Uterine Philosophy: Notes on the Woman of Isis

Victoria Vives as a Priestess of Isis

 Photo by Robert Domondon (2017) 

victoriavives.com

I.

As readers of Lawrence, we are intimately familiar with Ursula Brangwen and Constance Chatterley. Indeed, we know the latter not only from top to bottom, but inside and out in pornographic detail.

Arguably, however, the most intriguing woman in the Lawrentian universe is the unnamed and rarely discussed priestess of Isis, who performs such a crucial role in Part II of The Escaped Cock (1929). And so I thought it important to say something of her here ...

II.

The woman of Isis is twenty-seven years of age. Educated and intelligent, she's also very beautiful, with wondering blue eyes, dusky-blonde hair, and white-gold breasts. But she remains a virgin, however, for the "bud of her womb had never stirred" [145].

This is despite the fact that she grew up in a world of powerful and fascinating men. The only child of a Roman commander who served with Mark Anthony, the latter had "sat with her many a half-hour, in the splendour of his great limbs and glowing manhood". His attempts to seduce her were in vain, however, for whilst she had felt "the lovely glow of his male beauty and amorousness bathe all her limbs and her body [...] the very flower of her womb was cool, was almost cold, like a bud in shadow of frost" [144].

The woman of Isis had also known Julius Caesar, but, again, had "shrunk from his eagle-like rapacity" and much preferred older men who were happy just to talk with her and had no expectation that she would "open like a flower to the sun of their maleness" [144].

Remote, dreamy, and sexually unresponsive, the woman of Isis awaits a special type of man; one who has died and risen and is full of that other kind of beauty; "the sheer stillness of the deeper life"; a man who could touch her "on the yearning quick of her womb" [147].

Thus, retiring with her widowed mother to Sidon - an ancient city on the Mediterrranean coast of Lebanon - the woman of Isis built a pink and white temple dedicated to the goddess at her own expense. Here she has served as a priestess for seven years, dressed in a saffron-yellow mantle worn over a white linen tunic, with a pair of gilded sandals upon her ivory-white feet.

Her mother, meanwhile, took care of the day-to-day business of the small estate on which the temple and a villa, set amongst the olive trees, was built. She also oversaw the slaves, which is just as well, as the woman of Isis professes no interest in their activities, finding them invariably repellent as a class: "They were so imbedded in the lesser life, and their appetites and their small consciousness were a little disgusting" [148] to her. 

On one occasion, she watches with noble indifference as one of her young male slaves beats and rapes a half-naked slave girl. Nevertheless, despite her coldness, her cruelty and contempt for inferiors, she can give an excellent (erotic) massage, as the man who died discovers to his great joy:

"Having chafed all his lower body with oil, his belly, his buttocks, even the slain penis and the sad stones, having worked with her slow intensity of a priestess [...] suddenly she put her breast against the wound in his left side, and her arms round him [...] and she pressed him to her, in a power of living warmth, like the folds of a river." [159]


II.

In an early manuscript version of Part II of The Escaped Cock, Lawrence provides a few more details about the woman of Isis, some of which contradict the final published version, though not in any significant manner (for example, her age is given here as twenty-six, not twenty-seven). 

What is emphasised above all, is the extent of her learning: she was tutored as a child and young woman by a Greek philosopher, and whilst she often spoke Syrian or Latin, she always thought in Greek:

"Her Greek had taught her logic and history, and also poetry, and since she was small, she had liked to speak with men" about these things. But she found these men too worldly for her tastes and they "cared little for the gods" [216]. Thus she did not wish to be touched by any of them (much to her father's irritation). Indeed, the girl who would become the woman of Isis was not keen on any physical contact:

"True, her slave women bathed and annointed her. But their touch was dumb and voiceless, like the touch of linen, or the touch of polished wood. It came no further than the skin. But the touch of men would go much deeper, and would soil her subtlest privacy." [217]

She is defiantly chaste and even at twenty-six has the "same delicate virgin belly" [217] as the goddess whom she serves. And she knows herself - not in a philosophical sense, so much as in a gynaecological manner; she's womb-conscious in the same way that male protagonists in Lawrence's fiction are often said to be phallically conscious:

"She never confused an outside thrill or a suffusion of surface excitement with the other, the soft expanding joy of the womb [...] She was a woman of the old world, skilled in her own sensations. [...]
      The woman, skilled in Isis and the lore of Isis, knew her womb in lotus-bud, knew it deep, deep under the waters, knew its mystery, its curved, down-bent head, its uncoloured virgin petals, its thick, strong, softly-massive heart of golden adhesive fecundity. Dark-green like a water-snake, submerged like a root, obscure and even fearsome, the deep lotus-bud of the shadowy womb." [219]

I don't quite know what to make of a passage like this - and it seems that Lawrence doesn't expect most (if any) of his readers to understand it either: "This is Isis lore, which Isis women forever will understand, and only they." [220]

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Escaped Cock', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Part II, pp, 141-63. See also Appendix I (c) Part II: early manuscript version, pp. 216-30. 

