On Why the Language That Speaks Us as Children Matters

A young child revealed by nature

I.

The language that we dwell within is of crucial importance. 

For ultimately, such language speaks us, as Heidegger famously noted.* In other words, language mediates the existential unfolding or disclosedness of Dasein. 

Further, in as much as our actions are determined via linguistic categories, language is also in a very real sense world-creating. It certainly does more than merely represent the world, or communicate ideas. Language makes things possible; including the magical space/time of childhood.

II.

One of the most alarming chapters in Isabella Tree's recent book relates not to the destruction of the British countryside and the wildlife thereof over the last fifty years, but to what she refers to as the extinction of childhood experience in terms of the natural world.

Echoing the concerns of Margaret Atwood and Andrew Motion, she reminds us of how the editors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary have set about replacing words including acorn, buttercup, and conker with terms such as attachment, blog and chat room.** Whilst this obviously reflects a "shift in children's perceptions and activities over the past few decades", it might also help explain why so many young people seem so fucked-up today.   

For according to the author, much that is troublesome in their behaviour is rooted in a lack of empathy with (and knowledge of) nature. Not only are they unable to name trees, flowers, birds and insects, but they themselves are no longer spoken by the language of the natural world. Instead, they are enframed by technology and spoken by the language of social media and the digital workplace.

Thus, whilst they have profiles on Facebook and Instagram, they have a void where their souls used to be. And the more they intervene technology between themselves and the Outside, the more they numb and atrophy their own senses, denying themselves the opportunity to enter into a more natural revealing and to experience, as Heidegger would say, "the call of a more primal truth".    

A young child enframed by technology

Notes

*Heidegger first formulated the idea that language speaks [Die sprache spricht] in his 1950 lecture 'Language', trans. into English by Albert Hofstadter in Poetry, Language, Thought (Harper and Row, 1971). See also: 'The Question Concerning Technology' and 'The Way to Language', in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994).

**Margaret Atwood and Andrew Motion were among a group of 28 authors so concerned about the removal of words associated with the natural world from the OJD that they wrote to the publishers, calling for the decision to be reversed. Whilst recognising the need to introduce new words, they found it worrying that 'in contrast to those taken out, many are associated with the interior, solitary childhoods of today'. I share this concern and don't believe this is simply a romantic (or nostalgic) desire to project memories of my own childhood onto today's youngsters. I also agree with Motion, the former poet laureate, who argues that by discarding so many landscape words and animal names, the editors of the OJD 'deny children a store of words that is marvellous for its own sake' and that their defence - that lots of children now have zero experience of the natural world - is absurd; for dictionaries 'exist to extend our knowledge, as much (or more) as they do to confirm what we already know'.  

For further details, see Alison Flood, 'Oxford Junior Dictionary's replacement of 'natural' words with 21st-century terms sparks outcry', The Guardian (13 Jan 2015): click here to read online.

Isabella Tree, Wilding, (Picador, 2018), p. 294. 

For a sister post to this one - on biophilia and nature-deficit disorder - please click here.  

Reflections on the Death of a Sparrow (In Memory of Jodie Chesney)

A Trace of Feathers: Derridean Ornithological Absence 
(SA/2019)

I.

Yesterday was witness to an act of savage beauty as a sparrowhawk made a meal of one of the birds that live in the tangle of blackberry, honeysuckle and rose bush in the back garden, leaving nothing behind but a trace of feathers that gave rise to philosophical thoughts of presence and absence ... 

II.

The ontological terms presence and absence have a long history within Western philosophy, usually with the former being privileged over the latter, referring as it does to being in a positive sense; i.e., that which is directly at hand in a non-mediated manner and therefore linked to reality and to truth (the ultimate form of presence for Plato).

Derrida, however, famously deconstructs such thinking and shows how absense is not merely parasitic upon presence - is not merely a form of non-being there - and how presence is in fact always mediated and, indeed, reliant upon absence (i.e., being rests upon non-being, not vice versa).    

In so doing, Derrida is developing Heidegger's work on the metaphysics of presence, as set out in Being and Time (1927); attacking notions of origin, for example, and showing how the relationship between presence and absence is much more subtle - and much more playful - than many thinkers have realised.

For Derrida, representational absence is itself a form of presence; thus traces of feather, for example, speak not merely of a poor sparrow's death and absence, but also of their life and continued presence-as-absence. 

And, in a similar manner, we might suggest that the purple ribbons presently tied all over Harold Hill - on trees, fences, lamp posts, etc. - speak of Jodie Chesney's continued presence-as-absence ...    

III.

Nothing makes sense of the death of a sparrow - nor of a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl murdered as she sat in a park with her boyfriend, listening to music. But, thanks to the work of writers such as Derrida, it's at least possible to think beyond a dreary binary distinction that assigned value exclusively to presence and made of absence something inferior, something false. 

Feathers and ribbons don't do away with or disguise the fact of death. But such traces provide poignant reminders of lives once lived and allow us to know that the dead are with us still ...

Thanks to Símón Solomon for suggesting a Derridean perspective on the subject matter of this post.

