Oh, Baby Mia! What Have They Done to You?

A healthy, happy child has no higher nature, 

no purity, and no ideal being. - D. H. Lawrence

I like babies. And so I don't want to see them exploited or humiliated; used, for example, as fashion accessories, propaganda, or living props in a photo session that is nothing but an infantalising fantasy. For despite what many parents seem to believe, babies aren't cute, sentimental, or stupid.

They are, rather, little bundles of will to power, full of die Unschuld des Werdens; alien beings who, without even trying, live beyond good and evil in happy indifference to morality; an astonishing combination of the prehuman, inhuman, and overhuman. In brief, babies are natural born Nietzscheans.

And that's why despite being placed in a Santa sack alongside Eeyore, the old grey donkey, who has himself been Disneyfied and forced to uncharacteristically smile, I'm glad to see that Mia refuses to look at the camera and in this way displays her displeasure (and boredom) with the situation.     

For now at least, my great-niece retains something of the pristine integrity of a newborn; she hasn't yet been fully subjectified and made drearily Allzumenschliche, though I'm sure her mother and father are working hard at it. If only they would realise that she's an as yet impersonal creature, laid soft and vulnerable on the face of the earth, not merely a machine to be programmed.

They, the parents, have a responsibility "to see that this unformed thing shall come to its own final form and fulness, both physical and mental". But that doesn't mean turning her into a good little girl according to a recipe overloaded with sugar and spice.

Perhaps the best thing they can do is leave her alone - not in a neglectful manner - but so as to allow her to be, unprovoked and undisturbed in all her beautiful remoteness, before, of her own accord, she makes the fall into consciousness and individuality.               

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 118.  

Heads You Lose: Reflections on Craniopagus Parasiticus (with Reference to the Case of Manar Maged)

Manar Maged displaying Islaam, her parasitic twin head, 

seemingly with pride and tender affection

I. Two heads are better than one ... 

I've never been convinced by this old English proverb: indeed, in my younger, more schizonomadic days, I thought the ideal was to be both headless and homeless and had a picture of André Masson's acephalic figure as a screensaver on my laptop.    

I was convinced that human life is debased when it becomes a purely head-bound affair and physical experience bartered away for mere representation; that freedom had to involve escaping from all utility and the tyranny of reason.

Now, however, I'm not quite so Bataillean and - without wishing to sound too Kiplingesque - I very much admire those who can keep their heads as all about are losing theirs. But I still don't believe that two heads are better than one; and certainly not when the second head is fused to the first, as in the extremely rare cases of craniopagus parasiticus.    

It might be fun to have an identical twin. It might even be amusing to be one of a pair, rather than one of a kind, and be a conjoined twin. Abby and Brittany Hensel, for example, seem happy enough and have learned to cooperate and coordinate with an astonishing degree of success, despite being distinct personalities.

But to simply possess a parasitic twin head, that doesn't sound terribly appealing or in any way advantageous to the autosite. So it's probably fortunate that the tiny number of infants with this condition are usually stillborn, or die shortly after coming into the world. But not always, as the following case reminds us ...


II. The Case of Manar Maged (and Islaam)    

After an episode of Oprah featured her story, the whole world was talking about the case of Manar Maged, an Egyptian girl born in March 2004 with two heads - the second of which, named Islaam, had a separate brain and could (rather creepily) display certain autonomous facial features, but fully relied on its sister's vital organs to maintain it's own existence. 

As this parasitic twin head endangered Manar's wellbeing - and also prevented her from being able to crawl or sit up properly - it was decided to operate and attempt to surgically remove poor Islaam. The long, difficult, and extremely dangerous procedure was successfully performed in February 2005 and little Manar was released from intensive care the following month.

Sadly, however, she developed hydrocephaly, followed by a serious brain infection, and died shortly before what would have been her second birthday in March 2006. As for Islaam, she of the enigmatic smile, who knows what became of her ...?     


Thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting this post. His own unique take on this case can be read by clicking here. If ever a post deserved a twin, it's this one; though which part is the parasitic head is debatable ... 

On Etymology and Amphibology

Untitled work by Seoul-based artist Myeong Beom Kim 

featured as part of a solo exhibition in Paris presented 

by Galerie Paris-Beijing entitled Amphibology (2017)

I've always been fascinated by the etymology of words.

Not because I care about origins, or have a particular fascination with linguistic roots; nor even because I wish to determine the true sense of a word - quite the opposite!

That is to say, what really excites me is how things - including words - change and how language is always subject to a process of becoming. I'm interested also in how even innocent, straightforward little words - seemingly lacking in all ambivalence - nevertheless contain within them that which they are not; their own other and absence; their own difference and deferral, or what Derrida calls différance. 

Of course, critics say that deconstruction is nothing more than postmodern wordplay, often reliant upon false etymology in which the différance (and duplicity) of words is imagined simply to satisfy a cultural and political ideology masquerading as a philosophical project. However, I will always prefer the provocative brilliance of Derrida, Barthes, and Foucault, over the dull common sense of their critics. 

And I think that when a writer demonstrates that grammar is simply a theological prejudice and that even the Word of God contains the shadow of a lie (i.e. paradox and syntactic ambiguity), we should be grateful. For by breaking words (and worlds) open, they create the (chaotic) conditions in which poetry can thrive.

Drinking the Silence: Notes on the Case of Georg Trakl

Georg Trakl: Self-Portrait (1913)

I.

You should probably read more Trakl, says Simon. And, yes, I probably should ...

For even if his work isn't quite my cup of tea, there are elements within his lyrical expressionism to which I'm sympathetic; such as his fascination with the blueness of twilight and his love of silence. No one can deny that there are many arresting - and disturbing - images in his work, as he fully exploits the often uncanny ambiguity of German. 


II. Wer war Georg Trakl? 

Georg Trakl was a typical Romantic figure; a depressed drug fiend, who engaged in an incestuous relationship with his younger sister, Greta, and received generous financial support from wealthy patrons, including the philosopher Wittgenstein, who, like Heidegger, was a huge fan (see section III below).

A pharmacist by profession, Trakl liked to hang around with the avant-garde artists involved with the well-known literary journal Der Brenner, edited by Ludwig von Ficker. The latter was also an avid supporter of the young poet and not only regularly printed his work, but attempted to find a publisher for his first collection.

Unfortunately, Trakl overdosed on cocaine in the autumn of 1914 and became an early member of what is now known as the 27 Club. There's a very strong possibility of suicide. In a letter written in 1913 he confessed:

"I long for the day when my soul shall cease [...] to live in this wretched body polluted with melancholy, when it shall quit this laughable form made of muck and rottenness, which is all too faithful a reflection of a godless, cursed century."


III. Philosophical Readings of Trakl

As mentioned above, both Wittgenstein and Heidegger were keen readers of Trakl. But, perhaps not surprisingly, they responded very differently to his poetry ...

The former, for example, wrote that whilst he didn't understand the verses, their tone - one of true genius - made him very happy. The latter, on the other hand, claimed that Trakl's work made perfect sense, once it had been situated and unified as a single rhythmic wave within his own thinking.

Derrida would later question this rather outrageous attempt by Heidegger to co-opt Trakl's work - what we might describe as an act of philosophical Anschluss - though, to be fair, it's something we've all done is it not; to read an author in light of one's own ideas and obsessions (indeed, it might be argued that every reading is an act of violation, as the reader seeks out their textual pleasure).


Thanks to the poet and literary scholar Simon Solomon for suggesting this post.

Chaos Reigns (Memento Mori)

Stephen Alexander: Chaos Reigns (2018)

I.

A sparkling ice-cold morning in December: but even beneath cloudless blue skies, and just days before Christmas, chaos reigns ...


II.

