On the Joy of Metaphysical Conceit (With Reference to John Donne's 'The Flea')

John Donne (1572-1631): The Flea 

(First published posthumously in 1633) 

Whilst it's true that I don't like conceited individuals, I do like writers who make use of conceits; i.e. literary devices that form extremely ingenious or fanciful parallels between apparently dissimilar objects. And I'm particularly fond of what are known as metaphysical conceits, associated - not surprisingly - with a loosely associated group of 17th century English poets known as the metaphysical poets, a term coined rather sneeringly by the critic Samuel Johnson.

These conceits, according to Johnson, violently yoke together in a clever but displeasing manner the most heterogeneous ideas and establish provocative analogies between spiritual qualities on the one hand and base matter on the other; such as, for example, the virgin purity of an unmarried woman and the vile body of an insect.

It's for this reason that John Donne's famous poem, The Flea, continues to delight. It's a comic and erotic verse that uses the conceit of a flea which has sucked blood both from the male speaker and the young woman he is hoping to seduce, as an extended metaphor for the amorous relationship between them.

The speaker attempts to persuade the woman to surrender her sex to him, not with sweet talk, or romantic flattery. Nor does he make an emotional appeal to her feelings. Rather, he uses his wit and his logic to appeal to her reason, arguing that if their blood mingles together within the body of the flea, then they have, essentially, already been joined as man and wife, so may as well fuck together without further delay.

Thus, as Dryden rightly says of Donne - and again, one can sense the disapproval in this remark:

"He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love."

However, despite the criticisms of Dryden and Johnson, there have been those, following T. S. Eliot, prepared to champion metaphysical poetry for its witty, cerebral style. Camille Paglia, for example, ranks The Flea as amongst the world's best - and queerest - love poems; a perfect illustration of Donne's effrontery and ostentatious use of conceits, in which, amongst other things, he satirizes the absurd arguments men will advance in the hope of getting laid.

As Paglia also points out, the three stanzas that compose The Flea are like scenes from a play; full of what she terms dramatic immediacy. This is in part due to the fact that there's no superfluous or old-fashioned lyricism; the reader feels as if they are listening to a genuine conversation between actual lovers, rather than the speech of those still earnestly clinging to the tired conventions of Petrarch.

Ultimately, perhaps what's most engaging about The Flea is the fact that the young woman is "serenely impervious to the poet's dazzling flights of rhetoric." So much so that, despite his desperate plea for clemency, she squashes the blood-swollen bug beneath her nail without a qualm. He may imagine that they are united as one within the body of the flea, but she's not buying into this holy trinity line of bullshit for a second.      

However, in protesting that the death of a flea is inconsequential and that her act of cruelty is not one that in any way morally dishonours or physically weakens her, she allows the man an opportunity to make his final, beautifully nihilistic point: nothing really matters in the grand scheme of things.

Thus the sacrifice of her virginity means nothing more, nothing less, than the murder of an insect and her determination to maintain her maidenhead until her wedding night, based on groundless fear and superstition, is absurd.

(Whether this finally convinced her to take him into her bed, we sadly cannot know ...)  

See:

Helen Gardner (ed.), Metaphysical Poets, (Revised Edition: Penguin Books, 1966). The quote from Dryden is taken from this text. 

Helen Gardner (ed.), John Donne: The Divine Poems, (Second Edition: Oxford University Press, 1978).

Camille Paglia, 'John Donne, The Flea', Break, Blow, Burn  (Vintage Books, 2006), pp. 20-25.

Three Brief Extracts from a Study of Eric Gill

Photo of Eric Gill by Howard Coster (1927)

National Portrait Gallery

I: Two Men With Red Beards

Eric Gill was a great admirer of D. H. Lawrence. Not only did they share many ideas and obsessions, they even looked alike. When the latter died, in 1930, Gill performed a special mass for Lawrence in the self-built chapel of his home in the Chilterns. He also produced two wood-engravings inspired by Lady Chatterley's Lover (unabashedly using himself as the model for Mellors).

