In Praise of Moths

A very pretty mint moth (native to the UK)

Photo by Mark Parsons / Butterfly Conservation

Everyone loves butterflies: but not moths. People seem to regard the latter as an inferior version of the former.

Indeed, even Virginia Woolf writes about the moth's lack of gaiety in comparison to the butterfly, although she does concede that the moth has a sombre beauty all of its own, arousing pleasant thoughts of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom. Mostly, however, she experiences a queer feeling of pity for the poor moth, whose life, to her, appears meagre and pathetic and whose death is insignificant.

Other people complain about the destructive feeding habits of moths. But, even though they left holes in my favourite Vivienne Westwood jumper, I like moths. And I was pleased, therefore, to read that although overall their numbers are in serious decline, thanks to climate change and the global horticultural trade there are several species making their home here for the first time.

Indeed, according to a recent report, almost 30 species of tiny, often inconspicuous micro-moths - known as pyralid moths - have arrived in Britain during the last 30 years; either flying in of their own accord, or transported here with human assistance. Hopefully, at least some of these will be able to establish themselves in the UK. 

For love 'em or loathe 'em, moths comprise a substantial part of Britain's biodiversity and play an important role as pollinators. They also, of course, provide a vital food source for many birds, bats and other mammals. If you care about these larger creatures, then you have to also learn to care for insects of all kinds - even the creepy and uncolourful ones that sleep in the shadows ... 

See: Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, (University of Adelaide, 2015). This is a web edition of the work that can be read online by clicking here. 

 

The Ballerina is Not a Girl Dancing

In a late prose piece, Mallarmé makes the provocative claim that "the ballerina is not a girl dancing".

Indeed, according to Mallarmé, she's not even a girl, but a living metaphor; symbolising "some elemental aspect of earthly form", such as a flower or a swan.

And she doesn't dance so much as use her body - "with miraculous lunges and abbreviations" - to produce and perform a special kind of condensed writing whose ties to a metaphysically stable world of referents have been snapped: une écriture corporelle.

Thus, whilst not quite one and the same thing, ballet and poetry are semiotically entwined; they are both formalised and ritualised aesthetic sign systems, designating truth that is plural and uncertain.

And this is why Nietzsche loved both art forms and not only held great poets such as Goethe and Heinrich Heine in the highest regard, but blessed the feet and fair ankles of sweet girls who, in dancing, transcend their gender and humanity and bring meaning to a crisis.     


See: Stéphane Mallarmé, 'Ballets', in Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson, (Harvard University Press, 2009). 

Ali Baba Comes Today: Notes on Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures

Participants in Jack Smith's queer-oriental fantasy demonstrate 

how all sexes can be transformed via savage splendour 

and erotic intensity into Flaming Creatures

I.

Flaming Creatures (1963) is an experimental short black-and-white film directed by Jack Smith and famously described by Susan Sontag as a rare modern work of art, full of Dionysian joy and innocence. Other critics weren't quite so generous and dismissed it as a disturbing and unpleasant work full of limp genitalia and limp art which defiled sex and cinema in equal measure; not so much a vision of paradise, as a glimpse of hell.

It premiered in all its avant-garde excess at midnight on April 29, at the Bleecker Street Cinema in Manhattan. Interested readers can now view it on YouTube by simply clicking here.


II.

Flaming Creatures is composed of several disconnected scenes or provocative vignettes, including an orgy, an earthquake, and a mock commercial for a heart-shaped lipstick that doesn't smudge when performing fellatio. The sexually ambiguous and heavily made-up actors are dressed in elaborate costume as if attending a Scheherazade party; i.e., an exotically camp soiree based on the Arabian Nights.

Unsurprisingly, due to its graphic and illicit sexual content - not to mention the elements of queer gothic horror, including vampirism - even some underground venues refused to show it and, in March 1964, police interrupted a screening and seized a print of the film on the grounds that it was in violation of New York's obscenity laws.

