting - to me at least - is not that Yeats openly expresses his contempt for imperfect nature, which, in his mind, is full of ugliness and prone to decay; for that's common among idealists who despise the softness and (sinfulness) of the flesh. It's the fact, rather, that he's equally explicit in his positing of the artificial object as superior to the natural entity in every sense, including, the aesthetico-spiritual.

Ultimately, his is a material idealism of things, including golden birds, not an immaterial idealism of disembodied minds. And his dream is of being gathered into the artifice - not the reality or truth - of eternity. Once his soul has been released from nature, he wants it to be reincarnated in a man-made object.

I thought of Yeats whilst reading an interview with Ray Kurzweil, the American author, computer whizz, and Google's director of engineering. Kurzweil is a public advocate of artificial intelligence and transhumanism who eagerly awaits the singularity - i.e., the moment when mankind fuses with its own technology, finally securing immortality and a new Byzantium; albeit a scientific utopia wherein the knowledge drive is triumphant, rather than poetic fancy.     

If Yeats fantasized about becoming a toy bird, Kurzweil hopes to have his consciousness downloaded onto his laptop and eventually transferred back to his cryogenically preserved and technologically enhanced body, which will be all ready and waiting in its vat of liquid nitrogen at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Arizona.

Both of the visions described here are anathema to me; not only as a Lawrentian, but also as a Wildean. For like the latter, I too hope that if I am to be reincarnated one day it will be as a flower - no soul but perfectly beautiful.

And for that to happen, I need to be buried in the dark soil and allowed to decompose; returned to nature, not released from it; returned to death, which, as Nietzsche says, is a return to the actual, not projected into some virtual future founded upon techno-idealism and dreams of becoming-machine. 


See: W. B. Yeats, 'Sailing to Byzantium', in The Collected Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran, (Scribner, revised paperback edition, 1996). Click here to read on the Poetry Foundation website.

Of Spiders and Flies (Notes on the Lawrence-Eliot Relationship)

D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot 
by David Levine

The relationship between D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot was never going to be anything other than strained at best. And often it was hostile, even spiteful (one is tempted to say catty). There are several explanations why. F. R. Leavis, for example, accused Eliot of snobbishness in his appraisal of Lawrence and there is undoubtedly an element of class antagonism present in the Lawrence-Eliot relationship.

But Eliot doesn't just dislike or dismiss Lawrence for being an oik; they were artistically and philosophically irreconcilable, as well as belonging to different social worlds. And they were also poles apart religiously, which, arguably, was the really crucial issue for both.

Eliot, who famously converted to Anglicanism in 1927 and identified with the more orthodox wing of the Church, was as contemptuous of the young Lawrence's nonconformist background as he was disdainful of the mature Lawrence's neo-paganism. In After Strange Gods (1934), Eliot argues that whilst Lawrence's vision of life is spiritual, it's nonetheless corrupt and represents the intrusion of the diabolic into modern literature. 

Eliot also seems to have disliked Lawrence's idea of what constituted wholesome fucking:

"When his characters make love - or perform Mr. Lawrence’s equivalent for love-making - and they do nothing else - they not only lose all the amenities, refinements and graces which many centuries have built up in order to make love-making tolerable; they seem to reascend the metamorphoses of evolution, passing backward beyond ape and fish to some hideous coition of protoplasm."

This might not be entirely fair, but it is rather amusing.

Far less amusing, however, was Eliot's response to E. M. Forster's generous and straight out description of Lawrence following his death in 1930 as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation". Eliot - to his great discredit - felt it appropriate and worthwhile to pick this touching tribute apart, demanding that Forster explain and justify his terms:

"I am the last person to wish to disparage the genius of Lawrence, or to disapprove when a writer of the eminence of Mr Forster speaks 'straight out'. But the virtue of speaking straight out is somewhat diminished if what one speaks is not sense. And unless we know exactly what Mr Forster means by greatest, imaginative, and novelist, I submit that this judgement is meaningless."