Readers interested in an earlier post inspired by the woman of Isis should click here. 

Are You Pervin on Me? (Notes on The Blind Man, by D. H. Lawrence)

Tito Victoriano: Blind Man
redbubble.com

I.

There's something creepy and disturbing about Maurice Pervin. As his name suggests, he's a man born beneath a black star and full of the potential for violence; "like an ominous thunder-cloud".

So at home is Maurice within the invisible world of touch, that whilst his loss of sight during the war is something of an inconvenience, it doesn't profoundly affect him: "Life was still very full and strangely serene for the blind man, peaceful with the almost incomprehensible peace of immediate contact in darkness."

Indeed, so content is Maurice to live in connubial intimacy with his wife Isabel and perform menial farm work - milking the cows, attending to the pigs and horses - that he "did not even regret the loss of his sight".

His fits of depression and dark moods were rooted, therefore, in something else; in his hypersensitivity, perhaps; or his resentment of those individuals such as his wife's old friend Bertie Reid, who were less passionate but more quick-witted than he; "a resentment which deepened sometimes into stupid hatred".

II.

Bertie was a barrister and a man of letters; "a Scotchman of the intellectual type" - ironical, sentimental, and - one suspects - a repressed homosexual. For whilst he is extremely fond of his close female companions, he has no desire to marry any of them:

"He was a bachelor, three or four years older than Isabel. He lived in beautiful rooms overlooking the river, guarded by a faithful Scottish man-servant. And he had his friends among the fair sex - not lovers, friends. So long as he could avoid any danger of courtship or marriage, he adored a few good women with constant and unfailing homage, and he was chivalrously fond of quite a number. But if they seemed to encroach on him, he withdrew and detested them. 
      Isabel knew him very well, knew his beautiful constancy, and kindness, also his incurable weakness, which made him unable to ever enter into close contact of any sort. He was ashamed of himself, because he could not marry, could not approach women physically. He wanted to do so. But he could not. At the centre of him he was afraid, helplessly and even brutally afraid. He had given up hope, had ceased to expect any more that he could escape his own weakness." 

As noted, Maurice hates him: hates his Scottish accent; hates the other man's complacency. But perhaps his hatred wasn't born of homophobia, but, rather, his own homosexual desire: "He hated Bertie Reid, and at the same time he knew the hatred was [...] the outcome of his own weakness."


III.

To cut a short story even shorter, Bertie has come to visit the Pervins ...

After an uncomfortable meal and some small talk by the fire over drinks, Maurice excuses himself, taking his leave of Isabel and her friend in order to attend to some farm business. Several hours pass and, worried that it was getting late, Isabel asks Bertie to go find her absent husband:

"Bertie put on an old overcoat and took a lantern. [...] He shrank from the wet and roaring night. Such weather had a nervous effect on him [...] He peered in all the buildings. At last, as he opened the upper door of a sort of intermediate barn, he heard a grinding noise, and looking in, holding up his lantern, saw Maurice, in his shirt-sleeves [...] holding the handle of a turnip-pulper. He had been pulping sweet roots, a pile of which lay dimly heaped in a corner behind him."

The blind man is stroking a sinister-looking half-wild grey cat, as if it were some kind of familiar. He asks Bertie about the nature of the scar upon his face: "'Sometimes I feel I am horrible,' said Maurice, in a low voice, talking as if to himself. And Bertie actually felt a quiver of horror."

What happens after this isn't quite clear: one suspects that Lawrence wants us to read between the lines. Maurice asks Bertie if he might touch him and the latter, although a man who instinctively shrinks from physical contact, gives consent in a small, submissive voice: "But he suffered as the blind man stretched out a strong, naked hand to him."

Maurice lays his hands on Bertie's head:

"closing the dome of the skull in a soft, firm grasp [...] then, shifting his grasp and softly closing again, with a fine, close pressure, till he had covered the skull and the face of the smaller man, tracing the brows, and touching the full, closed eyes, touching the small nose and the nostrils, the rough, short moustache, the mouth, the rather strong chin."