Various intellectuals and artists jumped to the film's defence, including Jonas Mekas, Allen Ginsberg, and Susan Sontag. Nevertheless, the defendants in the case were convicted and given suspended sentences. On appeal, however, the Supreme Court reversed the guilty verdict and quashed the convictions. Despite this, the film continued to be banned and screenings continued to attract police attention throughout the sixties.

Indeed, it was only after Smith's death in 1989 that art institutions and film festivals started to regularly screen Flaming Creatures, Smith's unconventional approach to cinema - no fixed narrative, unashamedly cheap sets, bizarre rather than special effects, the use of non-professional actors, peculiar camera angles and close-ups, etc. - having finally been recognised as seminal (no pun intended).  

Smith himself, however, always regarded Flaming Creatures as a comedy which contained not only all the most amusing things he could think of, but also his idiosyncratic ideas of what constituted glamour (ideas inspired in part by Hollywood and in part by flamboyant forms of performance art, such as burlesque).  

Notes

Susan Sontag, 'Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures', in Against Interpretation (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1966), pp. 226-31. This essay originally appeared as 'A Feast for Open Eyes', in The Nation (13 April 1964) and can be read online by clicking here. 

Interestingly, Michael Moon challenges Sontag's reading of Flaming Creatures, arguing that she theorizes urban gay male social and artistic practice under the "extremely reductive rubric of 'camp'". His main criticism is that Sontag depoliticizes Smith's film by understanding it purely as an aesthetic exercise. I don't think that's entirely fair or accurate, however, and it seems to me that Moon misunderstands how Sontag uses the term innocence in its Nietzschean sense; she is not at all suggesting the film lacks sophistication or an understanding of how gender and sexuality are political issues. Indeed, she repeatedly stresses that art is always the sphere of freedom and not just about beauty and pleasure. 

See: Michael Moon, 'Flaming Closets', A Small Boy and Others, (Duke University Press, 1998), pp.67-93. The line quoted is on p. 76. 

Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence

I. Voir Vence et Mourir

There are not many places in the world I would like to visit, but the small medieval market town of Vence, on the French Riviera, is one of them.

For one thing, Lawrence died in Vence (2 March 1930) and having been to the town in which he was born, Eastwood, I'd like to complete the pilgrimage as it were (fully aware of the fact that his body no longer lies in the local cemetery, having been exhumed, cremated and shipped over to the United States at Frieda's bidding in 1935).

My primary reason for wanting to go to Vence, however, is to see a place of Catholic worship designed and decorated by an artist whom Lawrence loathed: the Chapelle du Rosaire was built between 1949 and 1951 under the direction of Henri Matisse, who regarded it as his masterpiece.


II. Going to the Chapel

From what I've read and seen, the chapel is not particularly striking from the outside; white walls, a rooftop decorated with a blue-and-white zigzag pattern and an elaborate metal cross. The interior, however, is both a very beautiful religious space and a great modern art space; doubly sacred, if you will.

The altar is made of warm brown stone and was chosen for its resemblance to the colour of bread and the Eucharist. Matisse also designed the bronze crucifix on the altar, the candle holders in bronze, and the small tabernacle. Behind the altar is a large image of Saint Dominic.

For the walls, Matisse designed three murals. Aged 77 when he began work on the chapel, Matisse was in such poor health that he could only work from a wheelchair using a long stick with a brush strapped to his arm. The images he drew on paper were then transferred to the ceramic tiles by skilled craftsmen.

On the side wall there are abstract images of flowers and of the Madonna and Child, all created in simple black outlines. On the back wall are the traditional scenes known as the Stations of the Cross, depicting the gruesome last days of Christ. Whereas these fourteen scenes are usually depicted individually, Matisse cleverly incorported them into a single composition.

As much as I admire his minimalist wall designs, what I really love are the three sets of stained-glass windows, upon which Matisse spent a great deal of time. The windows make use of just three colours: an intense yellow for the sun; a vibrant green for vegetation; and a Virgin blue for the sea and sky. The colour from the windows floods the chapel's all-white interior and, via a play of nothing more than lines and light, Matisse miraculously opens what is a very limited space on to infinity.