This - written in a published letter - is just nasty and petty, is it not? Insulting to Forster, insulting to Lawrence and insulting to the friendship between them. Forster was stung to reply:

"Mr T. S. Eliot entangles me in his web. He asks exactly what I mean by 'greatest', 'imaginative', and 'novelist', and I cannot say. Worse still, I cannot even say what 'exactly' means - only that there are occasions when I would rather feel like a fly than a spider, and the death of D. H. Lawrence is one of these."

       
See:

T. S. Eliot, 'The Contemporary Novel', in The Times Literary Supplement (12 August 2015). Click here to read.

The Forster-Eliot letters were published in The Nation and Athenaeum in March/April 1930 and can be found in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 5: 1930-1931, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, (Faber and Faber, 2014): click here. 

D. H. Lawrence and the Grand Perverts

Drawing of D. H. Lawrence by David Levine (1968)

According to D. H. Lawrence, in a letter written to Aldous Huxley, behind all of those whom he identifies as grand perverts, lies "ineffable conceit" and boundless ego.

Figures including St. Francis, Michelangelo, Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marcel Proust, are all guilty of the same thing; namely, "attempting to intellectualise and so utterly falsify the phallic consciousness", says Lawrence.

By this, he seems to mean they get their sex in their heads and barter away the sheer intensity of lived experience for mere representation. In other words, they fall into idealism, into narcissism and into solipsism; "the utter incapacity for any development of contact with any other human being".

But, in as much as phallic consciousness is also "the basic consciousness, and the thing we mean, in the best sense, by common sense", I suppose he's also taking a dig at all those who dare to think differently from those who subscribe to the morality of custom and popular prejudice, or what Lawrence mistakes for an instinctive-intuitive form of folk wisdom. 

 
And this, when you think about it, is not only surprising, but bitterly disappointing. That Lawrence - of all people - should end up defending doxa (that form of truth and goodness which goes without saying and from which we should never deviate) and condemning a host of other writers, artists, and thinkers as perverts (a term used in an admittedly idiosyncratic manner, but still in an essentially negative and pejorative sense), is, if nothing else, an outrageous example of the pot calling the kettle - and every other kitchen utensil - black.   


See: D. H. Lawrence, Letter 4358, to Aldous Huxley, 27 March 1928, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James. T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 342.  

Fish Out of Water (Notes on Evolution and Cruelty)

According to a report in the New Scientist, blenny fish - fed-up with the predatory behaviour of their aquatic neighbours - are abandoning life beneath the waves of the South Pacific Ocean and gradually relocating to dry land. It's 400 million years after others of their kind first made the move and kick-started an evolutionary process that eventually produced us. But still, better late than never and I wish 'em the best of British.

The case is interesting because scientists have never been entirely certain why fish first chose to exit the sea and crawl gasping onto terra firma. After studying several species of blenny, however, researchers at the University of New South Wales have concluded that it's most likely an attempt to avoid being eaten by bigger fish, such as flounders. This desire to escape is an understandably strong impetus.

Of course, it's not all sweetness and light up here on land and there are still dangers awaiting for the blennies as they shuffle around the rocks - such as bird attacks. But predation risk is significantly less, however, than it is underwater. In fact, once they pick up their piscine courage and make the full transition - developing stronger tail fins so as to be able to leap about more successfully - their chances of being eaten drop by about two-thirds (66%).

Further, moving onto land has additional benefits for blennies; holes in the rocks, for example, provide conveniently sheltered spaces for laying eggs. So it's really a move worth considering seriously if you're a small fish. In fact, one is surprised that it hasn't been tried more often and by more types of fish other than the estimated 30-odd families that have made the crossing between worlds. 

That said, Nietzsche reminds us in the Genealogy that it is never easy for any creature to make such a fundamental change. For fish, becoming land animals was as difficult, as painful, and as terrifying as it was for the animal man to become a creature capable of making promises; a creature restrained by a morality of custom and subject to an internalisation of cruelty; a creature made regular and predictable and weighed down by bad conscience; a creature, in short, made human, all too human.    

