D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Cioran on the Bath of Fire and Becoming-Ash

Phoenix design by Stephen Russ for the cover of Penguin's 

unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1960) 

According to D. H. Lawrence, unless the individual is willing to be dipped into oblivion and made nothing, then they will never really change. For like the phoenix, we renew our youth only when we are burnt down to hot and flocculent ash.

Interestingly, the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran thinks along similar lines when it comes to the question of how best to achieve one's immortality - with the latter conceived in terms of immaterial purity (a synonym for nothingness).

In his astonishing first work - written whilst still only 22 years of age - Cioran speaks of the bath of fire which "purifies so radically that it does away with existence". Its scorching flames set one's very being ablaze, until, finally, one has become-ash.

In a moving final passage, he asks: "when the inner conflagration has scorched the ground of your being, when all is ashes, what else is there left to experience?" There is, he confesses, "both mad delight and infinite irony in the thought of my ashes scattered to the four winds, sown frenetically in space, an eternal reproach to the world".

Thus, unlike the vitalist Lawrence, the nihilist Cioran feels no need to imagine himself rising from the ashes like some mythical bird, with bright new feathers. For him, the passing into death isn't any kind of triumph, nor a preliminary to a new and better life.

Having said that, even Cioran allows himself to occasionally dream of a world that is transfigured by the bath of fire, rather than simply reduced to ruin:     

"If I could [...] I would set a fire burning insidiously at the roots of life, not to destroy them but to give them a new and different sap, a new heat. [...] In this way life would adjust to higher temperatures and would cease to be an environment propitious to mediocrity. And maybe in this dream, death too would cease to be imminent in life." 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Phoenix', in The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 

E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992), see the sections entitled 'The Bath of Fire' and 'The World and I'. 

This post is dedicated to my beautiful friend, the artist Heide Hatry, who knows more than most about becoming-ash. 

Readers interested in a sister post to this one on DHL and EMC and the question of becoming-animal, should click here. 

D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Cioran on Man's Becoming-Animal

Helmo: from the Bêtes de Mode series (2006)

I. Becoming All the Animals in Turn. 

Sick and tired of well-domesticated modern men like her husband, the female protagonist of Lawrence's short novel St. Mawr (1925), ponders if there mayn't be something else to marvel at in men besides "'mind and cleverness, or niceness or cleanness'" and that perhaps this something else is animality. 

Her mother, however, is unconvinced by this idea and imagines that her daughter secretly desires a caveman to club her over the head and carry her away. Angered that her suggestion has been misinterpreted as a vulgar rape fantasy, Lou responds:

"'Don't be silly, mother. That's much more your subconscious line, you admirer of Mind! I don't consider the caveman is a real human animal at all. He's a brute, a degenerate. A pure animal man would be as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath. [...] He'd be all the animals in turn, instead of one, fixed automatic thing, which he is now, grinding on the nerves."

Mrs. Witt, unnerved by this, argues that whatever else such a combination of man and beast would be, he'd certainly be dangerous. Lou, angry now with her mother, replies that be that as it may, she'd still rather live in a world of animal-men that one full of tame and humble half-men who are merely sentimental and spiteful.     

II. Not to Be a Man Anymore

Of course, D. H. Lawrence isn't the only writer to dream of man's becoming-animal, or, indeed, becoming-plant. So too does the French-Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran. In his first book, for example, published just ten years after Lawrence's St. Mawr, he writes these rather lovely lines:

"I am not proud to be a man, because I know only too well what it is to be a man. [...] If I could, I would choose every day another form, plant or animal, I would be all the flowers one by one: weed, thistle or rose [...] Let me live the life of every species , wildly and un-self-consciously, let me try out the entire spectrum of nature, let me change gracefully, discreetly, as if it were the most natural procedure."

But it's important to note that Cioran isn't looking to escape from or abandon his humanity once and for all, so much as to make it seem a newly attractive option once more:

"Only a cosmic adventure of this kind, a series of metamorphoses in the plant and animal realms, would reawaken in me the desire to become Man again."    

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'St. Mawr', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 59-62, and E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 68-69. 

Note: Helmo is a French design studio established by Thomas Couderc and Clément Vauchez. In the Bêtes de Mode project, they collaborated with Thomas Dimetto to produce a series of double-exposure photographs of man and beast, exhibited at the Galeries Lafayette, Paris, (2006). To see more of these images, click here. 