Oostvaardersplassen: Animal Utopia or Animal Concentration Camp?

Rewilding means ... reacquainting ourselves with death

I.

Even Isabella Tree has to admit that the experimental nature reserve established by Dutch ecologist Frans Vera - which inspired her and her husband's own Knepp Wildland Project - is controversial as well as extraordinary and may very well determine whether rewilding is taken seriously as an idea or written off as a green fantasy.  

Covering an area of 23 square miles, the Oostvaardersplassen is established on land that was only recently reclaimed from a huge freshwater lake. Part wetland and part a dry area, the former, with its large reedbeds, is home to a great many waterbirds as well as other animals that thrive in an aquatic environment. 

It's the dry zone, however, with its starving four-legged inmates, that attracts the controversy ...


II.

Before the establishment of the reserve, the dry area was a nursery for willow trees and there were soon hundreds of seedlings sprouting up all over. This led to concern that a dense woodland would quickly develop, significantly reducing the value of the habitat for wildlife that requires open space.

And so, excited by Vera's theories to do with forest history and the role played by grazing animals in habitat creation, the park introduced a number of large herbivores, including primeval-looking Konik ponies, magnificent red deer, and dark-coated Heck cattle with their sharp, curved horns (and Nazi associations). 

These animals, it was hoped, would encourage the development of an ecosystem and flat, grassy landscape thought to resemble those that existed on European river banks and deltas before human influence, allowing biodiversity to flourish.  The plan was to keep the beasts out in the open all year round, living as close to an authentic life in the wild as possible. For minimal intervention was the name of the game at Oostvaarderspassen.

Initially, the numbers introduced to the reserve were modest; 32 Heck cattle in 1983; 20 Konik ponies in 1984; and 37 red deer in 1992. Again, the idea was to allow populations to grow naturally and, with no predators present, that's exactly what they did. Indeed, the animals multiplied faster than anticipated; soon there were hundreds of ponies and cattle and thousands of deer. 

And then, of course, during the first severe winter, they started to die-off just as rapidly - and in full view of the public. Unfortunately, the sight of starving animals and decomposing bodies being fed on by carrion, isn't one which modern Europeans are emotionally prepared for. Inevitably, there were angry protests from animal lovers concerned about cruelty and Vera received hate mail and death threats. Some compared Oostvaardersplassen to Auschwitz ...      

III.

To be fair, there are legitimate criticisms to be made of this project; perhaps it was irresponsible to adopt such a laissez-faire approach to animal welfare in what is, ultimately, an enclosed reserve, limited in size, built upon flat, exposed land with very little natural shelter, in a part of the world where winters can be extremely harsh.

Ultimately, Oostvaarderspassen is not the Serengeti or the Okavango Delta in Botswana! It's too small and impoversished a space to simply allow large animals to breed willy-nilly and without the possibility of being able to migrate and seek out new food sources.   

Having said that, I'm glad to know that Frans Vera is unrepentant (and addresses many of the criticisms and concerns directly):

"'Yet again, our view of nature is being dictated by the conventions of human control. The baseline for the welfare of farm animals is being applied to animals living in the wild [...] The fact that animals live in the Oostvaardersplassen have a free life in a natural environment - they are not cooped up in some factory farm; they aren't pushed around by humans every day; they have normal sex rather than artificial insemination; they have a natural herd structure allowing calves to stay with their mothers; they can graze and browse what they are designed to eat, not what is artificially concocted for them by the farming industry - none of this seems to matter. The fixation is solely on their death not the quality of their lives.
      In particular, people believe these deaths are numerous and "unnatural" because there is a fence around the reserve preventing the animals from migrating in search of food - but cyclical die-offs happen even in the migrating populations of Africa. And in places where animals cannot migrate [...] the dynamic is the same. Starvation is the determining factor. It is a fundamental process of nature.'" 

As a thanatologist, I think that's true: that all life rests upon death. Nevertheless, public outcry in the Netherlands and elsewhere has forced a change of policy at the Oostvaardersplassen. Now animals deemed to be on their last legs or suffering too much, are shot and the bodies of the ponies and cows taken away to be cleanly incinerated.

Only the deer - since they are categorised as fully wild animals - are left to rot and be eaten by the foxes, rats, crows, beetles, and bacteria in a picnic of life and death ...

See: Isabella Tree, Wilding, (Picador, 2018), p. 69.

For a related post to this one - in praise of the Knepp Farm Project - click here.

Wilding: In Praise of the Knepp Farm Project

Cover design by Neil Lang (Picador, 2018)

I.

Author Isabella Tree and her husband, the conservationist Charlie Burrell, are founders of the Knepp Wildland Project in West Sussex; a bold experiment in rewilding 3,500 acres of land, thereby providing a glimpse of not only what the British countryside had once been, but a vision of what the British countryside could be again, if only others dared to follow their lead and allow biodiversity to flourish.  

