That Chimp's Alright: In Memory of Koko

Koko (4 July 1971 - 19 Jun 2018)
Photo: The Gorilla Foundation / koko.org

I.

Although Puddy misidentified her species, he was absolutely right to declare that Koko the gorilla - who, sadly, died earlier this week - was alright. And the very fact that this one-time grease monkey could recall the name is evidence of just how far and wide her fame had spread. 

Indeed, by the time of her death, Koko was probably the best-known and most-loved ape on the planet; popular not only with the writers of Seinfeld, but good pals with many celebrities, including Robin Williams, who struck up a particularly close relationship with her.

II.

Koko was an unusually large female western lowland gorilla with a nipple fetish, a love of kittens, and an amazing ability to communicate with her carers using sign language. She also understood 2000 words of spoken English, in addition to more than 1000 signs. 

Born at the San Francisco Zoo, she spent most of her life at the Gorilla Foundation's preserve in Woodside, California, which is certainly not a bad place to live, whatever species one belongs to. Her interesting life has been fully documented by Francine Patterson and others in a number of books, articles and videos.

Some commentators have challenged the extent to which Koko truly understood what she was signing; she didn't use syntax or grammar and the suggestion has been made that her actions were largely the product of operant conditioning. However, she scored well in different IQ tests (between 70-95) and had passed the so-called mirror test, something that most of her kind fail to do. So Koko was clearly not just a typical dumb ape.   
 
Koko died during her sleep, unexpectedly, even though at 46 she had passed the average life expectancy of a gorilla and outlived her original male companion, Michael, by a good few years. The Gorilla Foundation released a statement saying "Her impact has been profound and what she has taught us about the emotional capacity of gorillas and their cognitive abilities will continue to shape the world."

This might be true. But, unfortunately, it doesn't alter the fact that both lowland and mountain gorillas - along with the other great apeas - are in imminent danger of extinction and the only sign they really need to learn is how to wave goodbye ...

See: Seinfeld, Season 9 Episode 11: 'The Dealership', (dir. Andy Ackerman, 1998).

Notes on Sleep Paralysis

The Nightmare (1781) by John Henry Fuseli

I don't know if people who believe in supernatural phenomena are more likely to suffer from sleep paralysis - or if, in fact, it's the other way round and those prone to the latter condition are more likely to see spooks, spirits, and succubi - but there's evidence to suggest a connection between what is a fairly common disorder and the conviction amongst some that there are occult forces at work in the world.      

For those who are unfamiliar with the term, sleep paralysis refers to those times either just after waking or just prior to falling asleep, when a person is semi-conscious but unable to move or speak. During these episodes, which usually last no more than a couple of minutes at most, people often report hearing strange noises or feeling an unusual presence in the room. Some also report out-of-body experiences, or breathing difficulties due to a tightness of chest.

Obviously, this can be frightening and the fear is very real even if the ghost or demon that is thought to have triggered it is not an actual entity, but is, rather, a hypnagogic hallucination, something which can be far more vivid than a regular dream. 

The condition can occur in those who are otherwise perfectly healthy (and perfectly rational). Often, it's triggered by sleep deprivation or psychological stress, such as the grief caused by the death of a loved one. Cases of recently bereaved widows hearing the familiar sound of their dead husbands' footsteps on the stairs at night are not uncommon, for example.  

Interestingly, it's believed that sleep paralysis plays a significant role in generating fantasies of alien abduction, as well as paranormal activity. Ultimately, the content (and interpretation) of a sleeping subject's dreams, nightmares, and hallucinations tends to be determined by their cultural background. Thus, whilst Americans mostly worry about extraterrestrials and Egyptians are troubled by jinn, only a melancholic Scotsman is haunted by the sound of a ghostly piper patrolling the ramparts.

Anyway, I hope this reassures those who fear things that go bump in the night: just relax, roll over, and go back to sleep in the knowledge that - more often than not - there is nothing to fear but fear itself. Or, as my MR therapist says, allow cognitive reappraisal to bring emotional regulation.

Oh, and one more thing - don't eat cheese before bedtime!*

Notes

For the latest scientific research on this question see: Dan Denis, Christopher C. French, and Alice M. Gregory, 'A systematic review of variables associated with sleep paralysis', in Sleep Medicine Reviews, (April 2018), Vol. 38, pp. 141-57. Click here to read online.

See also the 2015 documentary dir. Rodney Ascher, The Nightmare, which examines the issue of sleep paralysis via an extensive series of interviews with sufferers, dramatically re-enacting their experiences. The film seeks to demonstrate how a wide range of spooky phenomena can often be attributed to this recognised - but little studied - medical condition. The official trailer can be watched on YouTube by clicking here. 

* This sounds like a joke or a reference to an old wive's tale, but Dickens, like many great 19th century thinkers - including Nietzsche - took diet seriously and knew that eating the wrong foods at bedtime could have undesirable side-effects. In A Christmas Carol (1843), Ebenezer Scrooge attributes the ghost he sees to "an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, and a fragment of an underdone potato". 
 

