The Silver-Studded Blue Butterfly Post

If there's one thing I love almost as much (perhaps even more) than a blue flower, it's a blue butterfly: from the smallest of small blues to the largest of large blues, and including the common blue, holly blue and the brilliant Adonis blue, I find them all extraordinarily beautiful to behold (even if only ever seen in photographs).    

I think my favourite, however, is the silver-studded blue (Plebejus argus), found gaily dancing amongst the heather during the long summer months and befriending the black ants that protect their eggs and larval young. Although the females are far less splendid than the male - blueness giving way to a drab brown colour - they do retain the distinct silver spots on their hindwings.

Of course, numbers of both sexes have undergone a major decline during recent decades across most of its (restricted) range in the UK, thanks to all the usual causes; habitat loss, agricultural practice, landscape development, etc.
  

This, to me at least, is a genuinely depressing fact. I really don't think I would want to live in a world without blue butterflies, blue flowers, blue birds, and what Lawrence terms the blueness of the Greater Day that, in a sense, these things embody and symbolise, existing as they do beyond the everyday beauty of things that belong solely to the yellow sun.  

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Flying-Fish', Appendix II, St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 

For a sister post on the blue flower, click here.

The Blue Flower Post

I.

Even though some floraphiles like to parade their knowledge of its modern Latin name - derived from the Greek terms mēkōn and opsis - and insist that the Himalyan blue poppy is not a true poppy at all, it's always been one of my favourite flowers and there's surely no denying the beauty (and authenticity) of its colour. 

In fact, I'm very fond of all blue flowers - from the palest of pale forget-me-nots and delicate little alpine plants that glory in the snow, to those large Bavarian gentians that Lawrence described as darkening the day with a smoky-blueness belonging to the underworld.   


II.

Simon says all this reveals the Romantic aspect of my character. And perhaps he's right: for the Romantics were certainly enchanted by die blaue Blumen and gave it crucial symbolic meaning within their aesthetics and wider philosophy.

Novalis, for example, the 18th-century German poet and mystic who preached a Liebesreligion based on his reading of Fichte, used the symbol of the blue flower in his unfinished novel entitled Heinrich von Ofterdingen based on the life of the fabled Middle High German poet of that name.

In the book, the blue flower betokens man's metaphysical striving for the infinite whilst also symbolising the importance of remaining true to the natural world, for, according to Novalis, the development of the human self - and the ideas and emotions experienced by that self - is also a form of miraculous flowering. 

III.

Having conceded my own Romanticism, it's important to note that, ultimately, I'm not a Romantic; that I am, in fact, anti-Romantisch. I wouldn't go so far as to shout: Schlagt die Germanistik tot, färbt die blaue Blume rot!, but I agree with Walter Benjamin that it's become impossible to share the intense longing for transcendence that marked the true Romantic, or remain an uncritical devotee of the blue flower (as a symbol, not as an actual blossom).         

As Benjamin nicely noted: "No one really dreams any longer of the Blue Flower. Whoever awakes as Heinrich von Ofterdingen today must have overslept."

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Bavarian Gentians', The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 610-11. This verse can be read online by clicking here. 

Friedrich von Hardenberg, (aka Novalis), Heinrich von Ofterdingen, unfinished work written in 1800 and first published a year after his death in 1802. An English translation of this work is available to read as a Project Gutenberg eBook by clicking here.   

Walter Benjamin, 'Dream Kitsch', in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others, (Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 236. Click here to read the essay online. 

For a sister post on the silver-studded blue butterfly, click here.

His Bowels Did Yearn Upon His Brother (Notes on Ganymede, by Daphne du Maurier)

Zeus küsst Ganymed (1758)

Fresco by Anton Raphael Mengs and Giovanni Casanova.*

(Palazzo Corsini, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome.)

I. 