Readers interested in a sister post to this one on DHL and EMC and the question of becoming-ash, should click here. 

On the Anguished Lyricism of E. M. Cioran

Emil Cioran - crazy hair, crazy guy!

I.

From out of the blue comes a book in the post: a copy of E. M. Cioran's On the Heights of Despair (1934), kindly sent to me by my friend and sometimes collaborator, the Dublin-based poet Simon Solomon ...

Originally published in his native Romania, this was Cioran's first book in which many of the themes and obsessions of his mature work are already foreshadowed. It might best be described as a series of existential meditations on death, suffering and life's absurdity, in which a young writer openly borrows some of Nietzsche's more theatrical poses and mystical clown's tricks.    

Unfortunately, however, Cioran isn't ever going to be my cup of tea. Even his translator, Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, concedes that he's a specialized taste - "too sharp and bitter for many palates and, paradoxically, too lyrical and funny for some others" - though I'm not entirely sure this explains my own aversion. 

After all, I'm perfectly happy with rancorous, darkly comic authors. So perhaps, then, it is the unrestrained lyricism; the fact that there's simply too much blood, sincerity, and fire within the pages for my tastes. If only Cioran had curbed his enthusiasm - and his rhetorical flourishes - I may have found this book easier to read and enjoy.      

Of course, I've no doubt that the self-professed barbarian and passionate young fascist who authored On the Heights of Despair would brand my unlyrical (and perhaps at times even anti-lyrical) call for the exercising of caution cowardly - a sign of my own sclerosis and hollow intellectualism.  

II. 

The vital importance of lyricism to Cioran in the above work is clear from the opening section, in which he roots it in what he terms inner fluidity or spiritual effervescence - the chaotic, unconscious turmoil of the deepest self. Lyricism is thus an outward expression of profound interiority:

"One becomes lyrical when one's life beats to an essential rhythm and the experience is so intense that it synthesizes the entire meaning of one's personality."

I don't know what that sentence means and it's not one I could ever imagine writing; not even in the throes of death or some other decisively critical experience, "when the turmoil of [my] inner being reaches paroxysm". In fact, such language and such thinking is antithetical to my substantial centre of subjectivity.

Thus, I'll just have to remain a stranger to myself and to reality; a loveless being, trapped in an impersonal bubble of objectivity and "living contentedly at the periphery of things", never knowing the lyrical virtues of suffering and sickness, but vegetating in scandalous insensitivity and sanity.  

For according to Cioran, just as there's no authentic lyricism without illness, nor is there absolute lyricism "without a grain of interior madness". Indeed, the value of the lyrical mode resides precisely in its delirious and savage quality; it knows nothing of aesthetics or cultural refinement and is utterly barbarian in its expression. 

Sounding more like Bataille than Bataille, Cioran concludes his vision of excess with the following:

"Absolute lyricism is beyond poetry and sentimentalism, and closer to a metaphysics of destiny. In general, it tends to put everything on the plane of death. All important things bear the sign of death."

As a thanatologist, I agree with this last statement. Only consciousness of death and of the fact that all being is a being toward death, isn't something that I find particularly troubling. In other words, whilst I might share Cioran's nihilism, I don't experience his intense anguish and black drunkenness.

I prefer a practice of joy before death, not a practice of misery (no matter how lyrical) ...

See: E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Zoonosis (Revenge of the Animals)

Recent reports of the rare viral disease known as monkeypox recorded in the UK for the first time - first in Cornwall, then in Blackpool - oblige one to reconsider the question of zoonosis ...    

The term, zoonosis - from the Greek ζῷον (animal) and νόσος (sickness) - refers to the fact that some infectious diseases can naturally be transmitted between animals and humans. Examples include potentially deadly conditions such as Ebola, rabies, and salmonellosis, as well as the relatively mild - but still deeply unpleasant - monkeypox.

Many strains of swine and bird flu are zoonoses and HIV was originally a zoonotic disease transmitted to people in the early part of the 20th century from our simian friends, though it has since evolved to a separate human-only condition.

Despite the urban myth that infection with HIV was due to human-ape sexual contact, it was most likely due to the consumption of the latter served as bushmeat. Indeed, eating infected food is one of the most common modes of zoonotic transmission.

