On Saints and Satyrs: Why It's Preferable to Have Horns than a Halo

St. Anthony encountering a satyr 

Fresco from the Skete of St. Demetrios, 

the Holy Monastery of Vatopedi, 

Mount Athos, Greece  

I.

Nietzsche cheerfully claims in the Preface to Ecce Homo that he's the very opposite in nature to the kind of individual who has traditionally been regarded as virtuous and that he prides himself on this fact: I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus and I would rather be a satyr than a saint.

He doesn't aim for the moral improvement of humanity or long to see men and women with halos. On the contrary, he'd rather individuals grew horns and found their best strength in the evil that exists as a potency within us (and also a power outside us) over which we have no final control; a potency often thought of in terms of either animality or the daimonic.

Let me expand upon these ideas before, in part two of this post, Dr. Símón Solomon explains why it is that the figure of the saint never quite departs from Nietzsche's text and why his relationship with the holy fool is often ambiguous and perplexing.

II. 

Zarathustra famously says that man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him.

Of course, evil isn't being used here as a moral term. Rather, it refers to a healthy expression of will to power, or what Freud (negatively) terms man's primary hostility - i.e., that which is permeated with a death drive and perpetually threatening chaos and destruction if not mediated by the power of Love.

Nietzsche, however, feels it is Love - or moral idealism - that, in its attempt to negate difference and becoming, is fundamentally nihilistic. He argues that the restrictions placed on man's instinctual life and the frustration of his most active forces ultimately has the effect of weakening him and ensuring the becoming-reactive of these forces.

Marcuse calls this the fatal dialectic of civilization and D. H. Lawrence notes: "We think love and benevolence will cure anything. Where as love and benevolence are our poison." Of course, it's true that man has been made into an interesting animal via this moral poisoning - Nietzsche readily admits this - but so too he has been made sick and full of self-loathing.    

Ultimately, what I'm suggesting here is that if man were allowed to develop a pair of horns, then he'd be stronger and happier - if a little bone-headed - and, as a consequence, superior to the righteous but resentful creature he is today.

Those who wish for men to be saints and have halos above their heads, subscribe to a model of light-headed humanism that, in restricting the desire for power, has created an unhappy species of herd animal that is, to paraphrase Nick Land, sordid, passive, and cowardly.  

Notes

Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1988).

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Penguin Books, 1976), p. 330.

Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, (Beacon Press, 1955). 

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 114.


For a sister post to this one by Símón Solomon, click here.

To See More Clearly Than Ever Before (Notes on The Blue Lenses, by Daphne du Maurier)

"There comes a moment in the life of every individual 

when reality must be faced." 

I.

They say that dog owners gradually begin to resemble their pets, and people smile at the idea.

But what if everyone were to suddenly lose their human features and be seen with the head of the creature that best expresses their inhuman qualities; not so much their true nature, as what might be termed their molecular animality - would we still find this gently amusing?

I suspect not: in all likelihood, initial astonishment would quickly give way to horror, as the writer Daphne du Maurier brilliantly demonstrates in her extraordinary short story 'The Blue Lenses' (1959) ... 

II. 

Marda West is recovering in a nursing-home, following an operation on her eyes. The day has finally arrived for the bandages to be removed and for a pair of blue lenses to be fitted. Her surgeon reassures her that she will see more clearly than ever before.

As someone who has also undergone restorative eye-surgery, I can vouch for Marda's anxious anticipation; the hope that patience would be rewarded at last; the fear that the anonymity of darkness will continue. To see again, is to be born again. To rediscover the wonder of the world in all its glamourous objecthood: a wardrobe, a chair, a wash-basin, a window, a vase full of flowers ...             

"The dim light caused by the blue lenses enhanced the charm, the softness of all she saw. It seemed to her, rejoicing in form and shape, that colour would never matter."

What does concern Mrs. West, however, is the fact that her nurse, has the head of a cow! The head of a cow - with wide horns, large eyes, and broad nostrils - atop the uniformed body of a woman, carrying a tray with a glass of milk.

She thinks at first that Nurse Brand must be wearing an animal mask - but, no, she isn't. And nor is her surgeon wearing a mask when he comes into the room with a dog's head, ears pricked, and looking as if he might at any moment begin to yap and wag his tail. Marda begins to laugh at the absurdity of the situation.

However, when she looks down the corridor leading from her room and sees that everyone is in on the deception (as she believes it to be) - including a weasel-headed maid and a pig-headed porter - then "the first sharp prick of fear came to Marda West."

