8 Nov 2018

The Colour Purple



I. On the Excretory Origin of an Exquisite Colour

My birthstone, as an Aquarian, is amethyst. And so I have an astrological attachment to the colour purple, in all its shades. Fortunately, I like this red-blue composite colour very much and appreciate the fact that it has a fascinating history that is ultimately rooted in what Bataille terms heterogeneous matter.

For whilst many people associate purple with imperial power or sacred authority, its origin is both base and profane. Indeed, this is revealed in the etymology of the word purple, which derives from the Greek name for a dye manufactured in the classical period from a mucus secreted by the hypobranchial gland belonging to a species of sea-snail.

Although the slimy secretion is milky and colourless when fresh, it stinks and turns into a powerful, long-lasting dye - known as Tyrian purple - when exposed to the air. Distilling it was a notoriously unpleasant task in the ancient world and required either wax plugs in the nostrils or a strong stomach (or both). As the poet and cultural critic Kelly Grovier rather amusingly notes: "Though purple may have symbolised a higher order, it reeked of a lower ordure."

Not only was it a malodorous job, it was a tricky and time-consuming one. It took tens of thousands of hypobranchial glands to produce even a tiny amount of this miraculous colour which grows ever more beautiful over time - unlike other textile dyes whose lustre soon fades. Thus, naturally enough, Tyrian purple was expensive: very expensive, and soon became the colour of choice amongst kings, priests, and powerful magistrates:

"In ancient Greece, the right to clad oneself in purgative purple was tightly controlled by legislation. The higher your social and political rank, the more extracted rectal mucus you could swaddle yourself in."

Purple's discovery was also given a mythological origin, so that everyone might conveniently forget what it is and exactly where it comes from. (It was claimed that whilst Heracles was one day walking along the beach with the nymph Tyrus and his dog, the latter bit into a sea-snail, staining its mouth purple. Amused by the incident and dazzled by the colour, Tyrus subsequently requested that a garment be made for her using the same dye.) 


II. The Art of Purple

Of course, today no one knows (or cares) about any of this: purple has long since been synthesised artificially and become just another colour available to anyone who wishes to wear it. You can even get a pair of purple knickers from Primark for a fiver.

However, as Grovier points out, that's not to say that Tyrian purple has lost all its old magic; in the world of art, for example, it can still transform a canvas in a startling manner:

"When Francis Bacon resolved to reinvent Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X [...] he decided to recast the pontiff's vestments not as scorching scarlet as his Spanish forebear had, but as pulsating purple. The result was as quietly alarming as the mute caterwaul that howls from his subject’s tortured lips [...] as if the Pope were undergoing the excruciating disgorgement of millions of molluscs over many millennia."

It can, concludes Grovier, be regarded as "purple’s silent scream into anguished oblivion - the last gasp of a gorgeously appalling colour."


Francis Bacon: 
Study after Vezquez's Pope Francis X (1953) 


See: Kelly Grovier, 'Tyrian Purple: The disgusting origins of the colour purple', (1 August 2018), published on the BBC Culture website: click here. This is one of a series of essays on colours by Grovier. Other colours discussed with his customary brilliance include umber (the colour of debauchery), black, pink, orange, and silver. Readers who are interested in knowing more are encouraged to visit his website: kellygrovier.com    


6 Nov 2018

Olfactophilia: Reflections on Canine Arse-Sniffing

Illustration from the Dog Decoder smartphone app by Lili Chin

I got a smelly rear / I got a dirty nose
I don't want no shoes / I don't want no clothes
I'm living like the king of the dogs 


Someone once told me that the reason that dogs like to conduct anal inspections of other dogs is because they are looking for a long-lost message hidden by the King of the Dogs, containing the secret of how to overcome their human masters and be free once more to live their own lives.  

Part of me would still very much like to believe this story to be true. Unfortunately, I'm also familiar with the scientific explanation for such behaviour and this more factual account in terms of glandular secretions released from the dog's anal sac makes me doubt the veracity of the above.  

However, even the American Chemical Society conclude that canine arse-sniffing is essentially an exchange of information. Only what's being communicated concerns sexual status and dietary habits, for example, rather than how to regain the freedom of revered lupine ancestors.    

Finally - since we're discussing this subject - it might be noted that dogs are not enjoying the smell of shit when they stick their noses into the behinds of other dogs.