One of the distinguishing traits of the true pervert is that they have a very active imagination, one that is often informed as much by classical scholarship as by their sexual proclivities. They never quite see the world as it is, or the people in it - including themselves - as they are. They have what Lawrence terms glimpses. That is to say, they see in the faces and forms of young adolescents something divine as well as erotically fascinating:

[...] when lads and girls are not thinking,

when they are pure, which means when they are quite clean from self-consciousness,

either in anger or tenderness, or desire or sadness or wonder or mere stillness,

you may see glimpses of the gods in them.    

- D. H. Lawrence, 'All sorts of gods'

Thus it is that when the fastidious academic who is the narrator of Daphne du Maurier's third tale in her astonishing collection The Breaking Point (1959) goes on holiday to Italy, he quickly finds himself besotted with a youth and in a whole heap of trouble ...

II.

Arriving in Venice, our anonymous protagonist immediately feels as if he has entered an extratemporal space "outside the rest of Europe and even the world". This was Venice as an electrifying inner experience rather than actual location on a map. One that existed, magically, for him and for others who shared his tastes and were susceptible to the same secret enchantment. 

His excitement as he strolls the streets was "intense, almost unbearable", but it's as nothing compared to the moment when he first sees a young waiter, aged "about fifteen, not more", working at a café on the piazza:

"I told you I was a classical scholar. Therefore you will understand - you should understand - that was happened in that second was transformation. The electricity that had charged me all evening focused on a single point in my brain to the exclusion of all else; the rest of me was jelly. I could sense the man at my table raise his hand and summon the lad in the white coat carrying a tray [...] and this self who was non-existent knew with every nerve fibre, every brain-cell, every blood corpuscle that he was indeed Zeus, the giver of life and death, the immortal one, the lover; and that the boy who came towards him was his own beloved, his cup-bearer, his slave, Ganymede. I was  poised, not in the body, not in the world, and I summoned him. He knew me, and he came. 

      Then it was all over. The tears were pouring down my face and I heard a voice saying, 'Is anything wrong, signore?'"

It's significant how quickly he persuades himself that the blue-eyed boy is fully aware of the strange scene unfolding between them; how when the latter gives a smile and a little bow after the bill has been paid, the former takes this as a sign of Ganymede's knowing complicity.

The next night, he returns to the café and this time the glimpse goes beyond the first instantaneous flash:

"I could feel the chair of gold, and the clouds above my head, and the boy was kneeling beside me, and the cup he offered me was gold as well. His humility was not the shamed humility of a slave, but the reverence of a loved one to his master, to his god." 

The pursuit - the grooming - of Ganymede continues, despite an early premonition of danger; indeed, doesn't danger merely add spice to the game for an illicit lover? Of course, the affair quickly turns sour as reality begins to intrude: Ganymede is actually a very ordinary boy, of whom one could not expect too much, more interested in the latest rock 'n' roll records than he is in Shakespearean sonnets.

Just as well then, since he was bound to disappoint, that Ganymede is killed in a water-skiing accident. He may have been "beautiful as an angel from heaven", but he would soon have grown fat, grown ugly, grown old.

Besides, whilst the accident had been terrible - "a mass of churning water, of tangled rope, of sudden, splintering wood", and the young body of Ganymede drawn into the suction of the speedboat's propeller blades, turning the sea crimson with his blood - the horror soon passes and one comes to accept even the unfortunate consequences of such an affair, such as being forced to resign from one's job.   

At least that's true for du Maurier's cultured paedophile in this tragic tale. Having lost his old life and old friends and colleagues, having moved to a different part of town (the area near Paddington known as Little Venice), he happily adapts to a new regime of existence. At seven o'clock each evening, for example, he goes to his favourite local restaurant:

"The fact is, the boy who is training there as a waiter celebrates his fifteenth birthday this evening, and I have a little present for him. Nothing very much, you understand - I don't believe in spoiling these lads - but it seems there is a singer called Perry Como much in favour amongst the young. I have the latest record here. He likes bright colours, too - I rather thought this blue and gold cravat might catch his eye ..."  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'All sorts of gods', The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 579. 