I share their view that vain attempts at conservation are no longer enough; that these simply slow down the inexorable rate of wildlife decline and habitat destruction. What is needed now is to actively restore and expand the natural world; more plants, more ponds, more trees, more insects, more birds, and more animals of all kinds - and fewer roads, fewer cars, fewer houses, fewer people.

How easily we might spare a million or two human beings, as D. H. Lawrence says, if it allowed space for a few more wild things on the face of the earth.*   

II.

I also agree with Isabella that the generation born in the 1960s were the last to have any direct experience and knowledge of what is now a lost world; a pre-decimal and pre-decimated world in which children played (without adult supervision) outside at every opportunity and were still thrilled by and in touch with nature: I remember collecting frogspawn as a child from the local pond and catching newts and slow-worms; I remember the family of hedgehogs who lived in the back garden and seeing huge flocks of birds in the sky; I remember when the world was green and literally hummed and buzzed and hopped with insects.

Over the last five decades, this world has either vanished completely or been radically transformed:

"Changes in land use and, in particular, intensive farming have altered the landscape beyond anything our great-grandparents would recognise. [...] We lost [i.e. destroyed] more ancient woods - tens of thousands of them - in the forty years after the Second World War than in the previous four hundred. Between the beginning of the war and the 1990s we lost 75,000 miles of hedgerows. Up to 90 per cent of wetland has disappeared in England alone since the Industrial Revolution. 80 per cent of Britain's lowland heath has been lost since 1800; a quarter of the acreage in the last fifty years. 97 per cent of our wildflower meadows have been lost since the war. This is a story of unremitting unification and simplification, reducing the landscape to a large-scale patchwork of ryegrass, oilseed rape and cereals, with scattered, undermanaged woods and remnant hedgerows the only remaining refuge for many species of wildflowers, insects and songbirds." [3-4]

This paints a bleak picture. As does the State of Nature report published in 2013 and compiled by scientists from twenty-five UK wildlife organizations:

"The numbers of Britain's most endangered species have more than halved since the 1970s, with one in ten species overall threatened with extinction [...] The abundance of all wildlife has fallen dramatically. Insects and other invertebrates have been particularly badly hit, more than halving since 1970. Moths have declined 88 per cent, ground beetles 72 per cent and butterflies 76 per cent. Bees and other pollinating insects are in crisis. Our flora is also failing." [6]

Three years later, a new, more extensive report found some grounds for optimism. But not much. For despite small gains, substantial losses continue and we are in imminent danger of losing 10-15 per cent of native species. The British might like to think of themselves as nature lovers and regard David Attenborough as a national treasure, but the fact is the UK has "lost significantly more biodiversity over the long term than the world average [...] we are among the most nature-depleted countries in the world" [7]. 

So thank fuck for the Knepp Wildland Project, where, in less than twenty years, Tree and Burrell have created an astonishing oasis of life; not by attempting to artificially preserve things and strict micro-management of the environment, but by letting go and allowing nature to run wild. Their hope - and my hope - is that this project can be rolled out across the UK and that Knepp is but "a small step on [the] road to a wilder, richer country" [10].** 

Notes 

* Between 1970 and 2010 we added five million to the UK population, but lost 40 million birds from our skies. 

** The charity Rewilding Britain was launched in 2015: "By 2030 it aims to have returned natural ecological processes and key species to 300,000 hectares of core land [...] and three marine areas [...] Over  the next hundred years it hopes this will have extended to at least 1 million hectares, or 4.5 per cent of Great Britain's land and 30 per cent of our territorial waters [...] Its over all aim is not to rewild everywhere [...] but to restore parts of the British Isles to wild nature and to allow lost creatures [...] to live here once more." [10] 

See: Isabella Tree, Wilding, (Picador, 2018). Page references given in the text refer to this edition.  

Visit: the Knepp Castle Estate website: click here. 

Play: surprise musical bonus from 1982: click here. 

For a related post to this one on Oostvaardersplassen, click here.

The Jungle of Everyday Life: In Anticipation of Rob Dunn's New Book 'Never Home Alone'

(Basic Books, 2018)

A book I'm very much looking forward to reading when published in the UK later this month is Rob Dunn's Never Home Alone, which is a natural history of the domestic environment that indicates that there is a huge number of other species sharing our indoor space - perhaps over two hundred thousand. 

Many of these plants and creatures are, of course, microscopic, but almost all are completely overlooked, even when visible to the naked eye. And many are performing a vitally beneficial role, so best to put down the anti-bacterial spray:

"Some of these species help our immune systems to function. Others help to control and compete with pathogens and pests. Many are potential sources of new enzymes or drugs. A few can help ferment new kinds of beers and breads. And thousands carry out ecological processes of value to humanity such as keeping our tap water free of pathogens. Most of the life in our homes is either benign or good."

We destroy these things, therefore, at our peril: we simply couldn't survive in a sterile universe even if it were possible to create such; we should encourage the biodiversity that exists within our own homes (and bodies) and accept that - whether we like it or not - human life is always full of (and reliant upon) other forms of life.      

Further, it would be sensible to understand our domestic flora and fauna a little better than we do for the simple reason that we now mostly live indoors. Dunn tells us, for example, that the average child in the developed world spends 93% of his or her time in a building or vehicle and suggests that this reveals "a radical new stage in the cultural evolution of our species".