Danish film-director and screenwriter Lars von Trier is right: grief, despair, and - above all - pain are ever-present in this world and fundamentally determine the tragic (if extremely rare and unusual) phenomenon that people term life; something they not only value, but desperately cling on to, despite the three beggars.  

In one of the most memorable scenes of his 2009 movie Antichrist, Von Trier presents us with a malevolent-looking fox slowly disembowelling itself. As it does so, it looks up at a startled Willem Dafoe (playing the male character known simply as He) and utters the diabolical phrase: Chaos reigns.

This became an instant internet meme and many people thought it was funny: but it isn't funny. Those who find it so are just imbeciles whistling in the dark and if there's one thing I hate it's optimistic bravado; you can laugh at the bloody horror that lies beneath the surface, but don't ever think that in doing so you can laugh it away, or make yourself immune.

Ultimately it's good to show courage in the face of death and evil (which are synonyms for life), but this requires a certain honesty and an acknowledgement of one's own anxiety, not mocking stupidity.


Click here to watch the chaos reigns scene from Antichrist (dir. Lars Von Trier, 2009), starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. 

Thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting this post and reminding me of the above scene in Von Trier's film.    

On Poetry and Plagiarism (with Reference to the Case of Ailey O'Toole)

America's most wanted: Ailey O'Toole
poet and convicted plagiarist 

The poem-as-text is a "multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, 

blend and clash [...] a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."  - RB 

Ho hum, another week, another plagiarism scandal in the ridiculously small and self-absorbed world of poetry ... The young offender being hauled over the coals this time by moralists who police the above and zealously enforce intellectual property rights, is prize-nominated American poet Ailey O'Toole.

There's no question that Ms O'Toole paraphrased lines in her poem 'Gun Metal' from a work by Rachel McKibbens - she even contacted the latter to admit as much. But whether we describe this as theft or borrowing, inspiration or intertextuality, isn't quite so straightforward.

In my view - and I'm saying this as a writer - O'Toole has nothing to apologise for or feel ashamed about. Indeed, if I were her, I would tell those sanctimonious bores who sit in judgement and threaten to derail her career - her publishers have already cancelled her first collection and spoken of their pain and anger - to go fuck themselves.  

For the fact is, very few poets invent neologisms; and even fewer have original thoughts or feelings. They essentially rearrange the words of a shared language and play with the ideas and emotions of the culture to which they belong. It's an art - and it can produce amazing results - but poetry is never a personal or private matter, no matter how idiosyncratic one's writing style.*

As Roland Barthes would argue, the poem-as-text is neither representative of a non-linguistic reality, nor expressive of an author's unique being. It's explainable only through other words that are also drawn from a pre-given, internalised dictionary. Every poem is, in a sense, already a copy of a copy of a copy whose origin is forever lost and meaning infinitely deferred.     

After Ms McKibbens went public with her accusation, several other poets came forward and claimed that they too were victims of a terrible literary crime committed by O'Toole. Some even spoke of being violated, or having their identities stolen and experiences belittled.

In part, this hysterical overreaction is due to the p-word itself, which, etymologically, means kidnapping - thereby encouraging writers to regard words as their precious offspring.** This, however, is a laughable turning of the truth on its head; for it isn't authors who give birth to language; it's language that gives birth to them.  

Ultimately, whatever we might think of her and what she did, O'Toole's plagiarism demonstrated a good deal of art; her selection of lines was clever and she skillfully wove them into her own text, tweaking them as she saw fit.

Surely then, we can, in the words of the Irish novelist, poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith - commenting here on Sterne's cheerful habit of plagiarism - "pardon the want of originality, in consideration of the exquisite talent with which the borrowed materials are wrought up into the new form".  

Notes

*I'm aware, having read several interviews with Ms O'Toole, that she would find the view expressed here anathema. For she subscribes to a conception of poetry as something highly personal and highly political; a therapeutic art form that helps individuals deal with their mental health issues and other traumatic experiences (child abuse, rape, domestic violence, homophobia, sexism, racism, etc.).    