Daphne du Maurier, 'Ganymede', The Breaking Point, (Virago Press, 2009), pp. 83-123. All lines quoted and paraphrased above are from this edition. 

*Amusingly, the work was an imitation of an ancient Roman fresco, created to fool the famous archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, well-known for his interest in pederasty.

For a sister post to this one on du Maurier's tale 'The Blue Lenses', also in The Breaking Point, click here. 

On Miracles and Absolute Contingency in the Work of Daphne du Maurier and Quentin Meillassoux

I.

The opening tale of Daphne du Maurier's astonishing and disturbing collection of short stories entitled The Breaking Point (1959), is not so much a whodunnit as a who did what and reveals what she describes as "the lovely duplicity of a secret life" [22] and it's potential for tragedy.

But, whilst the latter is a fascinating notion - explored at length by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray - what really caught my interest is the moment of revelation at the very beginning of the story when James Fenton realises that miracles can happen at any moment and dramatically mark the end of one's old life. This liberating thought had never come to him before:

"It was as though something had clicked in his brain [...] time had ceased [...] everything had changed [...] he had stepped out of bondage into a new dimension." [2-3]

What's more, Fenton feels himself strangely empowered, as if he had become a miracle-worker himself; i.e., an instrument of fate capable of altering the lives of strangers with a single gesture, be it a random act of kindness, or one of sadistic cruelty.


II.

In some ways, it's nice to know that miracles, far from being rare or unusual, are actually the natural unfolding of things and events and can not only happen at any time, but are, in fact, happening all of the time. For one thing, it releases us from the grip of absolute necessity or what's known within philosophical circles as the principle of sufficient reason (i.e., the metaphysical insistence that the world is at is with good cause and could only be as it is).  

To think in terms of miracles, the unfolding of fate, and what Quentin Meillassoux terms unreason, is to enter a world of absolute contingency in which there is no reason for anything to be as it is or to remain so; everything - including the laws that govern the world - could be otherwise:

"Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing." [53]

For Meillassoux, this is the only absolute: a kind of hyper-chaos that du Maurier, at the point of breakdown - when reality must be faced - discovered for herself. Thus, when her protagonists suddenly step outside the gate, what they encounter is:

"a rather menacing power - something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses [...] a power with neither goodness nor wisdom, ill-disposed to reassure thought about the veracity of its distinct ideas." [64]

Further, whilst conventional time ceases, they observe something akin to it - an uncanny form of time that is:

"inconceivable for physics, since it is capable of destroying without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity [...] even God. This is not a Heraclitean time, since it is not the eternal law of becoming, but rather the eternal and lawless possible becoming of every law. It is a time capable of destroying even becoming itself by bringing forth, perhaps forever, fixity, stasis, and death.” [64]

Notes

Daphne du Maurier, 'The Alibi', in The Breaking Point, (Virago Press, 2009).

Quentin Meillassoux, After Infinity, trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2009).

For a semi-related post to this one on miracles understood from a Deleuzean perspective in terms of the fold, click here.

A Brief Note on How Miracles Unfold as a Form of Cosmic Origami

A miracle is an object or event that not only obliges us to reflect with wonder upon phenomena that seemingly transgress or suspend natural and scientific laws, but has a radically transformative effect upon our lives.

Although often attributed to a deity or demon, I prefer to think of miracles without agency and as part of a materialist metaphysics vaguely based upon Deleuze's work on the potential of things to differ from themselves.

In other words, I conceive of miracles as:

(i) A fateful inward folding of the outside ...

Like Deleuze, I regard the entire universe as an origamic process of folding and unfolding that creates an interior that is a doubling of the outside, rather than something that develops autonomously and separately from that which is external to it.

And this is true also, one might note, of the way in which the self is formed; the concept of the fold allowing Deleuze to think not only about the production of human subjectivity in a non-essential manner, but also about inhuman possibilities of becoming. 