Like us, the blenny fish is the result of millions of years of evolution. But only man has shaped himself through thousands of years of self-torture; indeed, this is what we have had the longest practice doing and wherein our genius as a species lies.    


See:

Alice Klein, 'These fish are evolving right now to become land-dwellers', New Scientist (16 March 2017): click here to read.

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), particularly the Second Essay. 

If It Be Not True To Me ... Reflections on D. H. Lawrence's Phallic Epistemology

Portrait of D. H. Lawrence by the brilliant American 

scratchboard illustrator Bri Hermanson

bhermanson.com 

One of Lawrence's major philosophical concerns was with the question of knowledge. If he didn't produce a fully developed epistemology as such, he nevertheless mused frequently on this topic and the closely related theory of consciousness.

Indeed, he even wrote a poem in which he professed his love of thinking and set out five conditions that constitute legitimate thought:

(i) the welling up of unknown life into consciousness

(ii) the validating of statements according to conscious criteria

(iii) the observation and interpretation of natural phenomena

(iv) the careful examination of direct experience

(v) the ontological receptiveness of Dasein, or, as Lawrence puts it, man in his wholeness, wholly attending.

What thought is not, says Lawrence, is a trick or an exercise that involves playing with already existent ideas. He hates this and regards it not only as a form of mental conceit, but mechanical in operation; something which offends him as a vitalist.

Preferably, for Lawrence, thinking should take place in the body and not the mind; for whilst we can easily go wrong in the latter, what the former tells us is always true. Thus Lawrence posits some kind of instinctive and pristine form of blood-knowledge, untainted by idealism with all its abstractions and logical absurdities.

This libidinal irrationalism (and anti-rationalism) underlies Lawrence's hostility towards modern science and ultimately renders his theory of knowledge deeply suspect and philosophically untenable; unless of course one is an ardent devotee of Nietzsche, who also wrote in blood and advanced similar ideas.

Critics and commentators sympathetic to Lawrence who argue that his reputation as an enemy of intellect is an unjust (if pervasive) cliché are, alas, fooling no one; certainly not those of us who are intimately familiar with his writing. Nor does it really work to suggest that if Lawrence's theory of knowledge fails to convince, then this reveals inadequacies in our own thinking.

The fact is, Lawrence - as a novelist, as a poet, and even as an essayist - is not concerned with objective truth; he's concerned, rather, with his own feelings and experiences of the world (i.e., of the world not as it is, but as it is for him). And so he gaily dismisses evidence for evolution or the expansion of the universe, for example, simply on the basis that it doesn't accord with his own instinctive-intuitive (i.e. fanciful) understanding of life's development and cosmology.

This is summed up in the first two lines of the little song that Lawrence gives us to sing in Fantasia; a four-line ditty which he obviously finds amusing in its chirpy insouciance, but which I find anything but: If it be not true to me / What care I how true it be ...?                  

Such art-speech hardly demonstrates a powerful and lifelong commitment to furthering knowledge and exploring inhuman reality. Rather, it reveals that Lawrence is not only sceptical but indifferent about the possibility of such. What's more, he's betraying a surprisingly solipsistic side to his nature; the universe may not be mind-dependent in Lawrence's Weltanschauung, but it's permanently correlated with his precious solar plexus (the great dynamic centre of what he calls primary consciousness and which houses the wisdom of the soul).

Either that, or it's dependent in some manner upon the phallic principle that he promotes in his later work, contrasting cerebral consciousness with phallic consciousness; the former a way of knowing the world scientically in terms of apartness and the latter a way of knowing it mytho-poetically in terms of togetherness.

And this, rather strangely, is where Lawrence concludes his epistemology; with one hand pressed firmly on his abdomen and the other gripped tightly round his cock so as to know the categorical difference between a rubber-ball and a pomegranate ...                