Nietzsche: All the Names in History

Friedrich Nietzsche (2014) by Don Mirakl

deviantart.com

I.

Whether we describe Nietzsche's anti-Christian and transhumanist late philosophy as Dionysian or schizoanalytic, it all comes down to the same thing: the shattering of the ego.

For the sovereign individual is not one who narcissistically and solipsistically proclaims themselves the big I AM - as if they were the great be-all and end-all - but one happy to declare themselves all the names in history ...

A declaration which, at the molecular level of atoms, is literally true - even if, for some readers, it's also a clear indication of Nietzsche's leap into madness (that mask which hides the most fatal of all certainties).


II.

For Nietzsche, the question of identity is, then, of fundamental importance. Thus his obsession with masks and with the processes by which one becomes what one is (subjectivation).

Refusing any grammatical fiction or essential model of self, he stamps becoming with the character of being. Which is to say, Nietzsche thinks being in terms of a chaotic and competing diversity of elements; a primordial affectivity that he calls the will to power. 

Indeterminable as it is, Dasein is free to assume an infinite variety of forms - including that of a dancing star or a Caesar with the soul of Christ - once it has been given style; the latter being Nietzsche's term for the manner in which knowledge and art are able to harmonize forces without reactively seeking to repress or eliminate those that moralists find troubling or sinful (the pride of the peacock, the lust of the goat, etc).

For when affirmative and strong, the will to power takes upon itself not only difference and plurality, but evil. When negative and weak, however, it retreats behind an anaemic ideal of goodness as conceived by those who lack the ability to master their inner chaos and wish to speak but a single truth with one voice and in the name of one Love ... 

The Three Questions

A teacher in France kindly wrote to say how much she enjoys reading Torpedo the Ark.

She also shared an insight into the kind of questions her pupils sitting their philosophy exam this summer are expected to answer and closed her email by suggesting I might find it amusing to address one or more of the topics myself.

And so, not wanting to disappoint and always happy to accept a challenge, I've selected three of the six questions that Mme. Stas sent and provided (brief) answers ...  

1. Is desire the sign of our imperfection?

No: desire is a term of folk psychology and is thus a sign of our clinging to false beliefs concerning human behaviour and cognitive states. In other words, it's a sign of superstition (and idealism) rather than imperfection (or Original Sin).   

2. Is it necessary to experience injustice to know what is fair?

No: the necessity (and value) of experience has rightly been interrogated within philosophy. Kant, for example, famously wrote: "Nothing, indeed, can be more harmful or more unworthy of the philosopher, than the vulgar appeal to so-called experience." It is thanks to our ability not only to reason but to empathise that we can recognise injustice without having to suffer such ourselves.    

3. Does culture make us more human?

This is what Mona Lisa Vito would describe as a bullshit question. For it presupposes the human condition outside of culture, whereas humanity is purely a cultural effect; a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea, as Foucault would say.

For Nietzsche, meanwhile, the human being results from a moral-rational overcoding of the flesh and the internalisation of cruelty; i.e., a cultural experiment in discipline and breeding that makes of man an interesting animal. 

I'm not sure I'd get a very good mark with these answers - aware as I am that French students are encouraged (and expected) to consider all sides of an argument before arriving at their own conclusion - but, thankfully, I'm not sitting in a classroom under strict supervision and attempting to pass my baccalaureate. 

He Stands, and I Tremble Before Him (Reflections on D. H. Lawrence's Phallic Poetry)

As elsewhere in his work, Lawrence offers a phallic eroticism in his poetry which, on the one hand, affirms and naturalises heterosexual intercourse as the great clue to being, whilst, on the other hand, challenging conventional thinking on sex and gender. 

For as always with Lawrence, it's complicated ... There's a perverse spirit (or queerness) in his text that frequently deconstructs its own authority. He advises us to trust the tale, not the teller - fully aware of the narrator's proneness to unreliability - but often even this is risky as the tale (or verse) is never as straight - or straight-forward - as we might anticipate.

But what we can say for sure, however, is that Lawrence is fascinated with erect penises (including his own) and the thought of them deeply penetrating expectant bodies (including his own), to instill newness therein and ejaculate their masculine gleam.

Obviously, as an author, it was vital for Lawrence to put pen to paper. But it's the phallus - not the pen - that is the bridge to the future and writing is ultimately a poor substitute for coition. As Mellors tells Connie in a letter: "If I could sleep with my arms round you, the ink could stay in the bottle."

But, as indicated, Lawrence doesn't just dream of fucking the girl next door; in the poem 'Come Spring, Come Sorrow', for example, he fantasises about being fucked by a solar phallus and inseminated by a fiery surplus of life, as if he were an open flower. 

Failing that, the young Lawrence seemed happy enough admiring his own hard-on and trying to resist the urge to masturbate ... 'Virgin Youth' is an amusing poem born of adolescent sexual excitement mixed with anxiety: "He stands, and I tremble before him."