(ii) A momentary actualisation of virtual chaos that shatters the parameters of the everyday, thereby allowing all things - good and evil - to become possible ...

To think of miracles only in terms of what benefits mankind or as the work of a heavenly Father, is a laughable mix of anthropocentric conceit and moral stupidity. Ultimately, the great advantage of thinking in terms of the miraculous and loving fate is that one no longer has to believe in such a loving God or subscribe to a model of sentimental humanism.


Note: readers interested in this area of Deleuze's work might like to see The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, (University of Minnesota Press, 1992) and 'Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivation)', the final section of Foucault, trans. and ed. by Seán Hand, (The Athlone Press, 1988).

Reflections on a Rose and a New Year's Resolution

SA/2019

New Year's Day: the world of my little garden forever undying. Roses, stained with the blood of Aphrodite, bloom and make happy. Sometimes, I think it would be nice to remain alone with the flowers and do nothing but quietly reflect upon their perfection.

But then, after a few minutes, I realise that not only is such a life impossible, it's also undesirable; that one's main duty as a Lawrentian floraphile is to actively shelter the rose of life from being trampled on by the pigs.      

Thus, in 2019, I resolve to "go out into the world again, to kick it and stub my toes. It is no good my thinking of retreat: I rouse up and feel I don't want to. My business is a fight, and I've got to keep it up." 

In other words, I shall continue in my attempts to torpedo the ark ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Risen Lord', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 271. 

D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), Letter 4034, to Earl Brewster (28 May, 1927), pp. 71-73.  

All of My Life is All I'll Give You: Un/Holy Reflections on the Case of St. Nietzsche (A Guest Post by Símón Solomon)

Nietzsche Icon from Ryan Haecker's 
blog Transhuman Traditionalism 

I.

'How is negation of the will possible? How is the saint possible? This really seems to have been the question that started Schopenhauer off and made him into a philosopher.'

- Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, §47 

In concert with these Kantian-looking questions, Nietzsche conjoins his taskmaster in tragic aesthetics, so that, guilty by association, Schopenhauer's questions become Nietzsche's questions too. That they are also two questions he collapses into one yields, in effect, a pseudo-singularity that differs from itself. To insert ourselves between them, to read Nietzsche against himself by insisting on their analytical separability, we must therefore ask:

(i) What if sainthood were not only the personification of the will's renunciation?

(ii) What if martyrdom were something other, something stranger, than the instincts' resentful atrophy?

(iii) Might the saint even be that inculpable being, incorruptibly defenceless, who is innervated by a god?


II.

'Up to now the most powerful people have still bowed reverently before the saint, as the riddle of self-conquest and of intentional final sacrifice. Why did they bow? In him they sensed - and, so to speak, behind the question mark of his fragile and lamentable appearance - the superior strength which wished to test itself in such a victory, the fortitude of the will, in which they knew how to recognise and honour their own fortitude and pleasure in mastery once more.'

- Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, §51

In this exemplary aphorism, Nietzsche bears witness to the figure of the saint as a kind of limit-figure, in which the ascetic ideal - the nadir of the slavish revolt against which he stockpiles his anti-Christian dynamite - folds back upon itself into a mystical spectacle of the will to power. We might think here of Jung's crucial insight that les extrêmes se touchent; an observation that further demands Nietzsche be received as the ground-breaking psychologist he claimed himself to be, presenting as he is an early object lesson in the psychodynamics of projection. 'They were honouring something in themselves', he discerns, 'when they venerated the saint'.

Or, as Zarathustra declared, 'You want to create the world before which you can kneel: this is your ultimate hope and intoxication'.

Just as Rudolf Otto identified terror and fascination as the two drivers of religious awe, such overmastered reverence conceals, on Nietzsche’s diagnosis, a diabolical distrust: a hermeneutics of suspicion avant la lettre freudienne. What the men of power learned from this 'monster of denial' and unnatural contrarian was thus a new kind of dread, a new fear of power's self-overcoming.