III. In the Footsteps of Sylvia Plath

For me, Matisse's chapel possesses what Lawrence would have termed a fourth dimensional quality and one can't help wondering what the latter would have made of it had he lived to see it: would he still dismiss Matisse as a clever trickster who masturbated in paint and produced works full of nothing more than willed ambition and the impotent glories of virtuosity ...?

Whilst we can only guess Lawrence's critical response, we can know for sure what the American poet Sylvia Plath thought of Matisse's Chapel, as she recorded details of her visit to it (along with then lover Richard Sassoon) on 6 January 1956 in her journal. She also sent a postcard to her mother the following day from Nice, in which she wrote:

"Yesterday was about the most lovely of my life … How can I describe the beauty of the country? Everything is so small, close, exquisite and fertile. Terraced gardens on steep slopes of rich red earth, orange and lemon trees, olive orchards, tiny pink and peach houses. To Vence - small, on a sun-warmed hill, uncommercial, slow, peaceful. Walked to Matisse cathedral - small, pure, clean-cut. White, with blue tile roof sparkling in the sun - I just knelt in the heart of the sun and the colors of sky, sea, and sun, in the pure white heart of the Chapel."

It sounds so lovely: one can only hope Vence hasn't been ruined in the intervening 60 years by commercial and residential development, tourism, immigration, etc. like many of the other towns in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region.


See: The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol 1: 1940-1956, ed. Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, (Faber and Faber, 2017).

Mozart's Starling

I.

Although many people object to their mad chatter (and the mess they make), I like the gregarious character of starlings and the way they can walk and run across the ground - limber and saurian, as Ted Hughes writes.

What's more, experts inform us that far from simply making a racket, starlings have a diverse and complex range of vocalisations, which includes snippets of song from other bird species and even sounds picked up from an increasingly urban envirionment, including car alarms and human speech. 

Perhaps it was this amazing talent for mimicry that first attracted Mozart to the starling ...


II.

We might never know for certain why Mozart decided to buy a starling. But we do know from his personal records that he purchased one from his local pet shop on 27 May 1784 and that it cost him 34 kreutzer.

We also know that the bird was able to whistle the opening bars of the third movement of the Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, which Mozart had started composing earlier that year. Indeed, some scholars suggest that this particular section of K. 453 originated with the starling. For when Mozart bought the bird he recorded not only its price in his expenses book, but the 17 note tune it was whistling - a tune almost identical to the one found in the above work.

Of course, it's also possible that Mozart had taught the bird the tune in the pet shop prior to eventually purchasing him - either way, it's nice to imagine an interspecies collaboration of some kind.    


III.

Mozart had his starling for three years, before it died in its feathered prime on 4 June 1787.

He buried the much-loved bird in his garden with considerable ceremony and provided an inscribed headstone. Mozart also read out a funeral poem of his own composition which, although humorous, was doubtless a sincere expression of mourning.

Interestingly, there's no such record of his being moved to eulogy by the death of his father only seven days previously. But then, what is the loss of a parent compared to the loss of a pet ...  

Note

Although not an advocate of birds being kept in cages, starlings do make excellent pets as they adapt well to captivity and thrive on a straightforward diet of seed, fruit, and mealworms. Their intelligence makes them easy to train and, being extremely social in nature, means you can keep several birds in the same cage should you wish to do so. On the downside, starlings - like other birds - indiscriminately defecate, attract numerous parasites and transmit certain diseases to humans, so probably best just to watch them in the garden. 


See: 

Ted Hughes, 'Starlings Have Come', in The Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan, (Faber and Faber, 2003). 
 
Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling, (Corsair, 2017).  


This post is for Maria Thanassa (who suggested it).