**We have the first century Roman poet Martial, known for his epigrams, to thank for this; he first used the Latin term plagiarius to denote someone guilty of stealing someone else's verses. The word appeared in its modern form in English c.1620 and the Romantics, who valued ideals of originality, sincerity, and authentic feeling etc., regarded plagiarism as the greatest of all literary sins. 

Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 142-48. I discuss this essay at some length in a post on postmodern approaches to literature that can be read by clicking here. 

Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, (1766), Vol. V, p. xviii.

Readers interested in knowing more about this case, might like to read Kat Rosenfield's piece published on the arts and culture website Vulture (4 Dec 2018): click here. 

Noise Annoys: Notes on Hyperacusis and Associated Conditions

Pretty girls, pretty boys, 

have you ever heard your mummy scream ...? 

I. The Case of Schopenhauer and the Seamstress

As everyone knows, the German philosopher and arch-pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer was found guilty in 1820 of assaulting a seamstress, whom he'd pushed down a flight of stairs after she disturbed him with her incessant chatter on the landing outside his room. 

Having experienced noisy neighbours who just don't know when to shut the fuck up, or simply don't care about respecting the silence that others may find necessary for their own happiness and wellbeing, I can certainly sympathise. 

Inconsiderate bigmouths, or those who bray with laughter like asses in every sense of the word, deserve some form of comeuppance for the irritation they cause to those with heightened sensitivity to noise and/or the base stupidity that so often accompanies it.


II. Hyperacusis, Phonohobia, and Misophonia

Whilst hyperacusis is usually regarded as a debilitating disorder, I would suggest that most highly intelligent and thoughtful people tend to find repetitive noises intolerable and perhaps even painful on the ear. This can understandably result in phonophobia or even misophonia - a term coined by audiologists Margaret and Pawel Jastreboff in order to discuss individuals who are triggered into reacting by certain hateful sounds.

These noises can be mechanical in origin, such as car alarms and ringtones, or made by animals; the incessant barking of a dog, for example. But they can also include the sound of the human voice; an idiot singing along to the radio; a baby wailing its head off. Indeed, one study found that around 80% of trigger sounds were made orally by people; coughing, snoring, slurping, chewing loudly, expressing satisfaction after taking a drink by going aaah! ...

These, and many additional noises, can solicit murderous thoughts or provoke actual aggression, particularly when performed habitually by a loved one over many years (and again, I'm speaking from experience here). 

Note: unlike phonophobia, misophonia is neither classified as an auditory or psychiatric condition. Thus there are no standard diagnostic criteria and little research on how common it is or what can be done to help. 

Musical bonus: Buzzcocks: Noise Annoys - B-side to the single Love You More (United Artists, June 1978): click here. This post is in memory of singer/songwriter Pete Shelley.

Under the Radiation of New Skies: On the Spirit of Place and the Question of Migration

D. H. Lawrence: Untitled ink sketch (1929)

They walked a new earth, were seized by a new electricity, and laid in line differently. 
Their bones, their nerves, their sinews took on a new molecular disposition in the new vibration.

      They breathed a savage air, and their blood was suffused and burnt. 
A new fierce salt of the earth, in their mouths, penetrated and altered the substance of their bones. 
Their subtlest plasm was changed under the radiation of new skies, 
new influence of light, their first and rarest life-stuff transmuted.

I. Genius Loci

One of the great ironies of Lawrence's savage pilgrimage was that it taught him the importance of a homeland. For it seems that the freedom to wander around the world isn't ultimately as fulfilling as belonging to a people "polarized in some particular locality".

Despite what some ethno-nationalists claim, Lawrence isn't simply subscribing to a völkisch ideology of blood and soil. He is rather affirming the Romantic belief that different places have a different vital effluence and are aligned with different stars.

The British Isles, for example, possess a "wonderful terrestrial magnestism" (over and above "the indisputable facts of climate and geological condition") and it is this which has made the British people what they are. Thus, for Lawrence, race is ultimately more a metaphysical question of spirit, than it is a biological one to be discussed in terms of heredity. 