In other words, they encountered in the saint a kind of fiend or force field, an unsurpassable adversary, atrociously empowered by 'a burning eye in a body half destroyed' [Human All Too Human, §141]. The will now bore a power that brought them, the non-saints, to a standstill. If the saint was a question mark, as Nietzsche tells us, whom they felt compelled to question, its crook sent back no echo.

In Tears and Saints, the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran offers the stirring speculation that 'Nietzsche’s greatest merit is that he knew how to defend himself from saintliness. What would have become of him had he let loose his natural impulses? He would have been a Pascal with all the saints’ madnesses.'

Of course, a wholly undefended Nietzsche would still have been Nietzsche, but for Cioran a Pascal-pacified Nietzsche, the Pascal Nietzsche envisioned as 'profound, wounded and monstrous' [Beyond Good And Evil, §45] and who antedated Wagner alongside Schopenhauer as one half of the four couples who did not refuse him, the sacrificer, in his 'descent into Hades' [Human All Too Human II, §408].


III.

As to the demono-maniacal Nietzsche's infamous sign-off in Ecce Homo, 'Dionysus against the Crucified', was what defeated him what also broke his youthful Lieblingsdichter, the mad poet Hölderlin: the monotheistic cult of the Cross plunging into the imperishable circus of the Greeks that revolved around it eternally? The image of the Bacchic Jesus, the horned Christ, is a demonic thought, truly beyond good and evil.

Nietzsche may not have been a Christian, or, perhaps, was a kind of mortified Christian - 'a man whom the grace of God has not touched’ as Eric Voegelin described him - but nor was he simply a nostalgic pagan, a satyr of the wine-god: the god of ecstatic dissonance, of wine, women and tears.

As Rouven J. Steeves has noted, Nietzsche was not unambiguously 'against' Christianity, or laying siege to the Nazarene with the sorcery of Greek ecstasy. Rather, as something 'even more primordial', his agon channelled the free spirit of Luther via Pascal, mingled with his self-styled Dionysus as a creative principle of life, to become a kind of Jobian Prometheus - an anti-ass, a world-historical beast, a fire-breathing Anti-Christ.

'Dionysus against the Crucified' signals, we suggest, a kind of divine double-crossing, an impossible authorship: a Dionysus crucified; the dying Christ dionyised. The German gegen, however can also signify 'towards': Dionysus towards the Crucified. And toward the end, Nietzsche signed himself as the Crucified One ...

In the German language, weinen and wein, tears and wine, share a common root. Drinking and dying are given together for those who dare to speak with a forked tongue, before they are driven mad. Here is the close of Nietzsche’s pious and tormented 1863 schoolboy poem, 'Before the Crucifix'.


On the floor lay a coin,
corroded and minted
with the devil’s hand and blow,
what it costs eternally, in heaven and on earth,
the soul hanging on the cross,
and, sunk deep in sin and lust,
thinking itself holy
that must yet be damned.


Author's Notes

E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. I. Zarifopol-Johnston, (University of Chicago Press, 1998). 

E. Cyblulska, 'Nietzsche Contra God: A Battle Within', Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, vol. 16 (1-2 October, 2016), pp. 1–12 (online).

C. Kerényi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, trans. R. Manheim, (Princeton University Press, 1976).

R. J. Steeves, 'Dionysus versus the Crucified: Nietzsche and Voegelin and the Search for a Truthful Order', in Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition, ed. L. Trepanier and S. F. McGuire (University of Missouri, 2011), pp. 108-136.

E. Voegelin, 'Nietzsche and Pascal', Nietzsche-Studien, vol. 25(1), pp.128-171. 


Editor's Notes

Símón 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

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

To read a sibling post by Stephen Alexander, on why it's preferable to have horns rather than a halo, click here.  

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.