Bovine Nurse Brand leads her back to bed and gives her a sedative. But when she wakes up, things remain just as queer. She finds reassurance in the fact that the inanimate objects of her room have remained what they were: the chair is still a chair, not a mushroom; the table is still a table, not a haystack; and there is nothing false about the carnations, as fragrant and as graceful as always.

But the people have all become-animal: Nurse Sweeting is a kitten; Matron is mutton-headed in every sense of the term. "Why was it only people had changed? What was so wrong with people?"   

Marda decides that, either she has gone insane, or it's the lenses that must be to blame; they were faulty in some way and creating an optical illusion. Or magical, and bestowing upon her some kind of hypervision. And yet why then had her own face remained unchanged in the mirror? They had to be wearing masks; masks designed by some genius mask-maker "that merged with the body, blending fabric to skin" - for there was no obvious join to be seen.    

She awaited the arrival of her favourite nurse, Nurse Ansel, the bewitching night-nurse. She trusted Nurse Ansel above all others; Nurse Ansel wouldn't lie to her. It was quite a shock then when Nurse Ansel entered her room and slid slowly into view - with the head of a snake on a long, twisting neck: "Marda West felt sickness rise in her stomach, choking her ..." 

And she knew that what she saw was real: but it was real with the reality of evil. Thus, it's not coincidental that Deleuze and Guattari speak of man's becoming-animal as a demonic process that challenges the idea of human being as something essential. Nurse Ansel didn't resemble a snake and she wasn't identifying as a one; she was a viper.

However we choose to describe it, du Maurier's tale is not simply an imaginative fantasy and she, like D. H. Lawrence, is "another of the writers who leave us troubled and filled with admiration" precisely because she was able to tie her work to "real and unheard of becomings". Hers is a genuinely black art.*      

Marda awaits her husband. Naively, she thinks he will save her from the waking nightmare in which she finds herself. But husband Jim, for all his familiar trappings - umbrella and bowler hat - now has the unmistakable head of a vulture:" The brooding eye, the blood-tipped beak, the flabby folds of flesh." Seeing the vulture and the serpent-nurse in conversation together, she knows that they are intimate and in collusion against her: "The two communicated in silence, sympathy between them."

In a fabulous passage, du Maurier reveals Marda West's fears of what horror is yet to come: would the bodies begin to change too, "hands and feet becoming wings, claws, hoofs, paws, with no touch of humanity left to the people about her"? And what about Jim's steady and reassuring voice? "When the human voice went, there would be no hope." Then she would be all alone, surrounded by the savage cruelty of beasts on all sides, making their jungle noises and cries.  

Marda decides she has to escape. And so she creeps out of the nursing-home in the middle of the night, passed the fish-faced night-porter, and out on to familiar streets of central London. But alas, there is no escape for the woman with the blue lenses:   

"When she came to Oxford Street she paused, wondering of a sudden where she should go, whom she could ask for refuge. And it came to her once again that there was no one at all [...] No one was human, no one was safe [...] Down Oxford Street she ran [...] the night all darkness and shadow, the light no longer with her, alone in an animal world."

This is the breaking point for Marda West: the moment when the link between emotion and reason is stretched to the point beyond endurance, and something snaps. Of course, this isn't as rare as people think - and you don't need to see the people around you suddenly transformed into beasts.

Indeed, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote twenty years earlier: All life is a process of breaking down ... One that combines big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside with blows from within that you don't feel until it's too late (i.e., until you realise with finality that in some regard you'll never be the same person again).**

Having evidently collapsed in the street, Marda wakes up back in the nursing-home. The porter, she's told, had luckily decided to follow her and was there when she needed him.

The blue lenses had been removed and replaced with another pair that enable her not only to see the world in colour, but as it was - as it should be - fully human and free from animal-headed monsters. The doctors reassure her all will now be well; they talk about a trapped optical nerve or some such thing as having caused her terrible ordeal.

Nurse Ansel was there to hold her hand and to smile at her with understanding. Marda admires her hazel eyes, clear olive skin, and beautiful dark hair: "How could she have seen Nurse Ansel as a snake!" She was so pretty, so gentle - a woman whose very presence promised friendship and loyalty.

All, then, was well, as the sun came "streaming through the window, throwing light on the roses, the lilies, the tall-stemmed iris". Even the hum of traffic outside sounded friendly. "Instead of darkness, light. Instead of negation, life."

But of course, this being a horror story - which is to say, true to the transparence du mal that shines through the moment you rub the surface of the world too hard, in a vain attempt to make it ever-more ideal - it doesn't end here ...   