Indeed, thanks to the presence of Jacobson's organ located inside their nasal cavities, dogs are able to pass subtle chemical information detected in the glandular secretions directly to the brain without being distracted by other more powerful odours. 


Musical bonus: Iggy Pop, King of the Dogs (Lil Armstrong / Iggy Pop), from the album Préliminaires (Astralwerks, 2009). 


4 Nov 2018

That Voodoo That You Do



When you see a lurid and salacious news headline containing the words black magic and Brazilian transsexuals, it's difficult not to have one's curiosity piqued; especially when the story unfolds not in Haiti or South America, but in Spain, and provides further evidence of how global migration (or Völkerchaos) is bringing unexpected forms of cultural diversity onto the streets of our towns and cities.       

According to reports, Spanish police arrested 13 members of a multi-national trafficking ring on suspicion of using Santería - a voodoo-like religion infused with elements of Catholicism - along with more mundane methods to coerce fifteen young transwomen into prostitution and drug dealing. 

It sounds uniquely bizarre. But, as a matter of fact, this is not the first time that migrants have been smuggled into Europe and then forced into a life of crime by gang leaders claiming to possess occult powers. And, sadly, I don't suppose it'll be the last ...

Welcome, then, to the new normal of sex slaves and raw chicken hearts; a reality that also incorporates grooming gangs, child brides, bushmeat, and halal slaughter. And I think to myself ...      


3 Nov 2018

England, Our England: Notes on D. H. Lawrence's Oikophobia

D. H. Lawrence by Fabrizio Cassetta (2015)


It begins, writes Lawrence, the moment you set foot back in England: "The heart suddenly, yet vaguely sinks."

He would, I suspect, dismiss talk of oikophobia. For Lawrence explicitly says that what he experiences when arriving home is not fear, but, rather, a form of dismay; not least at the inoffensive nature of everyone and everything and the "almost deathly sense of dulness" that overwhelms even the gayest of spirits.  

England is the easiest country in the world to live in and full of the nicest people:

"But this very easiness and this very niceness becomes at last a nightmare. It is as if the whole air were impregnated with chloroform or some other pervasive anaesthetic, that [...] takes the edge off everything ..."

Ultimately, England is simply too cosy for Lawrence's liking; mildly warm and reassuring like a bedtime drink.

It's important to note, however, that Lawrence doesn't say this in order to jeer or look down on his fellow countrymen. In fact, it pains him to admit how England makes him feel: for "to feel like this about one's native land is terrible" - particularly when the bit of England that depresses him most is his hometown.

Eastwood, he says, fills him with "devouring nostalgia and an infinite repulsion". Which is pretty much how I feel too, when walking around Harold Hill; on the one hand, I want it to be exactly as it was when I was a child and on the other I want it to be razed to the ground.

In other words, oikophobia is an ambiguous condition that can give rise to violently conflicting feelings within the same breast; something that those who, like Roger Scruton, politicise the term and use it as a concept by which to attack those whom they regard as insufficiently patriotic fail to appreciate.

Thus it is that oikophobes like Lawrence, who set off on savage pilgrimages around the world in order to escape the familiar confines of home and experience otherness in far away lands amongst alien peoples, often end by concluding:

"I do think [...] we make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America - as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we are rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong."


See:

D. H. Lawrence, 'Why I don't Like Living in London' and [Return to Bestwood] in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 119-22 and 13-24. 

D. H. Lawrence, letter to Robert Pratt Barlow, 30 March 1922, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), letter 2480, pp.218-19.  

Readers interested in a related post on oikophobia and Roger Scruton's political redefining of the term, should click here


2 Nov 2018

Oikophobia

Home is made for comin' from, for dreams of going to
Which with any luck will never come true.


I. Confessions of an Oikophobe

Oikophobia - from the Greek, oikos, which refers to the three distinct but related concepts of home, household, and family, and phobia, meaning fear and loathing - is a term used within psychiatry, literary studies, and political philosophy.    

In the first of these fields, psychiatry, it identifies a deep-seated aversion to the vita domestica as it unfolds within a physical space, including the everyday objects and household appliances that are commonly found in the home: including, for example, cookers, carpets, and curtains.

Whether such a phobia is irrational, is debatable; to my mind it seems perfectly reasonable. I don't think disliking the saccharine stupidity and bourgeois vulgarity of home, sweet home is symptomatic of mental illness - it's surely a sign rather of cultural nobility (that is to say, artistic and intellectual superiority).