We have become stay-at-home man, or Homo indoorus, as he puts it. And if evolution is going to continue anywhere, it's more likely to be at the back of the fridge or in our central heating systems, than in what remains of the great outdoors where the background extinction rate of species is ever-accelerating.

Note: Rob Dunn is a professor in the Department of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University and in the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen.

See: Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live, (Basic Books, 2018). The lines quoted here are from the Prologue. 

On Comic Relief and the Figure of the Great White Saviour (with Reference to the Case of Stacey Dooley Vs David Lammy)

Look what I'm holding!

I.

Labour MP David Lammy isn't often right.

But he's fully justified in his recent criticisms of Comic Relief: Stacey Dooley and friends do perpetuate "unhelpful stereotypes" about Africa and the peoples thereof and they do irritate and embarrass many of us as they play the role of Great White Saviour for the cameras amidst a sea of smiling black faces. 

No one questions the good intentions of those celebrities who participate in charitable projects such as Red Nose Day (although, in some cases, we could and probably should do just that).

But such projects can inadvertently descend into poverty porn and I agree with Lammy that Comic Relief has helped ingrain negative images of Africa into the popular imagination by blurring the fifty-four separate nations that make up the continent into "a single reservoir of poverty, grief and suffering", thereby reinforcing the Band Aid view of Africa as a place where nothing ever grows.


II.

Miss Dooley, MBE, is an English TV presenter, journalist, documentary filmmaker, and all-dancing media personality who has made a career out of the shit that goes on in the developing world. So you'd think she might know better than to ask, naively, whether the objection Lammy raises has anything to do with her being white.

For the blindingly obvious answer is that, yes, of course it does - but it's also an issue to do with wealth, fame, class, power and privilege, which is why it's equally offensive when Meghan Markle turns up on the scene to distribute her empowering bananas, for example [click here].    

No one is denying that Africa has problems and faces some huge challenges. But there's a lot of positive things happening there too and Comic Relief "should be helping to establish an image of African people as equals to be respected rather than helpless victims to be pitied".

More than this, it should also challenge its audience "not just to feel guilty, but angry" about the West's political and economic complicity in the war, poverty, and corruption that has plagued the continent in the postcolonial period.

In sum: whilst the fundraising (and international aid) is important and worthwhile, "the Red Nose Day formula is tired and patronising to Africans" and non-Africans alike.  

See: David Lammy, 'Africa deserves better from Comic Relief', in The Guardian (24 March 2017): click here to read online.

See also the excellent article on this topic by Afua Hirsch, 'Ed Sheeran means well but this poverty porn has to stop', The Guardian (5 December 2017): click here.

Faith and Feminism in Pakistan

(Folio Books, Lahore, 2018)

The new book by feminist scholar and activist Afiya S. Zia - Faith and Feminism in Pakistan (2018) - asks a very simple question (with a post-Freudian undertone): what do women in Pakistan (and other Muslim majority countries) desire most; religious agency or secular autonomy? 

That is to say, do they want identities shaped by and within a theocratic order that come with ready-made meaning and promise fulfilment; or do they want the godless freedom to create their own non-essential selves and individual values that may very well prove to have tragic consequences?

In Nietzschean terms, the choice is this: live piously - or live dangerously.

Dr. Zia has clearly chosen option B. Indeed, she lives more dangerously than almost anyone I know and I very much admire her for that.* I also think she's right to contend that female piety - be it Muslim, Christian, or Jewish in origin - presents no serious challenge to the patriarchal structures that produce it. 

However, where she and I differ is that she seems to believe that her own choice is one that all women can (and should) make for themselves and that as more and more women affirm secular autonomy this will lead to a radical transformation of society. I'm sceptical about this. For not only do I not subscribe to any kind of universal project of liberation, but I don't really undertstand why exceptional women - and Afiya is an exceptional woman - fail to understand their own exceptionality and wish to think collectively in terms of gender or class, for example.        

Having said that, what do I know about any of these things - particularly within a Pakistani context? Not much. Whereas Dr. Zia has spent many years thinking through these questions - and has done so not from the (relative) safety and security of professional exile in the West, but whilst continuing to live and work in Karachi.

Thus, whilst this book is full of sophisticated theory and analysis, it's also very much shaped by direct experience. For Afiya, the personal is the political; but the political is also personal and that lends her text an intense sincerity that puts to shame those who pride themselves on their ability to discuss everything with intellectual reserve and objective irony.   

The book is forthright in its assault upon those scholars in the West who not only turn a blind eye to the manner in which the reactionary forces of religious miltancy encroach upon and often violently usurp secular spaces, but seem to think there's something rather thrilling about this in terms of radical alterity and cultural diversity, etc. 
 
As Dr. Zia notes in her introduction, by advocating the "anthropological recovery of Muslim women's non-liberal agency" [3] those who now think it radical (or profitable) to promote religious identity politics betray years of hard work by feminists who have fought for secular rights and freedoms.