Andy Warhol's Decorated Penis

 Andy Warhol: Decorated Penis (c. 1957)

According to the critic Michael Moon, much of the revisionary queer power of Warhol's art proceeds from its ability to "invoke and to a considerable degree to celebrate the phallic and also to subvert it comically". It's this latter aspect that I so admire and which helped me to overcome neo-pagan and Lawrentian earnestness with reference to the question of the phallus (both as organ and as symbol).

Warhol liberates us all by liberating the phallus from its phallogocentric and phallocratic pretensions. And he does so not by an act of castration, but by gaily bringing out the vulnerable side of the phallus in all its erectile and ejaculatory glory.

In other words, he develops a rather sweet and touching model of what Lawrence terms phallic tenderness that isn't exclusively tied to heterosexual desire or the subordination of women - nor, indeed, to some grand metaphysical vision. As one friend remembered, Andy simply had a great passion for drawing cocks - be they erect, or in a flaccid state. And he would often add decorative details to these images.

Thus, in Decorated Penis (c.1957), we see a phallus that has been feminised via the amusing addition of hearts and flowers and a ribbon tied round it in a neat bow. As Richard Meyer points out, this transforms an object that is regarded by some as an oppressive symbol of masculine pride and authority - and by others as a symbol of cosmic potency - into an ornamental gift.

By playfully blurring lines between masculinity and femininity - as well as gay porn, popular culture and fine art - Warhol's penis pictures offer a queer challenge to all those who like to keep things cleanly distinct and clearly determined.                   

See:

Michael Moon, 'Screen Memories', essay in Pop Out: Queer Warhol, ed. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and Jose Esteban Munoz, (Duke University Press, 1996).

Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, (Oxford University Press, 2002). 

See also the excellent essay by Australian artist and writer Steve Cox, 'Andy Warhol: Killing Papa', which can be found on his website: click here.

This post is for James Walker.

Notes on Castration Anxiety with Reference to the Case of Oliver Mellors

Walk-Marcus: 04 Castration Anxiety

deviantart.com

I. Kastrationsangst

Castration anxiety is one of Freud's earliest psychoanalytic theories.

In brief, it's the conscious or unconscious - often overwhelming - fear of emasculation in both the literal and metaphorical sense, that originates between the ages of three and five years old (i.e. the so-called phallic stage of psychosexual development in the child), frequently continuing long into adulthood. 

Freud suggests it's a universal male fear, tied to the Oedipus complex, though one rather suspects it's rooted in his own time and culture (parents in 19th century Europe would often threaten to punish their misbehaving sons by chopping it off - particularly if caught masturbating).  

In a metaphorical sense, castration anxiety refers more to a feeling of being insignificant or powerless - socially and/or sexually - and which expands into an existential fear of death, conceived from the perspective of the ego as the ultimate act of emasculation resulting in a total loss of self. 

II. The Case Of Oliver Mellors

Oliver Mellors - aka Lady Chatterley's Lover - clearly suffers from a form castration anxiety, as revealed, for example, in his astonishing rant to Connie about the shortcomings of his ex-wife Bertha. According to Mellors, Bertha would never simultaneously achieve orgasm with him, no matter how long he delayed his own climax:

"If I kept back half and hour, she'd keep back longer. And when I'd come and really finished, then she'd start on her own account, and I had to stop inside her till she brought herself off, wriggling and shouting ..."

If this was bad enough, gradually things got worse:

"She sort of got harder and harder to bring off, and she's sort of tear at me down there, as if it were a beak tearing at me. By God, you think a woman's soft down there, like a fig. But I tell you the old rampers have beaks between their legs, and they tear at you with it till you're sick."

Mellors is offering a variant of the classic vagina dentata myth in which a woman's cunt is said to be lined with sharp teeth - the implication being that coition was inherently dangerous to the male, as it might result in injury or emasculation (originally such tales were meant to be cautionary in nature and perhaps intended to discourage rape).