Thus it is that many poets have a romantic and nomadic desire to wander in far away lands and escape the ever so 'umble confines of home; including married life, regular employment, and onerous social duties (such as putting the rubbish in the correct recycling bins). To long to flee along the open road or roam outside the gate, is so closely tied to the creative impulse, that one is almost tempted to describe modern art and literature as inherently oikophobic.   


II. On the Politics of Oikophobia

Thanks to conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, however, the term oikophobia has recently taken on a new and negative meaning within reactionary political circles; now oikophobes are regarded as self-hating, left-leaning liberals who despise or feel ashamed of their own culture, history, and society.

Scruton argues:   

"This repudiation of the national idea is the result of a peculiar frame of mind that has arisen throughout the Western world since the Second World War, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political elites. No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognized: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with 'them' against 'us', and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours'. I call the attitude oikophobia - the aversion to home - by way of emphasizing its deep relation to xenophobia, of which it is the mirror image. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which intellectuals tend to become arrested."*

Scruton's weaponised and anti-intellectual political usage has been taken up by other commentators with an alt-right axe to grind. They argue, for example, that oikophobia is particularly prevalent on university campuses and is a chronic symptom of political correctness, informed by the work of such thinkers as Foucault and Derrida, who express contempt for ideals of love, loyalty and longing for Ithaca, preferring instead, say their critics, to affirm a kind of rootless nihilism.        

I'm not saying there's no truth in this - only that it's often spoken by the kind of ugly, flag-flying individuals that I'm never going to feel at home with. 


* Roger Scruton, speaking in Antwerp, on 23 June 2006: the text of this speech appears in The Brussels Journal (24 June 2006) and can be read by clicking here.  

For a related post on D. H. Lawrence's experience of oikophobia in terms of devouring nostalgia and infinite repulsion for his hometown of Eastwood and for England in general, click here


30 Oct 2018

On D. H. Lawrence's Fascination with Male Legs

Robyn H. Fitzpatrick: Male Legs 


As David Ellis reminds us in a recent blog post, Lawrence was a great admirer of the male leg; particularly those legs that have a certain quick vitality, even if rather thin looking like his own. But he's not a fan of stocky, stupid looking legs, no matter how finely muscled; or knees that, in his view, lack meaning or sensuality.

Nor is Lawrence particularly keen on bare legs; his preference is for male legs clad in red trousers - or tight-fitting tartan trews in the case of Capt. Hepburn - and female legs wrapped in brightly coloured stockings.

Thus it is that one could easily imagine Lawrence offering a little travelling tip to a fellow passenger who happened to have his legs exposed: Try not to wear shorts. It's not all that attractive to look at ... Even if, unlike Larry David, he doesn't find naked, hairy male legs intrinsically grotesque.         

Indeed, one suspects that rather like the narrator of 'The Captain's Doll', Lawrence secretly thrilled at the "huge blond limbs of the savage Germans" parading around in their lederhosen and displaying their "bare, brown, powerful knees and thighs".   

And that, like Connie, he ultimately regarded legs as more important than unreal faces ...



Notes

David Ellis, 'Legs' (28 Oct 2018), can be found on dellis-author.co.uk: click here

Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm, S7/E4: 'The Hot Towel', (2009): click here

It might amuse readers to know that Larry also has a strong aversion to other male body parts, including testicles, which he regards as disgusting, hideous and rightly reviled. See Curb Your Enthusiasm, S8/E2: 'The Safe House', (2011): click here. Obviously, this testicular aversion is a very unLawrentian. Connie famously discovers the balls of her lover to be the primeval root of all that is lovely; full of a "strange heavy weight of mystery, that could lie soft and heavy in [her] hand!" See Lady Chatterley's Lover, Ch. XXII.   

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Captain's Doll', in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 122. 

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 254. 

Interestingly, one of the queer after-effects of Connie's affair with Mellors is that she becomes conscious of legs, including the thighs of her father. It strikes her, however, that most modern legs - of either sex - simply pranced around in leggy ordinariness without any significance, or were so daunted as to be "daunted out of existence". One can't help wondering, however, if this new awakening to legs isn't also a reaction to her husband's disability.


29 Oct 2018

Let Them Eat Plastic

People Can Look So Plastic These Days

Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es - Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1826)


Well, that's it then: the world has officially turned dayglo (you know, you know) and all that punk prophet Poly Styrene predicted has come to pass; microplastics have now been found in human faeces for the first time, suggesting that the tiny particles are widespread in the food chain.