This despite the fact that Lawrence in his review of Art Nonsense and Other Essays had been less than flattering, describing Gill as crude and crass; "like a tiresome uneducated workman arguing in the pub" who likes to repeatedly bang his fist on the table.

To his credit, Gill accepted this criticism in good spirit, telling Frieda in a letter that her husband was probably right and admitting that he was indeed an "inept and amateurish preacher". Gill was also extremely pleased to know that at least Lawrence had agreed with his main proposition concerning the sacred nature of workmanship.


II: It All Goes Together

A key idea for Gill was integration. One of the reasons he despised modern society was that, in his view, it seemed to perpetuate discord and division. His solution was to create perfect domestic harmony; home, sweet home providing a model of the good life amidst the chaos of the world and demonstrating how everything could be made to fit like the pieces of a jigsaw: It All Goes Together was one of Gill's favourite slogans.

Unfortunately, as Gill's biographer Fiona MacCarthy writes, when you consider his quest for integration and his extraordinary home life, you soon discover aspects "which do not go together in the least, a number of very basic contradictions between precept and practice, ambition and reality"; anomalies which, for one reason or another, are often ignored or glossed over by his admirers.

As MacCarthy also notes, however, to ignore Gill's complexity and contradictions - both as an artist and as a man - is ultimately to do him (and ourselves) a huge disservice.


III: Always Ready and Willing

Gill was a phallically-fixated, incestuous paedophile with a string of mistresses, happy to experiment with bestiality and cock sucking. We know this from diaries in which he recorded in explicit, quasi-scientific detail what he did with whom, when, where and how often (one of the telltale signs of a true pervert is this need to document).*

Gill preached morality and the importance of a well-regulated household that was devout and disciplined. But this didn't stop him from engaging in an anarchic succession of adulterous affairs, sleeping with his sisters, abusing his daughters, and fucking his dog. Always ready and willing, was another of the seemingly priapic Gill's favourite sayings.

The interesting thing is how, in Gill's mind, his aberrant sexual activities, his creative work and his Catholicism were, somehow, complementary; that is to say, equally important, equally holy. Which makes it extremely awkward, of course, for those who wish to separate these things in order that they might continue to enjoy the spiritual-aesthetic aspects, whilst condemning the former:

He was disgusting - but his lettering is so elegant and his designs so beautiful, as a friend recently wrote to me.        


* Afterword on Gill's Diaries

Gill cheerfully records, for example, the following incidents in his diary: (i) 25 September 1916: 'Compared specimens of semen from self and spaniel under a microscope'; (ii) 12 January 1920: Went into daughter's bedroom 'stayed half-an-hour - put p. in her a/hole'; (iii) 22 June 1927: 'The shape of the head of a man's erect penis is very excellent in the mouth. There is no doubt about this. I have often wondered - now I know'; and, finally, (iv) 13 December 1929: 'Discovered that a dog will join with a man'.

MacCarthy puts his bestial fascination and, indeed, his experiments with paedophilia, incest and fellatio, down to an urge "to try things out, to push experience to the limits ..." and suggests they should be seen as an "imaginative overriding of taboos" on the part of a highly creative and curious individual with an unusually avid appetite for sex. As such, says MacCarthy, these acts are not so very unusual, not so absolutely shocking, nor even especially horrifying - which is certainly a very liberal and generous reading, to say the least.       

See: Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill, (Faber and Faber, 1989). All the biographical information, including the lines from Gill's diaries, are taken from this work. The diaries themselves are located in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA. Copies can be found in the Archive of the Tate Gallery, London.  

Readers who are interested, might also like to see D. H. Lawrence's 'Review of Eric Gill's Art Nonsense and Other Essays' in Introductions and Reviews, ed. Neil Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005). This is believed to be the last work written by Lawrence before his death on March 2nd, 1930. Frieda sent the MS to Gill in 1933.  