I think that's a brave thing to say: for she's arguing that it's not just Islamism that has set the women's movement back in Pakistan, but also the lack of active support from liberals outside the country who are afraid of exposing the "misogyny and hatecrimes enacted or inspired by faith-based politics" [3] lest they should be accused of Islamophobia. 

Push comes to shove, I suspect that Dr. Zia prefers the open enmity of the former to the spinelessness of the latter who find what she says a bit awkward at times. Her real anger, however, is reserved for those diasporic scholars of South Asian, Middle Eastern, or North African origin based in Western institutions, who regard themselves as postsecular and postfeminist and spend much of their time mocking secular women's rights activists in these regions as Western collaborators or native informants. 

This, as Afiya notes, is ironic to say the very least ...

And whilst these retro-Islamist scholars insist that they are "simply reviving and interrogating a different way of being by show-casing the interiorised subjectivities of [...] pietist Muslim women", the danger is that their project "runs the risk of rehabilitating [...] patriarchal and nationalist agendas" [8] that seek to purge all rights-based initiatives and movements of Western influences.   

In a series of powerful passages Dr. Zia concludes:

"Those critics who keep pretending that religion and local cultural codes are not the immediate sources that limit women's progress or freedoms and who argue that women may be comforted by introspective spirituality and should negotiate with the tools available only within their domestic and communal locations, are missing the points being raised by [...] secular feminists." [178]

"Neither is it adequate to argue that it is not religious politics but really something called 'liberal-secularism' that is the source of all political damage in Muslim societies. Instead, it has been in the political subversion of Islamic law and reversion to the universalist and 'secular spirit' of the Constitution that has allowed an expansion of material and legal rights for women in the last decade." [178]

"Those advocating an anti-Modernity, anti-enlightenment, nonliberal, supposedly alternative Muslim politics need to acknowledge [...] that in practical terms, feminism and human rights activism is being successfully silenced in Pakistan. If there is a contest between feminism and faith-based politcs, it is quite clear which is the front-runner." [181]

And clear, too, who are are ultimately the real losers: the women and girls of Pakistan ...

* Note: it's worth keeping in mind that there are female activists and politicians in Pakistan who live under constant threat and require around-the-clock protection.

Readers interested in a guest post on Torpedo the Ark written by Afiya Zia (in 2014), should click here. 

Psychrophilia: Or Love (and Death) in a Cold Climate

Portrait by Tamara de Lempika (1929)

The white races, having the arctic north behind them, the vast abstraction of ice and snow, 

would fulfil a mystery of ice-destructive knowledge, snow-abstract annihilation.

Opening Remarks

Psychrophilia is another form of sexual fetishism encountered in the work of Mr. D. H. Lawrence - although often disguised beneath a pronounced fear and loathing of snow and ice - and I thought it might be interesting to examine his subzero-eroticism here, with reference to the doomed love affair between Gudrun and Gerald in Women in Love.

What amuses me is how Lawrence takes a relatively simple pleasure - in this case, one in which a person gains arousal via contact with cold objects or by exposing others to low temperatures - and incorporates it into his own perverse aesthetico-philosophical project.

Most psychrophiles are happy to simply rub an ice cube on their partners nipples, or play with a dildo that has spent the night in the freezer. But Lawrence is compelled to explore psychrophilia in relation to what Nietzsche terms the crisis of modern European nihilism. In other words, for Lawrence, psychrophilia becomes a question of racial-cultural destiny more than merely a sexy form of brain freeze.           

I. Snow

The two couples - Ursula and Birkin and Gudrun and Gerald - decide to head off to the mountains for a winter holiday in the Alps. Unsuprisingly, there is snow everywhere: and whilst they all find the sheer whiteness and perfect silence of this alien world exhilarating at first, so too do they find it terrifying.

Only Gudrun feels truly at home surrounded by the "terrible waste of whiteness". It fills her, writes Lawrence, with a strange sense of rapture: "At last she had arrived, she had reached her place. Here at last she folded her venture and settled down like a crystal in the navel of snow, and was gone."

But Gerald also loves being high up amidst the snow-covered mountains: "A fierce, electric energy seemed to flow over all his limbs" and he felt himself superhumanly strong. When he fucks Gudrun for the first time in this frozen environment he feels his heart ignite like a flame of ice.

She, however, remains frigid in every sense of the term; dead to love and, ultimately, dead to life. For whilst she can see that the peaks of snow looked beautiful in the blue of evening - "glistening like transcendent, radiant spikes of blossom in the heavenly upper-world, so lovely and beyond" - she can't feel part of it: "She was divorced, debarred, a soul shut out."

Ursula and Birkin, meanwhile, aren't great fans of the snow and the frighteningly cold air. Underneath the glamour and the wonder of it all, Ursula detected something malevolent and murderous. And Birkin is forced to admit that he couldn't bear to be there were she not by his side, protecting him with her warmth from the snow-stillness and frozen eternality.