Scientists examined shit samples from participants in Europe, Japan, and Russia and all contained various types of plastic, with polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate being the most commonly identified.

On average, 20 particles of microplastic were found in each 10g of excreta and based on the findings from what was admittedly a small-scale study, the researchers estimate that more than half of the world's population might have microplastics in their bodies.

The study confirms what many have long suspected and feared; that it's not just fish, birds, and flying insects that are ingesting plastic - we are too. But then it's hard not to when the stuff is in pretty much everything, including tap water and soft drinks.

Fuck knows what it means for human health or, in the longer term, human evolution, but it's interesting to note that the smallest particles are capable of entering the bloodstream and lymphatic system and may even reach the liver (i.e., they're not just in the gut where they may possibly affect the digestive system's immune response and aid the transmission of toxins and pathogens).   

The UK government, which recently launched a study looking into the matter, promises to take action. And earlier this year, the European parliament voted for a ban on microplastics in cosmetics. But plastic is so pervasive in modern life - a million plastic bottles are sold around the world every minute - that removing it from the food chain is virtually impossible.

We all know that banning plastic straws and cotton buds isn't going to be enough - but do we really care? I don't think so. I think if you wrench your nylon curtains back as far as they will go, you'll see people happily driving their polypropylene cars on wheels of sponge, before pulling into their local burger bar to have a rubber bun.

In other words, they like the world as it is and are willing to embrace their fate as homo plasticus ...


Notes

Philipp Schwabl et al, 'Assessment of microplastic concentrations in human stool' (preliminary results of a prospective study), presented at UEG 2018, Vienna, (24 October, 2018). 

X-Ray Spex, 'The Day the World Turned Dayglo', single from the album Germfree Adolescents, (EMI, 1978): click here.


28 Oct 2018

Ovinophobia: Reflections on D. H. Lawrence's Fear of Sheep

Curious Flock of Sheep


One of the more amusing things about the man who loved islands is the intensity with which he hates the half-a-dozen sheep who share his tiny third island:

"What he disliked most was when one of the lumps of sheep opened its mouth and baa-ed its hoarse, raucous baa. He watched it, and it looked to him hideous and gross. He came to dislike the sheep very much. [...] They were accustomed to him now, and stood and stared at him with yellow or colourless eyes, in an insolence that was almost cold ridicule. There was a suggestion of cold indecency about them. He disliked them very much. And when they jumped with staccato jumps off the rocks, and their hoofs made the dry, sharp hit, and the fleece flopped on their square backs, he found them repulsive, degrading."

And so the man who loved islands decides they have to go. But the "hustle and horror of getting the sheep caught and tied [...] made him loathe with profound repulsion the whole of animal creation." Even several days after the flock were disposed of, he was still nerve-wracked and would sometimes start with repulsion, "thinking he heard the munching of sheep". What evil deity, he wondered, created these foul-smelling, woolly beasts; "an uncleanness on the fresh earth".   

Now, of course, it's true that the man who loved islands is a character in a story and not to be confused with either the narrator or the author - whom, for convenience's sake, let us agree is D. H. Lawrence. Just because Cathcart suffers from ovinophobia, it doesn't mean that Our Bert was himself full of fear and loathing for sheep. However, even a cursory examination of Lawrence's non-fiction reveals that he did, in fact, have an extremely negative view of them.

In his 1917 essay 'The Reality of Peace', for example, Lawrence argues that sheep are a form of life that knows nothing of transcendent being. They are born, they live, and they grow fat like large green cabbages, but they never blossom. Their only reason for being is to provide food for more vital organisms - and thank God, writes Lawrence, "for the tigers and the butchers that will free us from the abominable tyranny of these greedy, negative sheep".

Ultimately, he says, it's not the great beasts of prey we have to fear, but "the masses of rank sheep" and other herd animals that are nibbling the earth into desert. Obviously, Lawrence is writing metaphorically here - it's actually sheep-like modern humanity he's attacking - but I'm not sure this really matters; the fact remains that it's the hideous myrmidons of sheep to which he compares mankind in all its obscene nullity. 


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Man Who Loved Islands', The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 168, 169.

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 42, 43. 

Arguably, Lawrence is at his most Nietzschean in this essay and the fact that Christians are collectively referred to as a flock - and Jesus often described as the Lamb of God - is undoubtedly a factor in his ovinophobia.    