Notes:

D. H. Lawrence, 'Thought', in The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
 
D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Readers interested in Lawrence's haemo-epistemology might also like to see the related posts Haemostasis (18 Dec 2012) and On Haematolagnia, Feelings and Freethinkers (7 Jan 2016).

 

On the Struggle Between Art and Knowledge in Nietzsche's Early Philosophy

Portrait of Nietzsche as a Young Professor
 University of Basel, 1872

What Nietzsche terms in his early writings the knowledge drive, is something he favours subjecting to strict control. For whilst it powerfully propels modern science, it does so in a promiscuous and indiscriminate manner that is incapable of determining value. To give it free reign is, at the very least, a sign of vulgarity.

The role of the philosopher, therefore, is to act as a kind of guardian and ensure that science serves life and furthers the aim of culture; left unchecked, the will to truth will ultimately result in nihilism. But this subordination of the knowledge drive isn't accomplished by means of metaphysics, or the establishment of a new faith. It requires, rather, the granting to art new powers and responsibilities. 

Readers in the analytic tradition of philosophy who are unfamiliar with German Romanticism, might be surprised at this. But, for the youthful Nietzsche, writing as an ardent devotee of Richard Wagner, philosophy - whilst it might rely upon similar methods to science - is, in its desire to invent beyond the limits of experience, a form of art and a continuation of the mythical drive. It is thus essentially pictorial and not mathematical in its expression.

What's more, according to Nietzsche, the reason why philosophy retains its value - and, indeed, a higher value than science - is because it continues to concern itself with notions of beauty and human greatness. Of course, this makes philosophy a refined form of anthropocentrism; one that transforms all nature into man's own image and posits all being as a permanent correlate of thinking, thereby demonstrating its radical incompatibility with scientific realism.     

Leaving us in no doubt about what this means, Nietzsche writes: "Man is acquainted with the world to the extent that he is acquainted with himself ..." A little later, he adds: "We are acquainted with but one reality - the reality of thoughts". And, as if to show how Kantian he remained in his epistemology, he concludes: "The world has its reality only in man: it is tossed back and forth like a ball in the heads of men." 

Nietzsche doesn't at this point flatly deny the existence of the thing-in-itself or dispute the possibility of facts, he simply argues that because objects are mind-dependent, we can say nothing about them outside of this relationship. In other words, for Nietzsche - as for other sceptics - we can only know reality as it appears to us. Consequently, Nietzsche privileges art over science, as art, of course, is all about appearances and attempting to form representations of reality (i.e. pictures of the world that are ever more complete).  

Unlike Kant, however, Nietzsche feels sensory knowledge is more than mere illusion; that it's adequate to the truth of the world and that the mind mirrors what is, because the mind of man has itself evolved out of matter and not out of thin air. The mind might structure and colour things, but it doesn't do so in an entirely arbitrary manner; even if its reflections are distorted, they are not entirely false or simply the product of dreamy idealism.

In other words, objects may conform to mind - but mind is itself an object. Thus, breaking out of the correlationist circle and directly accessing what Meillassoux terms the ancestral realm that exists prior to humanity (or, indeed, any forms of sentient being whatsoever), is not a major concern for Nietzsche. Indeed, even in his later, supposedly positivist mid-period, Nietzsche is still primarily concerned with what is true for us (mankind) and his model of science remains distinctly gay and tied to his understanding of art.

Ultimately, what does an arch-vitalist care about arche-fossils ...?    

See: Nietzsche, 'The Philosopher: Reflections on the Struggle Between Art and Knowledge', in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Humanities Press International, 1990). The lines quoted are from sections 80, 94 and 106.

On Black Mould and the Tragic Case of Dana Anhalt

Photos: Caters News

Mould is a fungus that grows in the form of multicellular filaments called hyphae. There are thousands of diverse species, but they all require moisture for growth and they all derive their energy heterotrophically from the organic matter on which they live. Typically, mould secretes enzymes that transform complex biopolymers such as starch, cellulose and lignin into simpler substances which can be absorbed by the hyphae. Mould thus has a significant role in decomposition, enabling nutrients to be recycled throughout ecosystems - which is a good thing.