On Operational Whitewash

Mark Tansey 

Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight (1981)

Oil on canvas with crayon

(182.9 x 183.4 cm)

Like many of his pictures, Mark Tansey's Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight (1981), is a lot more interesting than it first appears and certainly shouldn't be mistaken for a work of banal realism or straightforward representation, even if it utilizes certain conventions and structures of figurative painting. To fully appreciate its philosophical importance requires an awareness of how art is essentially a symbolic medium; i.e., a space in which different meanings interact.

The first thing one notices upon closer inspection of the canvas is that the human figure is not simply a madman scrubbing any old objects lying about randomly in the desert. They are, rather, the ruins of the Sphinx and Stonehenge; the remains of formerly great civilizations and long-dead peoples, the spirits of whom still haunt the present.    

Robbe-Grillet isn't attempting to remove the dust and the dirt from these fragments of the past in the naive and vain hope of one day reassembling them, driven by ideals of Unity and Wholeness. He is, rather, trying to cleanse them of significance, of their markings and metaphors, to remove every trace of meaning from them.

It's the ultimate act of iconoclasm and forms part of what Jean Baudrillard referred to as the operational whitewashing of human history. Everything is cleansed of evil until nothing remains that might possibly upset or offend or trouble anyone of a liberal-snowflake disposition; it's political correctness gone retroviral - guaranteeing a more inclusive tomorrow by destroying the past and all memory of the past and its divisions.

Baudrillard also described this form of self-inflicted social leukemia as the perfect crime; the murder not only of the real, but also of the imaginary until all that remains is a kind of aseptic whiteness (free of all shadow and every dark glimmer of fate and negativity).

I thought of all this - of Baudrillard's operational whitewash and of Mark Tansey's 1981 painting - when reading about those activists, anti-fascists, and assorted social justice warriors in America intent on smashing statues, tearing down monuments, burning books, and censoring images that don't correspond with how they want the world to be and to have been.

Not that this is limited to the US: the writer, broadcaster and Oxford graduate, Afua Hirsch, has recently called for Nelson's column to be pulled down on the grounds that Nelson was "what you would now call, without hesitation, a white supremacist", who used his power and influence to vigorously defend slavery and thus "perpetuate the tyranny, serial rape and exploitation" of black people.  

Ms Hirsch continues:

"It is figures like Nelson who immediately spring to mind when I hear the latest news of confederate statues being pulled down in the US. These memorials - more than 700 of which still stand in states including Virginia, Georgia and Texas - have always been the subject of offence and trauma for many African Americans, who rightly see them as glorifying the slavery and then segregation of their not so distant past."

Just to be clear: (i) I'm not entirely unsympathetic to those who advance this line of argument; (ii) I really don't give a shit about those historical figures who are immortalised as the great and the good; (iii) I think a lot of the vile abuse directed at Ms Hirsch for simply expressing her view is absolutely shameful.

However, the concern remains - as Heine recognised almost 200 years ago - that where cultural and historical artefacts are destroyed one day, human beings will be murdered the next ... For if you really want to wipe out all trace of European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, then it follows with a certain genocidal logic that you have to get rid of the descendants of the slave owners too; every white face becomes a provocation.

Indeed, even that might not do the trick. Because the descendants of the peoples who were enslaved also carry this history within them; they are, if you like, in their rage and resentment and inability to forget, living monuments to a terrible past. Thus they would ultimately have to abolish themselves.

And this is why peace on earth isn't accomplished until the last man kills the last but one and then tops himself, leaving behind a smiling corpse ...  


Notes 

Jean Baudrillard, 'Operational Whitewash', The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993), pp. 44-50. 

Afua Hirsch, 'Toppling statues? Here's why Nelson's column should be next', The Guardian (22 Aug 2017): click here. 

This post is for Thomas Bonneville.

Nice to See You, to See You - Dead!

Bruce Forsyth Death Mask  

Treating life as a good game, good game and always putting his best chin forward (a gesture some found comic, but which struck me as an act of narcissistic self-assertion), enabled Bruce Forsyth to have a career of great longevity in a business which, purportedly, is unlike any other. 

For over seventy years he was on our TV screens - longer than any other male entertainer - proving that, if nothing else, the Mighty Atom was a monster of stamina, popular with producers and the public alike. 