Musical bonus: The Clash, 'Shepherd's Delight', from the album Sandinista! (CBS, 1980): click here

27 Oct 2018

On Living a Solitary Life: the Case of Elsie Eiler

Elsie Eiler and the Monowi town sign 
Photo: Reuters (2011)


I.  No Man is an Island

For Lawrence, who passionately believed in generating new forms of relationship and the establishment of an immanent utopia that he termed the democracy of touch, the idea of an individual living a solitary life was anathema and invariably ended badly (see the case of the man who loved islands, for example).  

As Aaron tells Lilly: you've got to be alone at times - and know how to be alone - but to just go on being alone is not only pointless, but impossible; sooner or later you begin to look around for other people with whom to form living connections.* Even Birkin, for all his talk of starry singularity and a posthuman world, knows that he ultimately needs to be part of a wider society. **

And Mellors, too, accepts that he can't stay alone forever in his forest hut; that he has to be broken open again and accept the pain as well as the pleasure that comes with a new set of social and sexual entanglements: 'There's no keeping clear', he tells Connie, 'And if you do keep clear, you might almost as well die'.***        

Yet the rather touching story of Elsie Eiler seems to demonstrate that, actually, isolation can be a splendid thing ...


II. The Case of Elsie Eiler

84-year-old Elsie Eiler is the sole resident of America's smallest town: Monowi, Nebraska, est. 1902. Everyone else, including her two children, has either moved away or, like her husband, Rudy, passed away (a fate that befell many other small communities in the Great Plains as the big cities exerted their pull).

But Elsie, a life-long resident of Monowi, can see no good reason to leave: it's her home, she likes it, and she intends to stay. And - contrary to what Lawrence might think - she's doing just fine and is perfectly happy.  

She still opens up the little tavern that she and her husband bought in 1971 - around the same time that the local grocery store and the post office closed - and passing truckers and travelling salesmen will frequently stop by for coffee and a chat. So, admittedly, whilst leading a solitary life, she's not entirely devoid of all human contact, like some kind of hermit.    

Elsie is also very conscious of her civic duties as Monowi's only resident. In her capacity as town mayor, for example, she is required to collect taxes and produce a municipal road plan every year in order to secure state funding for the town's four street lamps.

Elsie also maintains the 5000-volume library founded in memory of her husband, so she has plenty to read - and who's to say our relationship with dead authors isn't as vital as that with living beings? As a homotextual, I know I'd sooner live alone with a few good books, than in the company of most people ...


See:

* D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

** D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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

'Population of one: the smallest town in the US', a 3 minute BBC film about Elsie Eiler and her life in Monowi: click here.


Thanks to Simon Solomon who kindly suggested this post and sent me a link to the above film.



26 Oct 2018

On The Man Who Loved Islands


No man is an island entire of itself ...


In a much admired - and much discussed - short story, first published in the Dial in July 1927, Lawrence writes of a man who dreams of living on an island - "not necessarily to be alone on it, but to make it a world of his own" - and who, by the time he reaches the age of thirty-five, had actually managed to acquire such (on a 99-year lease).


The First Island

Initially, the man loved his new life as an islander. But then mysterious feelings came upon him; feelings that he wasn't used to and which made him uneasy. For once you isolate yourself on a little island, writes Lawrence, then your "naked dark soul finds herself out in the timeless world" and the spirits of the dead return to haunt you. Of course, it's easy to dismiss such thoughts and feelings as nonsense in the daytime. But at night, when the world is transformed by darkness ... well, then it's not so easy.

In an attempt to counter these feelings, the man spent huge sums trying to transform the island into a gay little community over which he could be the Master. However, despite all his best efforts to create a utopia in his own image, an invisible hand would always strike "malevolently out of the silence", causing sickness, bad weather, and misfortune - even one of the cows falls off a cliff (and that, as Sgt. Wells and his men will tell you, is never a good omen).

Lawrence delights in describing - in an almost Gnostic manner - the wickedness and cruelty that emanate from the world in its materiality: "Out of the very air came a stony, heavy malevolence. The island itself seemed malicious. It would go on being hurtful and evil for weeks at a time." Not surprisingly, therefore, everyone comes to hate everyone else upon the island and the man continued to be disturbed by the "strange violent feelings [...] and lustful desires" that it provoked within his breast.