Mould also plays an important part in the production of various foods, antibiotics and other medicinal drugs - and again, this is a good thing. Indeed, one might view mould positively from the perspective of Ben Woodward's slime dynamics and understand it to be a darkly vital substance. Unfortunately, however, mould is also a major source of food waste and of illness and many strategies for food preservation - such as salting, pickling, and freeze-drying - are essentially attempts to prevent or retard mould growth.

Although moulds grow all around us and their spores are a common component of dust, their presence is visible to the naked eye only when they form large colonies consisting of an interconnected network of hyphae called a mycelium. In artificial environments, such as homes and offices, humidity and temperature are often stable enough to foster the rapid and extensive growth of mould colonies and this can lead to a variety of health issues, including allergic reactions and respiratory problems.

Indeed, some moulds, including the notorious black mould or Stachybotrys chartarum, produce mycotoxins, prolonged exposure to which can have extremely serious - potentially fatal - consequences. As a general rule, you really don't want to ingest or inhale toxic compounds produced by black mould, or facilitate the growth of pathogenic moulds within the body.   

Which brings us to the terrible and tragic case of Dana Anhalt which has recently received extensive media attention; a 37-year old writer and psychology student from New York, Ms Anhalt has been bedridden for years suffering from multiple health problems, due (it was eventually discovered) to the presence of toxic black mould in her household (and not, as was once believed, chronic Lyme disease).

Having spent most of her life being slowly poisoned and crippled with excruciating pain, Dana has now been instructed by doctors to immediately abandon her home and all of her possessions and move into a new, sterile environment - a bit like the Bubble Boy, Donald Sanger (Seinfeld 4-07).

But this, of course, requires money ... And so I invite readers of this blog interested in knowing more about Dana's case and possibly donating to her family's attempt to raise funds in order to help pay for her new life and the expensive medical care still required, to click here. Alternatively, one can go to Dana's own fundraising project: Art is Life.   

Hopefully, this courageous woman will one day discover the greater health which Zarathustra speaks of and enjoy the intoxication of convalesence. In the meantime, she might care to remember that it is only intense pain and sickness, unfolding within us over an extended period, that serves as the ultimate emancipator of the spirit and compels us to descend into our depths; not necessarily improving us as human beings, but making us more profound as thinkers.  

On Lewis Carroll and His Love for Alice Liddell and Other Little Girls

Six-year old Alice Liddell dressed as a beggar-child 

in a photograph by Lewis Carroll (1858)

As everyone knows, Lewis Carroll was extremely fond of children (except boys) and very much liked to keep their company. And to photograph them. He seems to have found their beauty unearthly, though not inhuman in the manner of the nymphet as described by Nabokov.

Adopting the Roman symbol of good fortune, Carroll would call a white stone day one on which he met by chance a memorable girl-child; on a train journey, for example, or at an exhibition, or perhaps at the seaside. He always carried with him a little bag full of puzzles, tricks and small gifts with which to entertain any little girls he might encounter on such a day. And he carried too a supply of safety pins for pinning up their skirts, should they wish to paddle in the surf.

Many lovely little creatures skipped and danced their way into Carroll's life and his affections. But none quite left their mark on him as did Alice Liddell, who, again as everyone knows, provided the inspiration (or at the very least the name) for Carroll's most famous literary creation.

There has been much speculation - not all of it pleasant or supported with evidence - about the precise nature of Carroll's relationship with Alice (as, indeed, with her older sister, Lorina). I doubt very much, however, that he wanted to sexually abuse her and would refrain from (retrospectively) describing him as a predatory paedophile; it's important to remember that Carroll lived in a time very different from our own.   