By the very next day, Ursula has had enough of it; "the dazzling whiteness seemed to beat upon her till it hurt her, she felt the cold was slowly strangling her soul. Her head felt dazed and numb." Suddenly, she decides she wants to go away - that she must escape from the world of snow and ice and return to the world of dark earth in which oranges and olives grew.*

And so Ursula and Birkin take their leave ...


II. Snowed Up**

As soon as Ursula and Birkin have left, the relationship between Gudrun and Gerald becomes increasingly frosty. His heart turns to ice at the sound of her voice; her flesh chills whenever he physically comes close. Even for psychrophiles, this is not a good sign. As Gudrun rightly concludes, their attempt to find love has been a total failure.

And so, here they are nowhere with nowhere left to go. Full of a cold passion of anger, Gerald imagines killing his mistress. And Gudrun is increasingly afraid that he'll do so. Only she doesn't intend to be killed: "A fine thread still united her to him. It should not be her death which broke it." 

With Gerald feeling ever more snow-estranged, Gudrun begins to openly flirt with an artist called Loerke. One day, she goes for a sleigh ride with him. When Gerald arrives on the scene, he punches Loerke to the ground and then proceeds to strangle Gudrun. The scene is described in sexually charged language that must surely delight sadists with a penchant for erotic asphyxiation.

Although she has the life squeezed out of her, Gudrun isn't killed. At the last moment, Gerald, full of self-disgust, releases his grip and then drifts off, unconsciously, into the snow, where he lies down to sleep and to die (perchance to dream).

III. Exeunt

"When they brought the body home, the next morning, Gudrun was shut up in her room. [...] What should she say? What should she feel? What did they expect of her? She was coldly at a loss."

Ursula and Birkin return and the latter goes to view the corpse of his friend:

"He had loved him. And yet he felt chiefly disgust at the inert body lying there. It was so inert, so coldly dead, a carcase, Birkin's bowels seemed to turn to ice. He had to stand and look at the frozen dead body that had been Gerald. [...] He reached and touched the dead face. And the sharp, heavy bruise of ice bruised his living bowels. He wondered if he himself were freezing too, freezing from the inside."

Birkin also touches "the sharp, almost glittering fair hair of the frozen body" and as his heart begins to freeze so too does the blood in his veins turns to ice-water: "So cold, so cold, a heavy, bruising cold pressing on his arms from outside, and a heavier cold congealing within him, in his heart and in his bowels."

What can he do at last but turn away and cease to care. His friend was no more - just a strange icy lump lying there and Birkin doubtless came to the same conclusion that he had reached once before when considering the case of Gerald Crich:

"He was one of these strange white wonderful demons from the north, fulfilled in the destructive frost-mystery. And [...] fated to pass away in this knowledge, death by perfect cold [...] an omen of the universal dissolution into whiteness and snow."

Still, who knows, perhaps that's why the fires of hell are so necessary - to warm us up again, in death, so that we may be reborn. Perhaps all is not lost ...

Notes

* It's interesting to note that Loerke, like Ursula, is also a psychrophobe, rather than a psychrophile; his nightmare vision is of a world gone cold, where snow fell everywhere "and only white creatures, polar-bears, white foxes, and men like awful white snow-birds, persisted in ice cruelty". This is probably the only thing the two characters have in common. 

** Readers might be interested in a sister post to this one in which I develop this section in relation to the question of erotic asphyxiation: click here.  

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). All lines quoted are from Chapters XXX-XXII, pp. 398-481, with the exception of the quotation prior to the opening remarks and the final quotation in section III, which are both taken from Chapter XIX, p. 254.

Asphyxiophilia: Reflections on the Case of Gerald and Gudrun

Oliver Reed as Gerald and Glenda Jackson as Gudrun in 
Women in Love (dir. Ken Russell, 1969)

I. Asphyxiophilia

As someone who has always had trouble swallowing and breathing, I've no practical interest in the subject of erotic asphyxiation (or asphyxiophilia as it's also known). That anyone should wish to strangle the object of their affection, or intentionally restrict their own supply of oxygen - even for the purposes of sexual stimulation - is a disconcerting thought. 

However, it seems that a lot of people are aroused (or at least intrigued) by the prospect of gasping or making gasp; they long to induce and/or experience the delirious, semi-hallucinogenic state known as hypoxia (a state that intensifies orgasm). This can be achieved via various methods, including hanging, suffocation, or strangulation.

Obviously, the practice can be dangerous and there have been a number of well-documented fatalities resulting from erotic asphyxiation (particularly when engaged in as a solosexual activity). Thus, as in so many other things, caution is highly recommended (one of the key words in Deleuze and Guattari's lexicon that is often overlooked); living dangerously doesn't mean dying stupidly.       


II. Strangulation

Strangulation accounts for a small but significant number of murders. It can involve the use of a ligature, such as a rope or an electric cord, or it can be accomplished manually for a more intimate and truly hands on experience.   

Research on homicidal strangulation suggests that most of the victims are female and that in the majority of cases the perpetrator and the victim are known to one another, often having a family relationship. Studies also show that men who strangle women frequently do so in order to facilitate rape or to express violent sexual emotions such as jealousy.