However, as zoonoses can be caused by a range of pathogens - viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites - there are numerous modes of transmission, both direct and indirect. Sometimes, this can involve a third party or intermediate species, known as a vector, which carries the disease without itself being infected; think mosquitoes and malaria. 

The fact is, like it or not, zoonotic transmission can occur in any context in which there is intimate contact with animals. Be they livestock, domestics pets, or wild creatures, they'll always find a way to undermine the health of man and extract a symbolic revenge upon a human order that treats them with disdain.  

On Art and Syphilis

Elizabethan Era Syphilis (detail)

by Swedish makeup artist 

Ylva Konradsson 

Even though, by his own admission, Lawrence knows "nothing about medicine and very little about diseases", that doesn't prevent him from offering a reading of English art history that is both critical and clinical in character and from assuming the role of what Nietzsche terms a cultural physician. 

Thus, in a fascinating late essay, Lawrence asserts that the reason the English produce so few painters is not because they are, as a people, "devoid of a genuine feeling for visual art", but because they are paralysed by fear. 

It is this which distorts Anglo-Saxon existence; an old fear which "seemed to dig into the English soul" during the Renaissance and that we might characterise as a morbid and mystical terror of sex and physical intimacy. The Elizabethans came to regard their own bodies with horror and began to privilege spiritual-mental life over instinctive-intuitive being.     

And, according to Lawrence, this was caused by the "great shock of syphilis and the realisation of the consequences of the disease" - particularly by the late-16th century when its "ravages were obvious" and, having initially entered the blood of the nation, it now "penetrated the thoughtful and imaginative consciousness". 

Someone, he suggests, ought to "make a thorough study of the effects of 'pox' on the minds and emotions and imagination of the various nations of Europe at about the time of our Elizabethans", who, despite their attempts to joke about the disease, were haunted by the fear of it. For the fact is "no man can contract syphilis, or any deadly sexual disease, without feeling the most shattering and profound terror go through him ... And no man can look without a sort of horror on the effects of a sexual disease in another person." 

I suspect that's probably true - and dare say many who experienced the outbreak of AIDS in the 1980s will agree. Like the arrival of syphilis, AIDS not only gave a "fearful blow to our sexual life", but the horror of it shaped our cultural imagination. We recoiled further and further away from one another - from physical communion - and into virtual reality (including online porn). 

Now we know know one another only as ideal entities on social media, or obscene online images; fleshless, bloodless, and cold. And our contemporary art reflects this great move into abstraction. It's often very clever, often very amusing, but it's real appeal is that it's germ-free.   

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Paintings', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

Johannes Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare's England, (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1994).

Arguably, the above book is the serious study Lawrence calls for and it lends support to his thesis concerning the manner in which syphilis profoundly changed the manners and morals of Renaissance Europe and shaped the literary and artistic imagination. Fabricius also suggests - as I have - that, in many ways, the emergence of syphilis has numerous parallels with the AIDS epidemic and the socio-political reaction to it. 

Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors, (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1989). 

In this brilliant work of critical theory - a companion text to her earlier work Illness as Metaphor (1978) - Sontag extends her arguments made about the way in which cancer is culturally conceived to AIDS, deconstructing harmful myths surrounding the disease. Further, she also provides an interesting comparison between AIDS and syphilis    

The History of a Phone Box

When I was little, one of the things I loved to do was walk with my big sister to the phone box on Straight Road, where she went to call her boyfriend, Barry.

The box was one of those iconic dome-topped designs by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott; iron-cast, bright red in colour and emblazoned with a crown, and which, even until relatively recently, remained a familiar and reassuring sight on British streets. I'm not sure, but I think people with an interest in telephone kiosks refer to it as a K2 - but possibly it was the smaller, cheaper 1935 model, known as the K6.

In fact, it probably was the latter. But, either way, I thought it was a magical object (and space) as a six-year-old and enjoyed every aspect of helping my sister make a call; lifting the handset from its cradle, dialing, putting the pennies in the slot, hearing the pips go, etc. I even liked the fact that sometimes there would be someone waiting impatiently outside in the cold (less so if that someone was me).           