As one critic notes, the stirring of the silent but sultry and vast [!] phallus provokes "contradictory and unreconciled attitudes". The erect member is both a wonder to behold - a column of fire by night - deserving of quasi-religious veneration and a cause for embarrassment; an independent creature which, willy nilly, rises up and provokes all kinds of desires and frustrations.  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Come Spring, Come Sorrow' and 'Virgin Youth', in The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Note that there are two versions of 'Virgin Youth'. For many readers, the earlier, shorter, less comical version is the more successful.  

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), Ch. 19. 

R. P. Draper, 'The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence', in D. H. Lawrence: New Studies, ed. Christopher Heywood, (Macmillan Press, 1987), p. 16.

This post is for Nottingham based writer James Walker. 

Because the Night

A red fox patrolling his London territory at night

Photo by Jamie Hall

It's believed that in order to avoid being devoured by dinosaurs, many ancient mammals became nocturnal. And it seems that in order to avoid equally unfortunate contact with humans, many modern creatures are again instinctively retreating into the night.

Having no more space in which to run and hide, there's little else they can do other than effect a temporal shift and seek the cover of darkness, thereby minimising contact with man. However, I fear this rather desperate measure will only further marginalise them and is a strategy that fails to guarantee their survival. For unlike man, dinosaurs didn't use electricity or dream of a 24/7 lifestyle.

Thus, despite the remaining pockets of darkness and the stillness of the moon, one can't help but be aware like Oliver Mellors of the incessant noise of man even in the middle of the night, including the diabolical sound of traffic. And aware also of the bright rows of lights everywhere, twinkling with a sort of brilliant malevolence:

"He went down again into the darkness and seclusion of the wood. But he knew that the seclusion of the wood was illusory. The industrial noises broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it. A man could no longer be private and withdrawn."

And nor, alas, can any other creature in a world of mechanized evil "ready to destroy whatever did not conform" and ensure that all vulnerable things "perish under the rolling and running of iron".

Notes

Kaitlyn M. Gaynor et al, 'The influence of human disturbance on wildlife nocturnality', Science, Vol. 360, Issue 6394 (15 June 2018), pp. 1232-35.

According to the above paper, mammals across the globe are becoming increasingly nocturnal in order to avoid contact with humans - even if, in some cases, this increases their vulnerability to night hunters. This retreat into the darkness is also a retreat into the past; for previous work has found that many mammals originally abandoned a nocturnal existence for a daytime lifestyle roughly 65.8 million years ago (i.e., 200,000 years after the extinction of the dinosaurs).       

The researchers compiled data from 76 separate studies of 62 species from around the world, including elephants, tigers, and coyotes. No mammal, it seems, apart from domesticated pets, wants anything to do with man; the mad animal, the laughing animal, the crying animal, the unhappy animal.

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), Ch. 10.

On the Pale Criminal

I.

All sides seem to agree that violent crime is on the increase in London and other metropolitan areas. But there's not the same level of consensus concerning the causes or solutions to this problem. Some blame gang culture, drug use or social media; others talk about inequality, cuts in social funding and reduced police numbers.   

It would, however, take a courageous - and unusually philosophical - politician, police chief, or commentator to adopt the Nietzschean perspective on this issue: to suggest that what motivates those who commit crimes of violence, including murder, is a thirsting for the happiness of the knife ...

     

II.

Zarathustra says that judges need to dig deeper into human psychology if they wish to truly understand the lunacy that precedes the criminal deed. For more often than not, the thief who savagely beats, tortures, or kills his victim enjoys the cruelty and the bloodshed; they steal only to ease their own conscience.

In other words, reason persuades them to steal in the process of committing murder or provide some other rational justification - such as the taking of revenge, for example. For no one, says Zarathustra, wishes to shamefully admit to madness.       


III.

Similarly, though on a wider geo-political scale, we might even argue - as Jordan Peterson argues having studied Nietzsche - that Hitler provoked a world war only to disguise his true aims of genocide and chaos.

Hitler didn't care about victory; if he'd really wanted to win the war and build his Thousand Year Reich, then surely he'd have enslaved the Jews and exploited their labour and their genius. Perhaps afterwards, when the war was won, he might have had them killed. But to initiate the Final Solution in 1942 and devote significant resources to a programme of extermination ... well, that simply doesn't make military or economic sense.    

But, as Peterson points out, that's exactly what Hitler chose to do; accelerate the misery and the mayhem, whilst insisting that everything he did he did either in the name of Love (for Germany and the German people), or so as to establish a great empire rich in materials and artistic treasures.

In a sense, we might describe Hitler as the palest of all pale criminals. Or, as Nietzsche would say, a type of strong human being made sick due to unfavourable conditions. The question remains of course: what are we to do with such people?  

See: Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1969), Pt. 1: Of the Pale Criminal.

Watch: Jordan B. Peterson, '2017 Maps of Meaning 11: The Flood and the Tower', YouTube: click here. 

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.