Maurice also allows his hands to wander south; he grasps the shoulders, the arms, the hands of the other man - and who knows what else? "He seemed to take him, in the soft, travelling grasp." Lawrence could have chosen to stop here, but, instead, he intensifies this scene of queer eroticism; Maurice asking Bertie to touch his eyes, with his young and tender hands:

"Now Bertie quivered with revulsion. Yet he was under the power of the blind man [...] He lifted his hand, and laid the fingers on the [...] scarred eyes. Maurice suddenly covered them with his own hand, pressed the fingers of the other man upon his disfigured eye-sockets, trembling in every fibre, and rocking slightly, slowly, from side to side. He remained thus for a minute or more, whilst Bertie stood as if in a swoon, unconscious, imprisoned."

The scene culminates thusly:

"Maurice  removed the hand of the other man from his brow, and stood holding it in his own.
      'Oh my God,' he said, 'we shall know each other now, shan't we?  We shall know each other now.'
      Bertie could not answer. He gazed mute and terror-struck, overcome by his own weakness. He knew he could not answer. He had an unreasonable fear, lest the other man should suddenly destroy him. Whereas Maurice was actually filled with hot, poignant love [...] Perhaps it was this very passion [...] which Bertie shrank from most."


IV.

Whether the knowledge that fills Maurice with delicate fulfilment is carnal in nature is debatable, making the question of whether this is or is not a scene of sexual abuse impossible to answer with certainty. But it's certainly a traumatic and shattering experience for poor Bertie who is desperate to escape throughout, and who returns to the house in silence looking haggard and with eyes that were glazed over with misery:

"He could not bear it that he had been touched by the blind man, his insane reserve broken in. He was like a mollusc whose shell is broken."
  
Maurice, meanwhile, is elated - and, curiously, so is Isabel who takes her husband's hand in both hers and whispers to him "'You'll be happier now, dear.'"

One almost wonders if she hasn't set the whole thing up; knowing the cause of her husband's depression to be frustrated homosexual desire; inviting her vulnerable friend to visit - a man whom she secretly despised and felt contemptuous of; sending Bertie out to the barn in the dark of night like a lamb to the slaughter, so that her husband might find some degree of (momentary) satisfaction.    

What this tale illustrates is that Lawrence's notion of touch or phallic tenderness isn't always loving and consensual; it can involve submission, it can involve violence, it can involve all manner of perversity and fetishistic behaviour, and it can even include rape (be it of middle-aged women by Mexican bullfighters, or physically reserved young men by powerful figures like Maurice Pervin who exist as towers of darkness upon the face of the earth).


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Blind Man', in England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 46-63. All lines quoted here are from this edition, but note that an online version of the story can be read by clicking here. Readers who are interested can also find an earlier version of the tale, from 1918, in The Vicar's Garden and Other Stories, ed. N. H. Reeve, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 175-91. 

For an alternative reading of the story see Abbie Garrington, 'D. H. Lawrence: Blind Touch in a Visual Culture', Ch. 5 of Haptic Modernism, (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Dr. Garrington argues that Maurice Pervin's disability gives him 'access to other modes of seeing - the potential for spiritual insight, and an ability to attune himself to the tides of his own blood'. She also considers the character in his phallic aspect and as a kind of living sculpture.

Finally, readers might also be interested in a short film adaptation of 'The Blind Man' (dir. Travis Mills, 2011) made by Michael Coleman, Jason Cowan, McKenzie Goodwin, Travis Mills and Jess Weaver (Running Wild Films): click here.

The Biophilia Hypothesis and Notes on Nature-Deficit Disorder

Biophilia: 
Tree-Sky-Horse-Mud-Hay-Child Assemblage 

(SA/2019)

I. Opening Remarks

According to figures, only ten per cent of children in the UK still play regularly in natural areas and green spaces, whilst forty per cent never play outside at all. This not only shapes their attitudes to the environment and to wildlife in later life, but also has serious health implications ...

In the final chapter of her book Wilding (2018), Isabella Tree makes reference to the research evidence showing the links between natural play and wellbeing on the one hand, and between disconnection from nature and numerous physical, psychological and social ills on the other:

"Measurements of blood pressure, pulse rates and cortisol levels of young adults demonstrate a decrease in anger and an increase in positive mood when walking in a nature reserve, while the reverse is true walking in an urban environment. Low levels of self-discipline, impulsive behaviour, aggression, hyperactivity and inattention in young people all improve through contact with nature."

"For Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson the human connection with nature - something he calls 'biophilia', the 'rich, natural pleasure that comes from being surrounded by living organisms' - is rooted in our evolution. [...] The need to relate to the landscape and to other forms of life - whether one considers this urge aesthetic, emotional, intellectual, cognitive or even spiritual - is in our genes. Sever that connection and we are floating in a world where our deepest sense of ourselves is lost."