Sadly, post-privatisation in the 1980s, the traditional red phone box was gradually replaced by a ghastly-looking glass booth: the KX100. Nick Kane, Director of Marketing for BT Local Communications Services, announced that the old boxes had to go as they no longer met the needs of customers. Even more outrageously, he claimed the old boxes were not only expensive and difficult to clean and maintain, but unpopular with the public - something I refuse to believe.        

Today, of course, in this age of the mobile, even phone booths in the KX series have mostly vanished from our streets and those that remain are unloved relics in a state of disrepair or ruin, not even fit to piss in. This includes the one pictured above, standing where a handsome-looking red box once stood and made a young child happy.

Despite how it may appear, I'm not overly nostalgic for the past. But it has to be said that there's something brutal and charmless about life in Britain today, shaped by men like Nick Kane and company, who, as Lord Darlington would say, know the price of everything and the value of nothing.          

Larking About with Philip Larkin

The Larkin Toad by Frances Kelly 
Image: The Philip Larkin Society

I.

When it comes to how we view and remember our poets, I'm all for a certain irreverence. But I don't like caricatures that mock without affection; particularly if they also seem to display a poor reading of the author's work.

In other words, whilst a cruel misportrayal of a writer is objectionable, a crass misinterpretation of their text is unforgivable.  

And so we come to the case of Philip Larkin and his representation as a giant toad during Larkin 25 ...

II. 

2010 was the 25th anniversary of Larkin's death and an arts festival in Kingston-upon-Hull culminated on 2 December with the unveiling of a life-size bronze statue of the poet by Martin Jennings. The unveiling was accompanied by Nathaniel Seaman's Fanfare for Larkin, which had been specially composed to mark the occasion.

Although born in Coventry, Larkin had lived and worked (at the Brynmor Jones Library) in Hull from 1955 until his death thirty years later and the city had even named a bus in his honour, so fair enough that the good people thereof should regard him as one of their own and choose to celebrate his life.

However, I'm not sure the centrepiece of the festival is something they can look back on with pride: a work consisting of 40 fibre-glass toad sculptures, each painted with a unique design by a local artist and inspired - or so it's claimed - by Larkin's poetry. Central amongst the designs was The Larkin Toad, by Frances Kelly.

Even at the time, voices of concern were raised. It was said that were it possible for Larkin to have posthumous knowledge of himself reincarnated in bufonid form with dry, leathery skin and short, fat little legs, this would send him spinning in his grave. And Rachel Cooke wrote of the toad stunt that it was:

"so loopily against the spirit of the two poems that are their inspiration - 'Toads' and 'Toads Revisited', in which the squatting toad, impossible to shake off, is both a symbol of work and of the narrator's timid and confining personality - I find myself wondering whether their creators have actually read either one."

And that's the fatal criticism in my view; not that it mocks the man - in whom, by his own admission, something sufficiently toad-like squatted inside - but that it misunderstands (and sells short) his writing.  

Notes 

Rachel Cooke, 'In search of the real Philip Larkin', The Observer, (27 June 2010): click here to read online. 

'Toads' (1954) and 'Toads Revisited' (1962), by Philip Larkin, can be found in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite, (Faber and Faber, 2003).  

For a sister post to this one - on why I love Larkin - click here. 

A Fond Farewell to Fenella Fielding

Fenella Fielding as the fiendishly beautiful Valeria

 Carry On Screaming (1966) 

It is again with sadness that I mark the passing of another wonderful comic actress - just days after the death of Liz Fraser - Fenella Fielding, star of my favourite Carry On film, Carry On Screaming (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1966). 

The exotic-looking and exotic-sounding Fenella was born in Hackney, in 1927, to a Romanian mother and a Lithuanian father, with whom she had an unhappy (often physically violent) relationship. Spending much of her childhood in conversation with her dolls, she dreamed of becoming an artist and performer from an early age (much to the horror of her parents who hoped she would become a shorthand typist).

After eventually fleeing her awful home life, Fielding found herself in an amateur production at the LSE playing alongside Ron Moody, who encouraged her in her ambition to become a professional actress. Soon, she began appearing regularly in various reviews and by the end of the 1950s she had made something of a name for herself as a beautiful butterfly of comedy.

Throughout the following decade, Fenella was an established figure in Swinging London: Vidal Sassoon did her hair; Jeffrey Bernard took her clubbing; Francis Bacon and friends were all enchanted. She appeared on TV (in The Avengers, for example) and on film alongside male co-stars including Dirk Bogarde and Tony Curtis.