However, I have to confess to a wicked feeling of glee when I heard the news that he had died. Because Brucie belonged to that golf club of performers whom my parents loved when I was growing up, but I despised. As a child, the words light entertainment, royal variety, and London Palladium were anathema and he was associated with all these things.            

But now he's dead. Gone to that great green room in the sky, where angels and demons bid for his eternal soul and the right to decide wherein it shall reside: Higher, higher! Lower, lower!    

It seems that one of the few genuine pleasures of getting older is that one starts to outlive those who blighted the airwaves during one's childhood; the sinful pleasure of morose delectation and spitting on graves ...  

Eric Gill: On Trousers and the Most Precious Ornament

D. H. Lawrence wasn't the only weirdy beardy Englishman writing in the interwar period to be concerned with the question of masculinity and men's fashion, with a particular interest in trousers and the male member.

The artist, typographer, and sexual deviant, Eric Gill, also wrote on the vital role played by clothing within society and that most precious ornament, the penis, and I would like to discuss his thinking on these things as set out in an essay from 1937 which exposes a phallocentric sexual politics that makes Lawrence's look relatively limp in comparison.

Like Lawrence, of whose work he was a passionate admirer, Gill hated commercial and industrial civilisation. For whilst it encouraged women to "flaunt their sexual attractiveness on all occasions" and display the shapeliness of their legs and breasts with pride, it forced men to dress in a manner that suppressed their maleness of body and obscured their animal nature.

The protuberance by which a man's sex might be identified, is, says Gill, carefully and shamefully tucked between his legs and modern men are taught to regard the penis as merely a ridiculous-looking organ of drainage; "no longer the virile member and man's most precious ornament, but the comic member, a thing for girls to giggle about ..."   

The mighty phallus has been deflated and dishonoured. And not just in the West, but wherever machine civilisation has triumphed, with disastrous consequences for both sexes. For in a world in which men lose physical exuberance and assurance, women quickly lose all natural modesty. They start to parade around like shameless prostitutes in a desperate attempt to arouse the half-impotent male.

The only hope, says Gill, lies with those men who still retain something of the Old Adam about them; men who, like Oliver Mellors, despise commerce and industrialism; men who care about more about making love and waging war, than making money; men who refuse to commute to the office on the Tube each day in clothes that restrict their maleness and crush their balls.

For Gill, if modern man is to be emancipated and remasculated, then he must throw off his trousers and refuse to wear "cheap ready-made coats and collars and ties". Instead, he should don a dignified long robe, like an Arab; or a kilt, like a proud Scotsman, sans pants, allowing his penis its natural freedom of movement and chirpiness: I'm out there Jerry and I'm loving every minute of it!

Not - we should note in closing - that Gill wants men to make a spectacle of themselves and expose their nakedness; indeed, the last thing he wants is for men to become sexual exhibitionists flaunting their masculinity like modern women flaunt their femininity by wearing short skirts and make-up. He just wants us all to admit that the question of clothing - like that of the human soul - is of great importance and deserves the most serious consideration ...

Notes 

Those interested in reading Gill's 1937 essay can do so by clicking here. 

The Seinfeld episode in which Kramer discovers the joys of going commando is Season 6 / Episode 4: 'The Chinese Woman'. 

Practically Perfect in Every Way: Notes on the Case of Mary Poppins

Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins (1964)

As a child, I didn't much care for Mary Poppins as portrayed by Julie Andrews in the 1964 Disney film. In fact, it was a movie I scrupulously avoided watching whenever it came on TV, as I did that other Dick Van Dyke vehicle - no pun intended - Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and the Disney follow-up to Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971).

And I'm not alone in disliking this portrayal; indeed, even the Australian-born author of the books upon which the film was based, P. L. Travers, hated the Disney adaptation of her work, finding it sentimental and silly (particularly the use of animation). She also claimed the movie-makers entirely misunderstood the character of Poppins.