Marda West decides to apply her face-cream and powder and to paint her lips; to dab some scent behind her ears:

"The fragrance filtered, becoming part of the warm, bright day. She lifted the hand-mirror and looked into it. Nothing changed in the room, the street noises penetrated from outside, and presently the little maid who had seemed a weasel yesterday came in to dust the room.She said, 'Good morning', but the patient did not answer. Perhaps she was tired. The maid dusted, and went her way.
      Then Marda West took up the mirror and looked into it once more. No, she had not been mistaken. The eyes that stared back at her were doe's eyes, wary before sacrifice, and the timid deer's head was meek, already bowed."

And that, gentle readers, is just about the most perfect ending to a near-perfect short story that you could ever ask for.

Notes

Daphne du Maurier, 'The Blue Lenses', The Breaking Point, (Virago Press, 2009), pp. 44-82. All lines quoted and paraphrased above are from this edition.  

* Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996), p. 244. 

** F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'The Crack-Up', in The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories, (Penguin Books, 1965), p. 39.   

On Opening Heaven and Hell: A Boxing Day Post Dedicated to a Secular Saint, by Símón Solomon

You pays your money and you takes your choice ...

I.

While it's probably safe to say that the philosopher Stephen Alexander is not en route to canonisation any time soon, the presiding presence of Torpedo the Ark may forgive me for divulging to his readers that he once indirectly referred to himself as Harold Hill's first secular saint.

Thus, on this day of all days, we wanted to pay our own deconsecrated tribute from across the Irish Sea to this prodigiously stylish, provocative and gifted writer, from whom - despite the prevailing disembodiment of the friendship in recent years - we continue to take much fractious inspiration and sometimes antagonistic pleasure, and to whose deliciously idiosyncratic platform we are delighted to be able to contribute as Gastautor and commentator on a (semi-)regular basis.

Stephen, though your name may never be dedicated to divinity (or even up in the lights we often feel you deserve), we hope that the pious vessel in your sights will be repeatedly holed but not wholly blown out of the water, lest TtA one day exhaust its irreverent purpose ...


II.

Though much of the detail of his namesake's biography is overlaid by theological propaganda, our main Biblical source for the historical St. Stephen, viz., the Acts of the Apostles, places him as a notable Hellenistic Jew tasked in his role as archdeacon with a fairer distribution of welfare to Greek-speaking widows. At the same time, with his practised penchant for signs and wonders, he was also said to have excelled in the rather attention-seeking art of enacting miracles, which quickly aroused the interest of the Synagogue of the Libertines, the Cyrenians and the Alexandrinians.

Clearly, there was only one way such subversive street theatre was going to end ...

As is the case with any saint worth his or her (pillar of) salt, the manner of Stephen's death infinitely transcends the significance of his foreshortened life. Accordingly, and in the traditional fashion, although it appears that he may just have missed out on early membership of the 27 Club, his timeless demise, as protomartyr of at least six denominations of the Christian church, was not lacking in gruesome glamour. 

Following blasphemy charges trumped up by the usual suspects, in which he stood accused of crimes against God, Moses and, more importantly, the Sanhedrin Assembly, Stephen's knockdown reminder while on trial that the chosen people had crucified the Son of God and less than life-preserving echoes of Christ's prophecies concerning the destruction of the Second Temple hardly screamed of an overwhelming desire to keep body and soul together.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his self-evident impatience to meet his Maker, however, Stephen himself was reportedly equanimous before his judges, with one report likening his countenance to that of an angel. Sentenced to the Biblical cliché of death by stoning, he faced the rock-wielding mob with prayers for his murderers and a divine vision to boot, rapturously declaring (in what was presumably not a piece of holy misdirection to facilitate a cunning escape) that he had 'seen heaven open and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God!'

In Christian iconography, the St. Stephen is frequently depicted for obvious reasons with three stones, while holding a palm frond (signifying victory over the flesh) and a copy of the Gospels. Those to whom his patronage now extends comprise a hilarious miscellany that includes deacons, bricklayers, stonemasons, casket makers, people with headaches, and ... horses!


III.

In Ireland, St. Stephen's Day has also been known as Day of the Wren [Lá an Dreoilín]. In what appears to have been a ritual of atonement, groups of wren boys with painted faces would hunt and stone a wren to death, then tie the birds corpse to a holly stick and parade it through the streets, while a nominated hunter collected coins. Among numerous variants of the Wren Boys’ song, alluding to this act of ornithological regicide, one runs:

The wren, the wren, the king of all birds, 
On Saint Stephen's Day was caught in the furze, 
Although he is little, his family is great. 
I pray you, good landlady, give us a treat.