III. The Case of Gerald and Gudrun

As a murderous motif, we might say that strangulation is the perfect coming together of sex and violence. No wonder then that it attracted the attention of D. H. Lawrence whose erotic vision is often tied closely to his thanatological musings (i.e., shot through with death). This is well illustrated in what I believe to be his finest novel, Women in Love (1920).   

Gudrun and Gerald have travelled to the Alps in order to meet their fate: only one of them will leave the mountains alive. Initially, they are accompanied by Ursula and Birkin, but this latter couple soon leave, finding the malevolent whiteness and silence of the snow unbearable.

The relationship between Gudrun and Gerald becomes increasingly frosty, to say the least. His heart turns to ice at the sound of her voice; she chills whenever he physically comes close. Even for psychrophiles, this is not a good sign. As Gudrun says, their attempt to be lovers has been a failure.

It's not long before Gerald's cold passion of anger induces murderous thoughts and Gudrun is rightly afraid that he will kill her: "But she did not intend to be killed. A fine thread still united her to him. It should not be her death which broke it."

Gerald's snow-estrangement continues until, finally, he snaps and Lawrence writes a disturbing scene that must surely delight readers with a penchant for erotic asphyxiation:

"He took the throat of Gudrun between his hands, that were hard and indomitably powerful. And her throat was beautifully, so beautifully soft. Save that, within, he could feel the slippery chords of her life. And this he crushed, this he could crush. What bliss! Oh what bliss, at last, what satisfaction, at last! The pure zest of satisfaction filled his soul. He was watching the unconsciousness come into her swollen face, watching her eyes roll back. How ugly she was! What a fulfilment, what a satisfaction! How good this was, oh how good it was, what a god-given gratification, at last! He was unconscious of her fighting and struggling. That struggling was her reciprocal lustful passion in this embrace, the more violent it became, the greater the frenzy of delight, till the zenith was reached, the crisis, the struggle was overborne, her movement became softer, appeased."

Gudrun, however, isn't dead. At the last moment, full of self-disgust, Gerald releases his grip and then drifts off, unconsciously, into the snow, where he lies down to sleep and to die (perchance to dream).

The next day, Gudrun is pale-faced and impassive: unwilling to speak; unable to shed a tear ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 452, 471-72.

Helinä Häkkänen, 'Murder by Manual and Ligature Strangulation', Ch. 4 of Criminal Profiling: International Theory, Research, and Practice, ed. R. N. Kocsis (Humana Press Inc., 2006). Click here to read as an online pdf. 

For a related post on psychrophilia, out of which this one emerged, click here. 

Surprise musical bonus (a classic slice of late '70s punk): click here. 

Surprise comedy bonus (a darkly hilarious clip from an '80s TV classic): click here.

Slippery When Wet: Reflections on D. H. Lawrence's Aquaphilia

Image via derpibooru.org

Aquaphilia is yet another form of sexual fetishism that we often come across in the work of Mr. D. H. Lawrence and I thought it might be interesting to examine several instances of his water-based eroticism here ...

I: The White Peacock

There's a very lovely scene in Lawrence's first novel in which Cyril and his friend George frolic naked in a pond ...

"The water was icily cold, and for a moment deprived me of my senses. When I began to swim, soon the water was buoyant, and I was sensible of nothing but the vigorous poetry of action. I saw George swimming on his back laughing at me, and in an instant I had flung myself like an impulse after him. The laughing face vanished as he swung over and fled, and I pursued the dark head and the ruddy neck. [...] As I came up to him and caught him, with my hand on his shoulder [...] George was floating just beside me, looking up and laughing."

This is already a fairly explicit piece of homoerotic and aquaphilic writing, but it's interesting to note the words deleted from the original MS at this point: "and his white breasts and his belly emerged like cool buds of a firm fleshed water flower" - a line that could only have come from Lawrence's pen.  

Afterwards, having returned to the land, Cyril and George "stood and looked at each other as [they] rubbed [themselves] dry".


II: The Trespasser

What's interesting about the case of Siegmund, the protagonist of Lawrence's second novel, The Trespasser, is how his aquaphilia takes on an autoerotic character and moves towards a becoming-fish ...

"He chose his bathing place [...] threw his clothes on a high rock [...] ran laughing over the sand to the sea, where he waded in, thrusting his legs noisily through the heavy green water.
      It was cold, and he shrank. For a moment he found himself thigh-deep [...] afraid to plunge. Laughing, he went under the clear green water.
      He was a poor swimmer. Sometimes a choppy wave swamped him, and he rose gasping, wringing the water from his eyes and nostrils, while he heaved and sank with the rocking of the waves that clasped his breast. Then he stooped again to resume his game with the sea. It is splendid to play, even at middle age, and the sea is a fine partner."

Now, I'm not saying for certain that he jerked off in the sea. But Lawrence writes in such a queerly erotic manner that this is certainly implied: "He offered his body to the morning, glowing with the sea's passion ... the sunshine came on his shoulders like warm breath. He delighted in himself."