And, according to Guardian features-writer Emma Brockes, Travers had legitimate grounds for complaint, as the original character, "like the woman who created her, was difficult to the point of obnoxious". A woman who never wastes time being nice and has little sympathy or affection for children, birds or beggars; sharp-tongued, short-tempered, humourless, and bullying - that's Mary Poppins!

"The biggest difference between the book and film versions of Poppins, however, was one of class. In the guise of Julie Andrews, you would call Poppins posh; all those crystal-cut vowels and crisp consonants. The original Poppins was nothing of the sort. Travers, an Australian immigrant to London, placed her heroine further down the social scale, as she herself, in that era, would have been judged to be. This is unequivocal. The original Poppins, in the accent that so magnificently eluded Dick Van Dyke, refers to the birds as 'sparrers'."

Perhaps this is key to my dislike of the film; the prim and proper poshness (or posh prim and properness) of Poppins as portrayed by Andrews would have jarred with me as a child, whereas now, of course, I appreciate its pervy appeal.

Then there's the smugness and much-noted narcissism; the fact she prides herself on being practically perfect in every way and wants to sugar-coat reality by pretending that chores can be pleasurable. Poppins appears to bring magical, anarchic fun, but, really, just reaffirms traditional values and reinforces the social niceties over afternoon tea as order is restored at 17, Cherry Tree Lane.

As for the other characters, I hate them even more: the children, Jane and Michael; the parents, Mr and Mrs Banks; and - most of all - Bert the cockney jack-of-all-trades, with his irritating Chim Chim Cher-ee line of bullshit. 

In spite of all this, I'm happy to concede there's an important story waiting to be told about Mary Poppins; one that occupies the darker moral universe that Travers describes in the books; one that emphasises the inhuman coldness and witchiness of the character and gets her out of the nursery and the company of irksome cor blimey cockneys; a Poppins whom even I might learn to love ...

See: Emma Brockes, 'Mary Poppins: not sugary, but sharp and subversive - on the page and the screen', The Guardian (15 Sept 2015): click here to read online.

See also Larry Fahey's article 'Something Steely, Unsympathetic, and Cold: A Reconsideration of Mary Poppins', The Rumpus, (June 22, 2010): click here.

Note: I am grateful to Simon Solomon for inspiring this post and providing fascinating insights into the character of Mary Poppins, though it should be noted that the views expressed here are the author's own and are not necessarily shared or endorsed by Dr Solomon.  

On Modest Fashion (Or OMG! I Agree with Julie Burchill - Again!)

The Dolce and Gabbana Abaya and Hijab Collection (2016)

I suspect many of those currently promoting modest fashion know full well that this is essentially a euphemism for clothing that is compliant with Islamic rules governing what a woman should and should not wear in public; or, more accurately, what parts of her body she should or should not be allowed to expose.

Clothing, in other words, that collaborates or knowingly flirts with an oppressive and misogynistic form of theocratic stupidity. Designers, fashion editors, and celebrities desperate to be on trend are all implicated in this shameful and cynical game that combines cultural cringe with cultural appropriation in the name of cultural diversity and the new femininity.  

As Julie Burchill writes, women who have previously "plunged it down to there, slashed it up to here and left no part of their bodies unscrutinised for years" are dressing in a way that suggests they have suddenly discovered not only modesty, but religious piety too!

Now, just to be clear: as a Nietzschean, I love stylish, elegant women who understand that Truth does not, in fact, love to go naked and so carefully avoid exposing too much flesh. Having said that, I don't want to see women and even very young girls covered from head to toe and very much doubt that a burka can be chic, no matter who designs it.

What's more, like Burchill, I have a problem when the concept of modesty is used aggressively to shame women into modifying their behaviour and, clearly, when used within the context of clothing, "the word implies, by default, that any other form of dressing is immodest, that is, tarty, exhibitionist and 'wrong'".

It's at this point that the craze to cover up "goes beyond the whimsy of fashion" and becomes rather sinister; an insidious attempt to persuade women that there's something courageous and liberating about surrendering their freedom. But there isn't. And those Western women who decide to conform to this trend - including those Muslims who talk about rediscovering their cultural heritage or identity - are unwittingly lending their support to those men who would cover their flesh in order to strip them of their autonomy and their dignity.