In its Celtic lineage, the associated myth derived from a Samhain sacrifice, in which the wren was connected with midwinter song and the dying year, and may also have been entangled with Druidic rituals. The Welsh warrior and magician Lleu Llaw Gyffes reputedly gained his (etymologically contested) name by killing a wren. On the Isle of Man, meanwhile, the hunted wren is an avatar of the shapeshifting queen of the fairies, Tehi Tegi, who was said to have drowned her suitors in the river and then turned herself into one to evade capture.

Among both the Norse and Christian traditions, the wren's association with treachery is likewise strikingly emphasised, in which one highly poetic legend conveys that, during the 8th-century Viking raids, as a troop of Irish soldiers entered an enemy camp under cover of darkness, the micropercussion of a wren nibbling breadcrumbs on a drum woke the sleeping warriors, leading to the invaders' rout.

In the case of St. Stephen, the story runs that, while attempting to conceal himself on the cusp of death - for it seems even martyrs, like Bee Gees, are not after all wholly indifferent to staying alive - his hiding place was revealed by a chattering wren.

For us, the way such symbolic narratives sew betrayal into the tapestry of these archetypal matrices of love and war, of soul and death, provides a kind of cold comfort at this chilly time of year, restoring the psyche to its sacrificial self-exposures, demanding our hunger for transcendence dance with deception, and darkening our enthusiasms.

The ecstasy of St. Stephen reminds us, whether we find our faith in God’s death or eternal life, of the art of dying as a summons to visionary existence. We know St. Stephen of Harold Hill is enduring his own considerable sacrifices now and we wish him every strength of spirit for the year to come, as well as much power to his writing elbow.

Author's Notes

For an Irish perspective on St. Stephen, see Rosita Boland's article in The Irish Times entitled 'A martyr whose day is set in stone', (24 Dec 2010): click here.

For further Biblical background, see the entry on St. Stephen in the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia: click here.

And on the Irish Day of the Wren, see Rose Eveleth's article in The Smithsonian Magazine, entitled 'The Irish Used to Celebrate the Day After Christmas by Killing Wrens' (26 Dec 2012): click here.    

Finally, readers will doubtless recall Stephen Alexander's own controversial post on this topic published on Torpedo the Ark (26 Dec 2013), entitled It's My Name Day (And I'll Decry If I Want To). 


Editor's Notes

Simon Solomon is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and serves as a managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He blogs at (and can be contacted via) simonsolomon.ink

Simon appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm.

Of Parasitic Heads and Archaic Torsos: In Memory of Islaam Maged (A Guest Post by Simon Solomon)

My frail and breaking sister 

I hold these memories in my aching arms.

I. The Numen of the Part-Human

In shifting horror into black humour with a splash of compassion, a dash of French theory, and a dollop of autobiography for good measure, the ingredients of Stephen Alexander's recent post concerning the terrible and strangely beautiful case of the fused Egyptian twins Manar and Islaam left us humanely stirred and poetically shaken. We are thus grotesquely grateful for this tragicomic Yuletide offering.

Given the acute rarity of this condition, Manar is apparently the only child to have survived - at least temporarily - her own beheading. Nevertheless, it is the role of her bodiless sister-fragment, the sacrificed Islaam, to which we feel peculiarly drawn. As might be surmised, the unstable ambivalence toward it/her attests to the undecidable mixture of uncanny in/humanity with which one looks upon such stupendously rare entities - or they upon us.

If Islaam was quite literally nobody, this apparently did not stop her from eliciting her sister's mortifying sibling attachment, as well as the love of her family. To that end, after she had been surgically removed from the autosite, she was given proper burial rites by her parents, who, to all intents and purposes, clearly viewed Islaam as a tiny child and not merely a genetic obscenity or clinical remnant.

However, whilst a functioning separate brain ensured that Islaam had a mind of her own, one doesn't need to be a doctor to see that, having no possibility of bodily autonomy, she would have been entirely incapable of a viable life. Moreover, since it appears that her continued existence might have exerted a toxic and ultimately lethal drain on Manar's well-being (in the weeks before surgery, for example, the latter suffered several episodes of heart failure due to Islaam, rotting alive with gangrene, channelling waste back into their her body), a decisive intervention was clinically crucial to save the hostess.

While it might seem luridly sentimental to some readers to interrogate such medical expedients, let alone mourn a lethal parasite, Islaam's identification and death rites nevertheless point to the way in which the ownership of a head (whether or not it comes with arms, legs and a beating heart to complete the ensemble) secures a human destiny. There would appear to be no way, one might say, of resisting the urge to put a name to a face ...