At the end of the second year, some of the islanders decide to leave. But still the bills kept arriving: "Thousands and thousands of pounds [...] the island swallowed into nothingness." Things clearly couldn't continue as they were; the man was facing bankruptcy, no matter what attempts he made to reduce expenses. The island seemed to actually pick the money out of his pocket, "as if it were an octopus with invisible arms stealing [...] in every direction".

In the middle of the fifth year, he finally sells the island.


The Second Island

Despite making a considerable loss on the sale, the man who loved islands still loved islands and had no intention of returning to the mainland. Instead, he moves to an even smaller hump of rock in the middle of the sea, with a much reduced retinue. And on this second island there were thankfully no ghosts of long lost inhabitants: "The sea, and the spume and the wind and the weather, had washed them all out ..."

Thus the second island was completely inhuman in its elemental otherness and was no longer a world - merely a queer sort of refuge. Was he any happier? In a sense. But it was that strange kind of happiness that exists beyond desire:   

"His soul at last was still in him, his spirit was like a dim-lit cave under water, where strange sea-foliage expands upon the watery atmosphere, and scarcely sways, and a mute fish shadowily slips in and slips away again. All still and soft and uncrying, yet alive as rooted sea-weed is alive."

As the man who loved islands becomes increasingly inhuman, he ceases to care even about his own writing and it seemed to him that "only the soft evanescence of gossamy things" was permanent; that cobwebs mattered more than stone cathedrals, or books - or even love.

Nevertheless, he can't resist fucking Flora, his housekeeper's daughter, and thereby falling back into what Lawrence terms the automatism of sex. Naturally, he's eaten up with post-coital regret, for it leaves him "shattered and full of self-contempt". Worse, the very island now seemed tainted: "He had lost his place in the rare, desireless levels of Time to which he had at last arrived", and had fallen right back into wilfulness - and the paternity trap; because Flora is pregnant with his child.

Horrified at the thought of clocks and nappies and home, sweet home, the man does what a lot of men have done in his position; he scarpers - to another island bought at auction for very little money:

"It was just a few acres of rock [...] There was not even a building, not even a tree on it. Only northern sea-turf, a pool of rain-water, a bit of sedge, rock, and sea-birds. Nothing else. Under the weeping wet western sky."         

Quickly realising just how desolate the third island was and what effect it was likely to have on him, the man reluctantly decides to return to Flora and make an honest woman of her. Lawrence, however, isn't the sort of writer who affords his readers the opportunity to enjoy a conventional happy ending.

Thus, the new husband and father-to-be soon experiences the death of all desire for his wife. And the island became as hateful as a vulgar London suburb; a sort of prison. Even the birth of the child, a daughter, doesn't lift his spirits. Just looking at the baby made him feel depressed, "almost more than he could bear". He tried not to show his unhappiness. But all the while he was planning his return to the third isle ...


The Third Island

The man who loved islands had himself a little stone hut built, roofed with corrugated iron. Inside, he had a bed, a table, three chairs, a cupboard, and a few books along with supplies of fuel and food. There were also half-a-dozen sheep for company; "and he had a cat to rub against his legs". But soon, even the presence of the cat begins to irritate him and he starts to hate the sheep, forever breaking the silence with their ridiculous bleating:

"He wanted only to hear the whispering sound of the sea, and the sharp cries of the gulls, cries that came out of another world to him. And best of all, the great silence."   

It rained. In fact, it rained a lot. But, fortunately, he also liked the sound of the rain.

As the days shortened "and the world grew eerie", the man began to find all human contact impossible. When local fishermen brought him his mail and supplies, he found it painful to talk to them: "The air of familiarity around them was very repugnant to him." And he didn't much care either for the clumsy way they dressed. In fact, it's hard to tell which he hates more: the sheep, the men, or the repulsive god who made them: "To his nostrils, the fisherman and the sheep alike smelled foul; an uncleanness on the fresh earth."

As winter arrives, the man who loved islands sheds himself of his last vestiges of humanity and passes into the material world of things and elemental chaos, effectively becoming-island in a manner unimaginable to John Donne - as, indeed, it seems to be to many commentators on this story, who fail to grasp that a becoming often involves a fatal affirmation of difference, not only in its positivity, but in its demonic and self-destructive otherness.

Opening oneself up to alien forces is never easy and often deeply unpleasant; it's not a question of the man identifying with the island; nor is he merely engaging in an imaginative exercise. It's a real process at the molecular level of forces. As Deleuze and Guattari write, Lawrence is one of those rare few authors - a master of the dark arts - able to tie his writings to unheard of becomings that are often profoundly troubling and do not end well.