But the spirit of place doesn't only determine customs, beliefs, behaviours, etc., it also fatally undermines attempts at globalism and the dream of an ideal, homogenised humanity living as one. In this respect it might better be thought of as a kind of malin génie:

"The spirit of place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister spirit of place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens ..." 


II. On the Law of Transubstantiation

What, then, of the millions of migrants from Africa and the Middle East who are driven northwards by invisible winds?* Even if they can be assimilated into European society, can they ever feel comfortable subject to a demonic spirit belonging to an alien continent and beneath the radiation of new skies?

Probably not. There is an unthinkable gulf between them and us and crossing the Mediterranean in a little boat isn't the major problem they face (deadly as this journey can prove to be). And it doesn't really matter how they think and feel about things, or what they do, once here.

Ultimately, however, the malevolent reality of Europe will disintegrate their old way of being. Thus, it's not our values and human rights that will triumph, it's the inhuman spirit of place. Uprooted from their native lands, planted in new soil, they can do nothing but become-other.

Become, that is to say, future Europeans, who will be as different to their present selves as their present selves are to us today. This is Lawrence's law of transubstantiation and it offers the hope that from out of Völkerchaos a new order and a new people will slowly emerge, as "through hundreds of years, new races are made [and] people slowly smelted down and re-cast."

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Spirit of Place', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). I am quoting from both the final version of the essay (1923) and the first version (1918-19); see pp. 13-19 and 167-179. 

D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1997). The paragraph that closes part I of this post is found on p. 57 of this work.

*Although most commentators insist that migrants come in order to escape violence and poverty, Lawrence argues that it is inadequate in times of great crisis and upheaval to accept such a plausible explanation. The desire to improve one's material circumstances is never enough in itself to uproot a people that is strongly attached to its home and way of life. People only migrate en masse when gripped by the vital magnetism of a faraway land, and do so without knowing why or whither: 

"It is our fatal limitation, at the present time, that we can only understand in terms of personal and conscious choice. We cannot see that great motions carry us and bring us to our place before we can even begin to know. We cannot see that invisible great winds carry us unwitting, as they carry the locust swarms, and direct us before our knowledge, as they direct the migrating birds." [SCAL 170]. 

Some readers will almost certainly object to this; seeing it, for example, as a mystical attempt to dehumanise migrants and strip them of their agency. But - with certain reservations - I think there's something in what Lawrence says here and that it behoves us all to make a greater effort at perceiving the inhuman (or daimonic) forces that control us and ultimately shape our fate.  

Reflections on a Photo of Two Young Punks

Debbie Juvenile and Tracie  O'Keefe
(Seditionaries 1977) 

There are two reasons why I like this photograph ...

Firstly, there are the clothes: McLaren and Westwood's idiosyncratic designs looked fucking amazing back then and they look even more astonishing now. One forgets just how romantic and swashbuckling punk fashion was - and just how queer (using that word in its fullest sense, to mean strange and outlandish as well as sexually deviant in some manner). It was never really a style that came from the streets; it came, rather, from the extraordinary imaginations of Malcolm and Vivienne and made very little sense outside of the world of 430, Kings Road. Clothes for heroes - and clothes for weirdos.         

Secondly, there are the two girls: Debbie Juvenile and Tracie O'Keefe.* They seem unable to contain their pride and joy at looking so fabulous as they pose for the camera lens and actively transform themselves into an image. The fact that each is smiling - such a rare thing for a punk to do - provides the picture with a warmth and a charm that makes me love it and love them.   

If they look so young, it's because they were so young. And their youth - the freshness of faces, the whiteness of hands - also illuminates the image and arouses great affection in me (almost a kind of tenderness). But what gives it a special poignancy is the distressing knowledge that both girls are no longer living.