And if he did, in fact, choose to ejaculate his sperm upon the naked waters, mightn't this be said to mark his becoming one with his aquatic environment, just like a wave-thrilled fish?    


III: The Rainbow

Suddenly, in her penultimate term, Ursula Brangwen discovers that a "queer awareness existed between herself and her class-mistress, Miss Inger [...] a rather beautiful woman of twenty eight" who also happens to be the school's swimming instructress:

"Ursula trembled and was dazed with passion. Her hopes were soon to be realised. She would see Miss Inger in her bathing dress.
      [...] In the great bath the water was glimmering pale emerald-green, a lovely, glimmering mass of colour within the whitish, marble-like confines. Overhead the light fell softly and the great green body of pure water moved under it as someone dived from the side.
      Ursula, trembling, hardly able to contain herself, pulled off her clothes, put on her tight bathing suit, and opened the door of her cabin. Two girls were in the water. The mistress had not appeared. She waited. A door opened, Miss Inger came out, dressed in a red-tunic like a Greek girl's, tied round the waist, and a red silk handkerchief round her head. How lovely she looked. Her knees were so white and strong and proud, she was firm-bodied as Diana. She walked simply to the side of the bath, and with a negligent movement, flung herself in. For a moment Ursula watched the white, smooth, strong shoulders and the easy arms swimming. Then she too dived into the water.
      Now, ah now she was swimming in the same water with her dear mistress. The girl moved her limbs voluptuously, and swam by herself, deliciously, yet with a craving of unsatisfaction. She wanted to touch the other, to touch her, to feel her."

Miss Inger invites Ursula to race her: and so the latter sets off in chase; just as Cyril chased George in The White Peacock:

"The mistress was just ahead, swimming with easy strokes. Ursula could see the head put back, the water flickering upon the white shoulders, the strong legs kicking shadowily. And she swam blinded with passion. Ah, the beauty of the firm, white, cool flesh! Ah, the wonderful firm limbs. If she could but hold them, hug them, press them between her own small breasts!"

Lawrence concludes this hydrosapphic fantasy:

"They neared the end of the bath - the deep end. Miss Inger touched the pipe, swung herself round, and caught Ursula round the waist, in the water, and held her for a moment against herself. The bodies of the two women touched, heaved against each other for a moment, then were separate."  

Lawrence, however, can't resist giving us a further scene of aquatic lesbianism later in the same chapter ...

Miss Inger has invited Ursula to stay with her for the weekend at a country cottage and suggests a midnight swim. They undress in the bungalow, Ursula a little nervously. And then they venture outdoors, naked, feeling the "soft air of night upon their skins". Because Ursula is uncertain of the path, Miss Inger holds her close, and gives her a reassuring kiss.

Then, she picks up her student and volunteers to carry her into the water: "Ursula lay still in her mistress's arms, her forehead against the beloved, maddening breast." Before they can enter the water, however, a heavy shower of ice-cold rain begins to fall on their "flushed, hot limbs" and brings their aquaphilic adventure to a premature close.    


IV: Women in Love

Finally, I would like to draw attention to a scene in Chapter IV of my favourite novel by Lawrence, Women in Love, in which Gerald delights (solipsistically) in his own movement through water - and arouses the desire and envy of Gudrun in the process ...

"Suddenly, from the boat-house, a white figure ran out [...] It launched in a white arc through the air, there was a bursting of the water, and among the smooth ripples a swimmer was making out to space, in a centre of faintly heaving motion. The whole otherworld, wet and remote, he had to himself. He could move into the pure translucency of the grey, uncreated water.
      Gudrun stood by the stone wall [...] watching the motion on the bosom of the water, as if fascinated. [...]
      And she stood motionless gazing over the water at the face which washed up and down on the flood, as he swam steadily. From his separate element he saw [her], and he exulted to himself because of his own advantage, his possession of a world to himself. He was immune and perfect. He loved his own vigorous, thrusting motion, and the violent impulse of the very cold water against his limbs, buoying him up."

Lawrence continues:

"Gerald suddenly turned, and was swimming away swiftly, with a side stroke. He was alone now, alone and immune in the middle of the waters, which he had all to himself. He exulted in his isolation in the new element, unquestioned and unconditioned. He was happy, thrusting with his legs and all his body, without bond or connection anywhere, just himself in the watery world.
      Gudrun envied him almost painfully. Even this momentary possession of pure isolation and fluidity seemed to her so terribly desirable, that she felt herself as if damned, out there on the [dry land]."

Gudrun's aquaphilia, in other words, expresses itself not as a desire to fuck under water, but to shed her humanity and become-mermaid in her own weird, underwater world ... 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 222-23, and see the editorial note on p. 386. 

D. H. Lawrence. The Trespasser, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 73.

I am also paraphrasing a line from Lawrence's magnificent poem 'Fish' in this section of the text, which can be found in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923). See The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Vol. I, pp. 289-94. 

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 311,  313-16. 

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, John Worthn and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 46-7. 


This post is dedcated to Brenda Sumner, Secretary of the D. H. Lawrence Society, for all her kind help and support over the years.