As Burchill wrote in an earlier piece: "Modesty be damned. If you've got it, you've got every right to flaunt it." And, arguably, in this new age of puritanism and Islamism, one has a feminist duty to do so. Zarathustra says: don't be demure - live dangerously and be brazen!

Notes

To read Julie Burchill's Daily Mail article on modest fashion (28 June 2017), click here. 

To read her piece in The Guardian on modesty written five years earlier (23 Sept 2012), click here.

To read the post in which I agreed with Ms Burchill for the first time, please click here.  

On Moral Turpitude (with Reference to the Case of Sebastian Horsley)

Sebastian Horsley at home in Soho (Mar 2008) 

Photograph: Steve Forrest / Rex Features 

Having an immoral past or criminal record is bad enough. But flaunting one's queer and amoral dandyism in the faces of American customs officials is probably not the wisest thing to do if one is hoping to enter the United States ...

For whilst America is the Land of the Free, it retains a puritanical sensibility that has long required visitors to behave in a manner that doesn't threaten to gravely violate or undermine the accepted standards of decent society. They even have a concept - moral turpitude - woven into U.S. immigration law which specifically addresses this issue.

Whilst this concept eludes precise definition, it's clearly intended to keep out the base or depraved individual; i.e., the kind of man who don't respect the customary rules that govern civil society and feels no sense of duty to others; the kind of man who has worked as a prostitute, consumed copious amounts of controlled substances and had himself crucified in the name of art; the kind of man whose only concession to American sensibilities upon arrival was to remove his nail polish; the kind of man, in short, like Sebastian Horsley ...

One hundred and twenty-six years after Oscar Wilde breezed through customs at New York (declaring nothing except his genius), and thirty years after even the Sex Pistols were eventually allowed to embark on their ill-fated American tour (despite the authorities' initial reluctance to issue visas), Horsley found himself interrogated for eight hours at Newark before being refused entry, declared a persona non grata and deported back to the UK - on the grounds of moral turpitude.

Wearing his favourite outfit, which included a top hat and long velvet coat, Horsley wisely resisted the urge to unbutton his fly when asked if he had anything to declare (Nothing except my genitals), but couldn't resist being facetious when asked what he kept under his hat (My head). US Customs officials - be it noted - are not known for their sense of humour and do not appreciate irony, sarcasm, or flippancy.    

It's such a shame, because Sebastian was genuinely excited to be going to the USA - which he thought of as a friendly, generous nation - in order to promote his best-selling autobiography Dandy in the Underworld. "I have always felt American in my artificial heart," he wrote on March 12th (2008), but seven days later he was obliged to abruptly revise this feeling. And two years later he was dead ...

Anyway, here's Sebastian looking beautiful but slightly deflated having just returned from the US, addressing the American audience denied him. Sometimes, alas, taking civilisation to the barbarians isn't as straightforward as one might hope ...

Taking Civilisation to the Barbarians

Two Irish poets pictured whilst on tour in America: 

Oscar Wilde (1882) and Johnny Rotten (1978) 

When the Sex Pistols set off on their ill-fated American tour in January 1978, manager Malcolm McLaren had determined that the band would avoid playing major venues in New York and Los Angeles in front of audiences likely to be receptive and would, instead, head to the Deep South and perform in front of hostile rednecks in cities including Atlanta, Memphis, San Antonio, Dallas, Baton Rouge, and Tulsa.

For Malcolm wasn't interested in building a new fan base, or simply increasing record sales; he wanted, rather, to cultivate hatred, incite conflict, and cause as much chaos as possible amongst the barbarians who invented rock 'n' roll: "The idea was to get lost in the swamps and the badlands, making it impossible for the myth of the Sex Pistols to be exposed", as he puts it in the Swindle. 