That's why, I suppose, many readers of this tale fail to recognise its importance and think it's simply an attempt to demonstrate that no man is - or can be - an island and that we need human company in order to secure our own humanity - as if that were the great desideratum or exclusive concern of man. Those who read the story in such human, all too human terms don't understand how our haecceity consists entirely of impersonal elements, unformed particles, and non-subjectified effects (or what Lawrence terms vibrations).

Anyway, let us return to the man who loved islands ...

"He felt ill, as if he were dissolving, as if dissolution had already set in inside him. Everything was twilight, outside, and in his mind and soul. [...]
      Only he still derived his single satisfaction from being alone, absolutely alone, with the space soaking into him. The grey sea alone, and the footing of his sea-washed island. No other contact. Nothing human to bring its horror into contact with him. Only space, damp, twilit, sea-washed space!"

Lawrence continues, in a series of passages that surely number among his finest and which are philosophically of great interest for what they tell us about time and language in relation to human being:

"He was most glad when there was a storm, or when the sea was high. Then nothing could get at him. Nothing could come through to him from the outer world. True, the terrific violence of the wind made him suffer badly. At the same time, it swept the world utterly out of existence for him. [...]
      He kept no track of time, and no longer thought of opening a book. The print, the printed letters, so like the depravity of speech, looked obscene. He tore the brass label from his paraffin stove. He obliterated any bit of lettering in his cabin. [...]
      He prowled about his island in the rain [...] not knowing what he was looking at, nor what he went out to see. Time had ceased to pass."

Sometimes, the man staggers and falls down from fatigue, or illness, or both. But he doesn't really care, as he had long "ceased to register his own feelings". Only the "dull, deathly cold" still made him fearful for his wellbeing and unlike Gerald Crich, he refuses to lie down and die beneath the heavy whiteness of the snow which had "accumulated against him".  

But, of course, ultimately, you can't defeat the mechanical power of the elements and one has to surrender completely if one is to push becoming towards what Deleuze and Guattari call its cosmic formula or immanent end point: a becoming-imperceptible. The man climbed to the top of a hill and looked blankly over the whiteness of his now unrecognisable island: 

"As he looked, the sky mysteriously darkened and chilled. From far off came the mutter of the unsatisfied thunder, and he knew it was the signal of the snow rolling over the sea. He turned, and felt its breath on him."

And that's the last Lawrence tells us of him. We are left to assume that the man who loved islands has accepted his mortal destiny; i.e, that all being is ultimately a being towards death and that death is that inanimate realm of bliss into which every straight line curves (or what Nietzsche terms the actual).  

'The Man Who Loved Islands' matters because it teaches the Heideggerean truth that Dasein can come to grasp its own nature only when it confronts the void and affirms the possibility of its no-longer-being-there - not because it reaffirms the importance of human community and/or family life.      

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Man Who Loved Islands', The Woman Who Rode away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 151- 173. All lines quoted are from this edition. For those who don't have the book to hand but would like to read the tale, it can be found, in full, online by clicking here.

The photo is of the Anglo-Scottish writer Compton Mackenzie, aspects of whose life Lawrence used in his tale of the man who loved islands. Mackenzie, who had been up until that point on friendly terms with Lawrence, wasn't amused at being made into a preposterous Lawrentian figure and at one point attempted to get an injunction against what he described as a lunatic story. This, of course, didn't go down very well with Lawrence, who in a letter to his publisher Martin Secker wrote:

"I'm disgusted at Compton Mackenzie taking upon himself to feel injured. What idiotic self-importance! If it's like him, he ought to feel flattered, for its very much nicer than he is - and if it's not like him, then what's the odds? [...] But as a matter of fact, though the circumstances are some of them his, the man is no more he than I am. It's all an imbecile sort of vanity."

See: D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), Letter 4196, (3 Nov 1927), pp. 205-06.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996). 

John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), see Meditation XXVII for the famous phrase 'No man is an island'. 

Readers interested in a sister post to this one on leading a solitary life (with reference to the case of Elsie Eiler), should click here.  

And for an alternative reading of 'The Man Who Loved Islands', see Stefania Michelucci, 'D. H. Lawrence's (Un)happy Islands', Études Lawrenciennes, 46 (2015): click here for the online text.