II. Of Rilke, Radiance and Sculpture (Or the Terrible Beauty of Being Born)

Islaam's haunting posthumous image - a dead head resting upon the failed promise of a noble breast - put me in mind of Rilke's famous ekphrastic poem, 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' (1908), written in the aftermath of his reverberating association with the sculptor Auguste Rodin, for whom he worked as a secretary during 1905-6.

The poet's charged visits to the Louvre, where he viewed the ancient sculpture, were the cultural departure point for his phenomenological exploration of aesthetic distance vis-à-vis classical fragments, in which the object, under Rilke’s modernist gaze, more than merely taking its Baudrillardian revenge, gleamed with its own radiant and transformative life:

We have not known the unconscionable head 

nor its eyes' ripening apples. And yet the star- 

cold torso burns still like a chandelier, 

in which his glances gleam and abide,

cut back merely. Else the bow of the breast 

could not deceive you and no smile join 

to the shifting softness of the loins 

toward their procreative centre, their phallic absence.

Else the stone might stand disfigured and dwarfed 

below the shoulders, diaphanous,
not glister like a bloodied hawk,

nor pour through all its contours, 

since, like the panoptical sun, there is no place 

it does not see you. Change my life, yours. 

- Trans. S. Solomon

If, as Rilke famously claimed, beauty is the beginning of terror, we would turn his poetic equation on its head: it is the terrible that initiates us into the beautiful.

Thus, as we read it, Rilke's sonnet commemorates the luminous power of creation's disappearance: the way what is not, what is missing, what has broken off or crumbled to dust, charges and animates an artistic composition with numinous power, to the point of ultimately driving the modern mind into a state of psychic rearrangement.

As the solar god of poetic music, Apollo is all-seeing like the sun. But he is also a god of dreams, appearance and illusion. Art, therefore, is inherently treacherous; as implied by Rilke's deployment of the verb blenden (to 'blind', to 'dazzle', or 'deceive') to describe the lucent charisma of the ancient relic.

The sacred head was, or is now, unerhört - ‘outrageous’, ‘scandalous’, ‘tremendous’. Like the sun itself, the head of a god, Rilke tells us, is something we could not have borne; now, sightlessly reborn, it is the torso instead that, literally and metaphorically, takes us in. This mystical antique is, in effect, a kind of headless hallucination, a decapitated game-changer. An acephalic Apollo inserts a rent in the rational.

III. With all Earth for a Body: The Afterlife of Islaam

If the name Islaam translates as 'the will of God', we can reinterpret its bearer as directed by a pure vector of fate, the expressive silence of cosmic necessity. (Islaam's head was literally unerhört, unheard, since she could not make sounds, though she could apparently blink, cry and smile.)

The poetic question is whether it is sentimental to mourn a part object, or whether there is a play to be staged about a human bloodsucker that was literally no more than a pretty face. In viewing Islaam's death as an event and not merely the rational operation of a clinical machine, we are returned to an immanent a/logic of sacrifice, a lucent horror incarnated by an impossible object - 'impossible' in the sense of being unable to sustain itself, to offer mortal satisfaction, or to entertain a future beyond its urgent expenditure.

Islaam's irremediable fate, in exemplary terms, was to die that another might live, to stitch the decision of death like a phantom skull into the remaking of a consanguineous body. As such, we would argue, her separation is the inseparable operation that signals the possibility of the sacred.

Remembering the stillborn lamb and its hacked-off head in Ted Hughes's astonishing poem 'February 17th', we fantasise about Islaam's caput mortuum placed on a burial mound, 'its pipes sitting in the mud, / With all earth for a body'. Or under the ground, where the roots of plants might lend the dead head the push of organic limbs and the soil pack her bones with black flesh.

But she was the gift to whom only death could be given; like the fire of Antigone, or a baby Christ. What Rilke memorably described as 'all the shame of having a face' was never less shameful, never more strange.


Author's Notes

The epigraph beneath the image of Manar and Islaam is taken from Paula Meehan's poem 'The Lost Twin', which can be found in her collection Dharmakaya, (Carcanet Press, 2000). 

For two alternative translations of Rilke's sonnet Archäischer Torso Apollos, by Sarah Stutt, and an interesting discussion of the work by Carol Rumens in her Guardian column (15 Nov 2010), please click here.

This post is dedicated to my sister, Lisa Thomas.


Editor's Notes

Simon Solomon is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and serves as a managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He blogs at (and can be contacted via) simonsolomon.ink

Simon appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm. I am very grateful for his submission of this twin text to my own attempt to discuss the case of Manar (and Islaam) Maged, entitled Heads You Lose and published on 23 Dec 2018 - and grateful also for his kind permission to slightly edit the post.  

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.