Camille Paglia argues that we should take these stories seriously and not consider them simply to be the product of sexist hallucination or misogynistic male fantasy. Like Simone de Beauvoir, she insists that the cunt is a dangerous place where insects and philosophers might easily lose their way.

The fact is, men enter the vagina in a state of phallic triumph, but invariably leave in a much diminished state. So maybe they are to some degree justified in their castration anxiety.   

Mellors, however, isn't just concerned about being nipped and torn by a vaginal beak - he's also worried that modern industrial civilisation, built upon the power of capital, wants to castrate working-class men like himself, robbing them of their spunk and making mincemeat of the Old Adam. 

Indeed, Mellors tells Connie that there's a global conspiracy on behalf of those in sexless authority to "cut off the world's cock" and they offer a cash incentive to those who help them achieve this: "a quid for every foreskin, two quid for each pair of balls."   

Little wonder then, believing this as he does, that Mellors feels so threatened in his manhood and subscribes to a defianty phallocentric viewpoint.     

See: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Eros, Anteros, and the Angel of Christian Charity (Notes on the Shaftesbury Memorial)

No, that's my brother you're thinking of ...

I.

Located at the southeastern side of Piccadilly Circus, the Shaftesbury Memorial was erected in 1892–93 to commemorate the philanthropic works of Victorian do-gooder Lord Shaftesbury.

As Londoners and tourists from all over the world know, the bronze fountain is surmounted by a statue of Eros, the Ancient Greek deity of sexual desire. Only ... it isn't - Alfred Gilbert's famous sculpture actually depicts Anteros, younger brother to Eros and the god of requited love.

Admittedly, there's a strong family resemblance - both have wings and curled hair; both have a penchant for nudity and carrying a bow - but the fact that so many people are mistaken about the identity of the figure atop what is arguably London's most famous landmark is, I think, shocking and disconcerting.

For it makes one doubt everything else one thought one knew for certain - is that really Admiral Nelson, for example, at the top of the column in Trafalgur Square ...? (Some, such as Afua Hirsch, would obviously be delighted to discover that it wasn't.)      

II.

Whichever god it was, the use of a nude figure on a public monument was controversial at the time of its construction and, following its unveiling by the Duke of Westminster on 29 June 1893, predictable complaints were made from all the usual quarters. The work was well-received by the general public, however, even if they mistook the identity of the figure cast in aluminium.  

Gilbert had already sculpted a statue of Anteros when commissioned to work on the Shaftesbury Memorial and, rather lazily, chose to knock out another version - if only because it gave him another opportunity to ask his 16-year-old studio assistant, Angelo Colarossi, to strip and pose for him; a handsome Anglo-Italian youth from Shepherd's Bush.

It was thought that Anteros was a more suitable figure to represent Lord Shaftesbury as he was deemed to be a less selfish and more mature god than his frivolous (if better known) brother, Eros.

However, following objections that even Anteros was too sensual (and too pagan) a figure to serve as a fitting memorial to the famously sober and eminently respectable Lord Shaftesbuty, the statue was officially - if rather ludicrously - renamed The Angel of Christian Charity, thereby adding a further level of confusion as to its identity.

Unsurprisingly, this name failed to capture the popular imagination and soon everybody called the figure Eros, which, considering its location in Soho, is probably appropriate ...    


Note: It may interest readers who are unfamiliar with the complexities of Greek mythology to know that Eros and Anteros are but two members of a winged-collective of deities associated with love, known as the Erotes [ἔρωτες]. Other members include: Himeros (god of impetuous love); Hedylogos (god of sweet-talk), Hermaphroditos (god of queer desire); and Pothos (god of longing for the one who is absent). Stories of their gaiety and mischief-making were extremely popular within Hellenistic culture, particularly in the 2nd century BC, and these sons of Aphrodite continue to appear in Classical Roman and later European art, albeit in the diminutive form of Cupids or Amoretti.