Having said that, he was clearly infatuated with the girl, whom he adored in that peculiar Victorian manner - sublimating illicit desire into ideal moral sentiment - and although there's no record of actual impropriety, there were enough elements of perviness to concern her mother who, eventually, took steps to discourage Carroll's relationship with her daughters and burned all of his early letters to Alice (letters that often closed with 10,000,000 kisses).

Ultimately, if obliged to take a position on this affair, I tend to agree with the American writer and critic, Katie Roiphe, whose 2001 work, Still She Haunts Me, is a fictional reimagining of the relationship between Carroll and Alice which suggests they were essentially friends with benefits - but not the kind of benefits that we've come to expect.

I agree also with Roiphe, writing in an essay, that, whilst Carroll was no drooling child molester, neither was he the shy, stuttering, essentially sexless bachelor that some of his defenders would have us believe. It is, she writes, simply absurd to claim that Carroll was drawn to little girls on a purely spiritual plane; his erotico-aesthetic appreciation of their physical charms was too conspicuous.

To his credit, however, he exercised great discipline and, rather than indulge his carnal urges, produced amazing works of imaginative nonsense instead. There is, says Roiphe, something noble in a practice of self-restraint "so forceful that it spews out stuttering tortoises and talking chess pieces ..."

She concludes:

"There is something touching about a man who fights the hardest fight in the world: his own desire. You can feel the loneliness on the page. You can the feel the longing in the photographs. You can witness the self-contempt in his diaries. ... He had impure thoughts, yes. But what matters, in the end, is what he did with them."

See: Katie Roiphe, 'Just Good Friends', article in The Guardian (29 Oct 2001): click here to read.

Nietzsche in Wonderland (On the Importance of Making Oneself Small)

In order to reach the lovely garden lying on the other side of a little locked door through which she was far too big to pass, Alice had to take a chance and drink the magical potion contained in a glass bottle labelled so as to encourage its consumption.

Finding the strange-flavoured liquid very much to her taste, she quickly finished it off and discovered to her delight that it had the desired effect of shrinking her, until she was no more than ten inches tall and thus just the right size to gain access to the lovely garden through the little locked door.  

Why does this matter?

Well, it matters because I think it crucial that all of us dare to live dangerously and take risks like Alice. This means not only tumbling down rabbit holes and drinking hallucinogenic (potentially poisonous) cocktails, but remaining as close to the flowers, the grass and the world of insects as is a girl who is not so very much bigger than they.

In other words, it means overcoming the arrogant disdain or numb indifference that grown-ups often feel for the tiny things that excite childish wonder. For as Nietzsche wrote: "They who wish to partake of all good things must know how to be small at times."  

- Human, All Too Human, II. 2. 51

This post is dedicated to the memory of Scott Carey.

On Fast Food and Film Theory

Everyone knows what an Egg McMuffin is: a delicious combination of egg, bacon and melted cheese inside a toasted English muffin, it's Herb Peterson's great contribution to culinary culture.

But not everyone knows what a MacGuffin is ...    

A MacGuffin is a plot device, commonly used in films (not least of all by Hitchcock, who popularised the term), that often takes the form of a desired object of apparent value and significance to those who know its secret, but mysterious and meaningless to those who don't. This object can pretty much be anything; a person, a place, an event, or a Maltese falcon and it doesn't matter why it matters - just so long as it sets up a story and then drives the action along.    

In other words, the nature of the MacGuffin is immaterial and completely contingent. Whereas the nature of the Egg McMuffin is - in its key ingredients at least - essentially fixed and non-exchangeable; it can't be an Egg McMuffin without the griddle fried egg and toasted English muffin.

Yes, the medallion of back bacon can be replaced with a sausage patty - and I'm also prepared to regard the slice of processed cheese as optional - but, if you remove the egg and serve what's left inside between two slices of toast (or even a crumpet posing as a muffin), then, as far as I'm concerned, you've not only ruined breakfast, but fundamentally misunderstood Herb Peterson's fast food take on Eggs Benedict.