On stage, meanwhile, she pursued her real passion - drama. An accomplished and versatile actress, Fielding captivated audiences and critics alike with her interpretations of Ibsen, Shakespeare and Euripides. Noel Coward and Fellini both regarded themselves as fans of this highly intelligent and amusing woman who kept a copy of Plato by her bedside.        

Of course, this aspect of her life and work has been fatally overshadowed by her role in Carry On Screaming. It is as smoking-hot Valeria wearing a fitted red velvet dress with plunging neckline, designed by Emma Selby-Walker, that she has entered the popular and pornographic imagination and will forever be remembered.

Serious performers and dramatists may not like it, but classical theatre, it appears, cannot compete with cinematic camp-vamp. And if the role of Valeria provided the kiss of death to Fielding's career, it also guaranteed her cinematic immortality.

I don't know if Fenella will be buried or cremated, but I kind of hope it's the latter, so she may smoke for one last time and the ghost of Orlando Watt might look on and cry: Frying tonight!  

Note: those who are interested might like to click here to watch Fenella in her most famous scene as Valeria in Carry on Screaming, alongside the brilliant Harry H. Corbett as Detective Sgt. Bung.

Why I Love Philip Larkin (The D. H. Lawrence Birthday Post - 2018)

Portrait of Philip Larkin by gforce7 (1996)

deviantart.com 

There are many reasons to love Larkin - and doubtless just as many to hate him. 

Primarily, of course, is the body of work he left behind. Whatever the shortcomings of the man, these were more than compensated for - as if they needed to be - by the strength of his writing. He's unarguably one of our finest post-war poets, something which even most of his critics concede.

But I also love Larkin for his porno-fetishistic interests, his peculiarly English pessimism that is both ironic and understated, and the fact that he declined the honorary position of Poet Laureate when offered it in 1984 (having already turned down an OBE in 1968). A lyrical discontent, Larkin disliked fame and had no time for the trappings of success.       

And then - perhaps best of all - there's his love for Lawrence, whose work his father introduced him to and whom he regarded as the greatest of all English novelists throughout his life. Indeed, such was Larkin's devotion to DH that, according to his biographer, he even liked to mow his lawn whilst wearing a Lawrence t-shirt and drink his tea from a Lawrence mug.     

See: Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, (Faber and Faber, 1994). 

For a sister post to this one - on Larkin and the Larkin Toad - please click here. 

Save the Hedgehog

Photo: Tim Melling /Getty Images 

As a rule, I don't like the idea of saving anything, be it a whale, an immortal soul, or a sum of money. Whenever someone says we need to save this, that, or other, I always wonder from what and for what. It seems a slightly futile - if not ultimately a nonsensical - concept.

However, in the case of the hedgehog I'm willing to make an exception, because it's such an exceptional little beast; one of the earliest mammals and little changed in its spiny perfection for the last 15 million years. 

It also, of course, has a special place in the affections of the British; indeed, in a recent poll, it was voted our favourite wild species. But as author and journalist Tom Holland asks: If we love hedgehogs so much, why are we letting them vanish?

The answer, of course, is because we prefer to convert our gardens into driveways and eat McFlurries in a lifeless concrete world, sprayed with pesticide. We might anthropomorphically fantasise about Mrs Tiggy-Winkles, but we are supremely indifferent as a nation to the demise of the humble hedgehog, whose numbers have crashed dramatically over the past 20 years (down by over 30%).

Today, entire regions of the country are hedgehog-free zones. As Holland notes, an animal once ubiquitous in our fields, parks, and gardens is now facing extinction. It's a national shame: we encourage other peoples around the globe to protect their tigers, pandas, elephants and gorillas, but we can't even ensure the survival of our own small creatures. 

I wholeheartedly agree with Holland that we have an ethical duty to protect our wildlife; to be kind, while there is still time, as Larkin wrote in a mournful verse after accidently killing a poor hedgehog with his lawnmower.   

Notes

Tom Holland, 'If we love hedgehogs so much, why are we letting them vanish?', The Guardian (9 Sept 2018): click here to read online. 

Philip Larkin, 'The Mower', Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite, (Faber and Faber, 2003): click here to read on The Poetry Foundation website. 

For a related post to this one, on hedgehogs versus HS2, please click here.