"Stephen and Rachel Kaplan take the psychological implications of this dislocation further. Their research [...] focuses on the burden that living outside the natural world imposes on the brain. Modern life, loaded with stimuli, multiple forms of communication and information requiring rapid processing and selection, demands what they call 'directed attention' from the right frontal cortex of the brain - the same part of the brain that appears to be affected in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This kind of focused attention is tiring and requires enormous effort to block out distractions, resulting in symptoms of impatience, planning impairment, indecision and irritability. The natural environment, on the other hand, holds our attention indirectly, providing what the Kaplan's call 'soft fascination', a broad absorption that demands little or no effort and provides plenty of space for reflection and mental recovery."


II. Nature-Deficit Disorder

I don't know if all (or any) of the above is true and it's worth pointing out that nature-deficit disorder - a term coined by the American author and journalist Richard Louv in 2005 is not officially recognised by the medical profession (indeed, Louv himself concedes that NDD is merely intended to serve as a convenient fiction via which we can describe certain conditions that we see manifested in contemporary society) - but one suspects that there's at least some truth in it; and certainly enough to justify further research in this area.     

Those who pooh-pooh the idea that it's beneficial for children to spend as much time as possible playing outdoors in a natural environment with grass, trees, insects and dogshit - who think such an environment is too dangerous for children unless accompanied by a supervising adult and are happier seeing little Johnny and Jane safely indoors surrounded by electronic media - seem to be in denial about what might be described as a crisis of childhood in our times; a crisis that includes everything from allergies and eating disorders to knife crime and substance abuse. 

Of course there are other (often very complex) reasons for these things. Arguably, we live in a dysfunctional culture, so a few hours spent playing in the park or fishing in a stream isn't going to provide a panacea. But I do believe that flowers and birdsong (and even just stroking next-door's cat) make happy and that happy children, as a rule, don't self-harm or want to stab other people. 


III. The Biophilia Hypothesis

Finally, I'd like to say a little more about E. O. Wilson's biophilia hypothesis, which, as we noted above, is the idea that human beings possess an innate tendency to seek out connections with nature and affiliate with other forms of life.* Romanticism and vitalism are, if you accept this, not just cultural and philosophical dispositions, but sensibilities encoded in our DNA. 

Again, I'm not entirely convinced of this: no one has yet identified a nature gene as such. Nevertheless, it's true, I suppose, that most people like flora and fauna; otherwise why would they buy indoor plants and voluntarily keep pets? The rich diversity of forms that compose the natural world is universally appreciated by artists, poets, and children who delight in colours, shapes, sounds, and other physical properties. And I suppose the spiritual reverence for animals and other natural phenomena in human cultures worldwide might also be cited as evidence for biophilia. 

However, what's also true is that modern humanity defines itself by its divergence and difference from nature and prides itself on its intimate relationship with machinery and technology and has spent the last 250 years or so (i.e. since the industrial revolution) wilfully exploiting natural resources, destroying habitats and exterminating species. **

Indeed, what is modern nihilism if not this ecocidal drive?  It might be suggested that the only thing more innate than our biophilia is our biophobia. People like to think they are defined by love, but actually it's fear, hate and cruelty that have shaped human history.

Notes:

* The term biophilia wasn't coined by Wilson: it was first used by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in his 1973 work The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Fromm defined it as 'the passionate love of life and of all that is alive'. Whilst I share this love, I also understand (after Nietzsche) that being alive is just a very rare and unusual way of being dead, so don't make such an absolute binary distinction, nor do I disprivilege, disparage, or denigrate the non-living objects that make up the vast majority of things in the universe.  

** It's important to note that biophilia isn't always juxtaposed in opposition to technophilia; that some theorists insist that man's technological drive is itself an extension of human evolution (and is therefore perfectly natural). Heidegger famously writes of a more original revealing outside of technological enframing, that would allow man to experience the call of a more primal truth, but as Keith Ansell-Pearson points out this appears to underestimate "the extent of technology's invention of the human animal and the nature and extent of its investment in mankind". See Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994) and Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life, (Routledge, 1997), p. 153.        

See:

Isabella Tree, Wilding, (Picador, 2018), pp. 295, 297. 

Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Algonquin Books, 2005).

Richard Louv, The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder, (Algonquin Books, 2011)

Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia, (Harvard University Press, 1984).

Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson (eds.), The Biophilia Hypothesis, (Island Press, 1993). 


For a related post to this one on why the language that speaks us as children matters, click here.

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.