Of course, any one familiar with the above film or the history of the band, will probably know this already. But what fans might not know is how this idea - often mistakenly said to be ill-conceived - was inspired by Malcolm's love for Oscar Wilde, who in 1882 went on his own (far more extensive, far more profitable) US tour that also brought him into amusingly close contact with some of the colourful locals, including farmers, miners, and gun-toting cowboys.

For despite his pretensions and poses, there was nothing snobbish about Wilde and he took great delight in meeting such people and not just fellow authors, such as Henry James and Walt Whitman. Indeed, one of Wilde's most interesting trips was to a mining town, high up in the Rocky Mountains, called Leadville, the story of which Malcolm was fond of retelling ...

Back in 1882, Leadville was a genuine Wild West town of some 30,000 inhabitants; most of whom had recently arrived and all of whom were hoping to strike it rich following the discovery of thick veins of silver in them thar hills. Strangely, however, as well as the customary saloon and whorehouse, Leadville had (and still has) its own opera house and it was here that Wilde was booked to speak - dressed, according to contemporary accounts, in a purple smoking jacket, knee breeches and black silk stockings.    

His chosen topic for the evening: The Practical Application of the Aesthetic Theory to Exterior and Interior House Decoration with Observations on Dress and Personal Ornament. Unsurprisingly, the talk didn't go down very well. Depending on which account you choose to believe, either the audience eventually fell asleep or Wilde was pushed off stage into the orchestra pit.

Either way, Wilde himself was much amused when, after reading passages from the autobiography of the great Italian artist Benvenuto Cellini, the miners expressed their disappointment that the latter wasn't going to be making an appearance: "I explained that he had been dead for some little time which elicited the enquiry 'Who shot him?'"

Like the Sex Pistols, Wilde liked to meet and mingle with his audience afterwards. When it was discovered that he was a man who not only liked but could handle his liquor - he manfully drank all of those who jeered at him for being a sissy under the table - Wilde became an instant hero in the town and the next day it was agreed to name a new silver vein in his honour.

This apparently involved a ceremony in which Wilde was lowered to the bottom of a mine in a bucket, where he proceeded to eat a meal and smoke a cigar. "I had hoped that in their simple grand way they would have offered me shares in [the lode], but in their artless untutored fashion they did not."

Upon returning to the surface, Wilde and his new pals retired once more to the saloon where he saw what he described as "the only rational method of art criticism" he'd ever come across; over the piano there hung a notice reading: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.

"I was struck", says Wilde, "with this recognition of the fact that bad art merits the penalty of death, and I felt that in this remote city, where the aesthetic applications of the revolver were clearly established in the case of music, my apostolic task would be much simplified ..."

Whether there's anything Wildean about the Sex Pistols is debatable. But there's certainly something punk rock about Oscar and his sexy, stylish, subversive aesthetic.  

Notes 

Photo of Oscar Wilde, by Napoleon Sarony (New York City, Jan. 1882).

Photo of Johnny Rotten, lead singer with the Sex Pistols, by Roberta Bayley (San Antonio, Texas, Jan. 1978).

To find out more about Wilde's American adventures, click here. 

To watch the Sex Pistols perform their song New York at Randy's Rodeo, in San Antonio, Texas, (8 Jan. 1978), click here. 

This gig is notorious for the fact that Sid Vicious hits a member of the audience over the head with his bass guitar. 

For a sister post that provides a kind of PS to this one and refers to the case of Sebastian Horsley, click here.   

The Wisdom of Solomon 2: On the Grain of the Voice and Further Remarks on Lunacy

Simon Solomon (aka Dr Simon Thomas)

simonsolomon.ink 

Dublin-based poet, critic and translator, Simon Solomon, has been kind enough to leave several lengthy comments on recent posts and I would like here to respond to some of his points, hopefully demonstrating the same intelligence, humour, and breadth of reading as this rather shadowy figure ...

I: On the Grain of the Voice [See: Bootylicious]

As a matter of fact - and I'm not entirely convinced I said anything in the Bootylicious post that implied otherwise - I'm not affirming "the beauty of male Welsh choirs for their proximity to the coal pits and the dust of Mother Earth". Barthes may love what he terms the grain of the voice, but I don't want to hear the blackness of the lungs, or the phlegm in the back of the throat, thank you very much.