I look at this photo and see two lovely - if unconventional - young women, dressed in their punk finery; they would appear to have their whole lives ahead of them. But in the back of my mind is the thought: they are going to die ... This, of course, is the challenge and the scandal of every photo. Indeed, it might even be said death is the very essence of photography; that every snap is to some degree or other mortifying: A second of your life ruined for life.

However, as Roland Barthes points out, the photograph also powerfully attests to presence and to the reality of lives that have been. It doesn't merely remind us of the past, or preserve what was abolished by the passing of time. It forms an actual bridge between ourselves and the dead. Thus, you look at Debbie and Tracie and - although they are no longer physically with us - they manage nevertheless to affect those of us who are still here in the flesh; not as ghosts, but as tiny suns that continue to shine long after they have burned out.

To paraphrase Susan Sontag, the presence of the absent being touches me like the delayed rays of a fading star.


Notes

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, (Hill and Wang, 1981).

*Both girls were early fans of the Sex Pistols and part of the so-called Bromley Contingent; both worked as sales assistants at Seditionaries; and both were arrested during the Sex Pistols' Jubilee gig on a Thames riverboat. Tracie, however, was the only one to be given a prison sentence (for assaulting a policeman), although she was later acquitted on appeal. Shockingy, she died the following year, from cancer, aged 18.

As for Debbie, she embodied the look and spirit of punk: it was Debbie who sold programmes on the Anarchy in the UK tour and it was Debbie who can be seen singing backing vocals on stage with the Sex Pistols auditioning for a new frontman in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. Post-punk, she apparently drifted into the world of vice. Then she simply disappeared and is presumed dead.  

Intertextuality: Bert & Amy & Ted & Hannah

According to Hannah Roche, poor old Amy Lowell has been rather hard done by and her poetry unfairly neglected by readers and critics in the 21st century.

For according to Dr. Roche, not one but two of the great white males of English literature - Mssrs. Lawrence and Hughes - both borrowed imagery and ideas from her work. The latter in his much-celebrated poem Pike and the former in the sapphic bathing scene in chapter XII of his astonishing novel The Rainbow.
     

It's an interesting argument and anything that stimulates renewed interest in Lowell and her writing is to be welcomed. Having said that, I don't find the textual evidence Roche supplies in support of her argument particularly persuasive. There are certain similarities and echoes, but to speak of influence and an unacknowledged debt is, I think, going too far.

(Nor do I believe her being an overweight lesbian is the reason Lowell isn't considered a major figure within modernism; it has more to do with the fact that her talent was pretty slender.)   

Besides, even if Hughes and Lawrence - who exchanged many letters with Lowell* and considered her to be a very good friend, if a very bad poet - did plagiarise from Amy (and Roche is careful not to use this word and make such a strong claim), so what? 

To paraphrase Picasso, whilst good poets, like good painters, politely borrow from others and subscribe to a bourgeois etiquette founded upon property rights, great artists steal and make ideas their own without apology.

The critic Richard Ellmann sums this up nicely in a passage written in 1967:

"That writers flow into each other like waves, gently rather than tidally, is one of those decorous myths we impose upon a high-handed, even brutal procedure. The behaviour, while not invariably marked by bad temper, is less polite. Writers move upon other writers not as genial successors but as violent expropriators, knocking down established boundaries to seize by the force of youth, or of age, what they require. They do not borrow, they override."

Notes

Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Auden (Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 3.

Hannah Roche, 'Myths, Legends, and Apparitional Lesbians: Amy Lowell's Haunting Modernism', Modernist Cultures, (Sept. 2017). Click here to go to the University of York Research Database from where you can download a copy of this essay.

For a journalistic spin on this issue, see Alison Flood's article 'Amy Lowell: Ted Hughes and D. H. Lawrence "owe unacknowledged debt" to "uncelebrated" poet', The Guardian, (29 Nov. 2108). Click here to read online. 

*See: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence and Amy Lowell, 1914-1925, ed. E. Claire Healy and Keith Cushman, (Black Sparrow Press, 1985). 

Thanks to Dr. Maria Thanassa for providing me with the quotation from Ellmann's book.