Notes on Herb Brown's Party

Herbert L. Brown: Party (1966)

Overpainted subway poster (60" x 90")

When I first saw the above work by the American artist Herb Brown, I immediately smiled and thought of something that Lawrence once confided to a friend with reference to his own erotic canvases and artistic intent: "I put a phallus in each one of my paintings somewhere. And I paint no picture that won't shock people's castrated social spirituality."

For there's no place at which people parade their cultivated personal selves and castrated social spirituality more blatantly than at a semi-formal drinks party. I don't think I've ever enjoyed such a gathering - no matter how gracious the host, how splendid the cocktails, nor how interesting the guests are said to be. As Dorothy Parker once wrote: I hate parties; they bring out the worst in me.

I love the way that Brown allows bits of lettering and illustration from the original posters to show through, although it is their inert neatness that seems superimposed on the explicit nakedness of the figures. It's an amusing (and provocative) aesthetic juxtaposition.

Unsurprisingly, Brown's paintings - like Lawrence's - were branded gross, coarse, hideous and obscene and he found it difficult to exhibit them. Worse, in 1966 he lost most of his work in a huge blaze (by his own estimation, around 900 pieces were destroyed). To his great credit, however, Brown started again and kept on working right up until his death, aged 88, in 2011.

Finally, we might ask in closing whether Lawrence would have liked Brown's Party ...?

I very much doubt it: probably too raunchy and not reverential enough for his tastes. Despite his phallic bravado, Lawrence remained a bit of a prude; easily offended by those who, in his view, had their sex in their heads.

But I like it. And I would hang it on my wall and leave it there - even when the grandkids came to visit.    

Notes 

Dorothy Parker's poem Parties: A Hymn of Hate (1916) can be read online by clicking here. 

For a post on one of Lawrence's phallic paintings - Boccaccio Story (1926) - click here. 

On the Erotics and Etiquette of Wearing Gloves

Jean Patchett by Erwin Blumenfeld 
Variant of US Vogue cover (May 1949)

I.

I'm just old enough to remember a time when respectable women (including my mother) still wore gloves as a matter of course; not just as an elegant fashion accessory to be matched with hat and shoes - nor simply to protect the hands - but as a sign of culture, discipline and breeding. 

Gloves encoded a set of values. They were worn to display one's knowledge of (and conformity to) a complex series of social norms governing polite behaviour.

In other words, the wearing and - just as importantly - the removal of gloves was a question of etiquette, belonging to a wider politics of style. If one wanted to look just the ticket, then one was obliged to follow a whole series of (often unwritten) dos and don'ts.

These rules can briefly be summarised as:

Don't leave the house without gloves; whether attending a formal reception, a garden party, a church service, or simply popping down to the shops, gloves should be worn at all times. However, don't eat, drink, or smoke with gloves on - and don't play cards or apply makeup wearing gloves either. Note also that, with the exception of bracelets, jewellery should never be worn over gloves.

Finally, whilst it is perfectly acceptable to shake hands wearing gloves, they should be removed if the other person is clearly of a higher status (such as the Queen). But, when removing gloves in public, one should always do so discreetly and not as if performing a striptease of the hand.

This final point brings us on to what might be termed the erotics of the glove ...

II.

For the amorous subject, the erotics of the glove (a sign of high culture) is often tied to the pleasure of glimpsing naked female flesh (a sign of base nature) exposed between two edges. In other words, it's "the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing" which they find arousing.

Long black evening gloves, for example, which reach over the elbow but not as far up as the armpit, have an analogous function and provoke a similar frisson of excitement to black stockings; they do for the arms of the woman wearing them what the latter do for her legs.

Of course, there are fetishists who love gloves in and of themselves and couldn't care less about glimpsing the flesh or intermittence; their concern is with the length, style, colour and - often most crucially of all - the material of the glove (be it leather, silk, cotton, or latex).

For the sophisticated pervert, the devil is always in the detail (and the object) - not the beauty or the wholeness of woman as created by God.

See: Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 10.

This post is for Tim Pendry who suggested it.