In short, I don't like earthiness: but nor do I like those big, booming voices which tremble with powerful emotion and technical brilliance, or have what people like to think of as soul. If people absolutely must break into song, I prefer they do so quietly in a non-expressive, non-showoffy, slightly hesitant, slightly shy manner (perhaps not always hitting the right notes).

I don't care whether someone has a talent for singing because, ultimately, like Larry David, I can't stand the sound of the human voice; a trick of the larynx that, as you rightly point out Simon, is no longer so impressive in a predominantly visual culture.  

II: Further Remarks on Lunacy [See: On Lunacy]

I'm perfectly happy for you to number yourself amongst the lunatic fringe, Simon. And it's clear from some of your - shall we say more poetic - comments made in response to my post on the Moon and it's supposed effect upon human biology and behaviour, this is where you belong ...

So whilst, obviously, I'd rather be beneath the stars with Sylvia Plath than Roger Scruton, I'm not sure I'd want to attend a dinner party made up of "myth-making mavericks". Nor would I choose to consult with the latter if I wanted to learn something factual about the Moon (i.e., about the real body orbiting the Earth and not the spooky object that some think is made of cheese).

Can you not at least concede the possibility that one might discover something more amazing about the Moon from astronomers and physicists, than from artists and poets? Or do you really believe that even William McGonagall has more to offer us than, for example, Brian Cox?

Actually, despite the two studies you cite, there really is scant evidence for any significant lunar effect on either surgical or criminal activity and the thirty-three-year old article by C. P. Thakur and Dilip Sharma is - I would have thought - clearly nonsense. See Eric Chuder, Bad Moon Rising: The Myth of the Full Moon (2014), which explains why this is so.

As I indicated in the post, there are many people - including politicians, doctors, and police officers - who believe in the lunar effect; just as there are many otherwise perfectly respectable and perfectly reasonable individuals advocating alternative therapies, including homeopathy.

Your argument from intuition that because the Moon's gravity "can move something as vast as an ocean" it must be able to affect "our small and frangible human bodies", is the exact opposite of how things actually work - a kind of pataphysical denial of reality or, at the very least, a misconception regarding the laws of physics in relation to scale.

(Just so you know, the gravitational pull of the moon on a human body is less than that exercised by a mosquito on your arm; measurable, but bordering on the infinitesimal. Or, to put it another way, when a mother holds her new born baby in her arms, she exerts approximately twelve millions times more tidal force on the infant than the moon overhead.)  

Finally, yes, of course, the human body is an open system; otherwise, as you rightly say, we'd "all be living like autists, psychotics and sad, solitary sacks" (in fact we'd not be living at all, as we obviously need to eat, breathe, and excrete waste materials to sustain our existence and these activities require openness and exchange).

But it's quite a leap to then say there are "no such things as individual bodies" and humanity is "one collective cosmic contagion"... This may be true at a philosophical-libidinal-psychic level, but it's certainly not the only truth. For there's also the truth of singular being; that I am I, you are you, and I am not you, you are not me, and that the Universal Oneness of Humanity is a lie (and a dangerous one).

Every man and every woman is a star, wrote Aleister Crowley. Which means, according to Lawrentian protagonist Rupert Birkin:

"'At the very last, one is alone, beyond the influence of love. There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional relationship. So it is with you. But we want to delude ourselves that love is the root. It isn't. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does not meet and mingle, and never can.'"

- D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love

In other words, if you want to live a cosmic life, burning like a tiny sun or as cold and mysterious as the Moon, then you must become starkly inhuman; beyond speech and feeling, beyond responsibility and obligation, beyond understanding ...

We don't need to open ourselves up to others, Simon, or serenade them by the light of the silvery moon; we need, rather, to come into a strange conjunction or equilibrium with them as singular beings. Or something like that ...

Note: readers interested in part one of this post - On Sincerity, Authenticity, Black Sheep and Scapegoats - should click here.