Reflections on a Black Hole in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

A black hole as captured by the Event Horizon Telescope

Photograph: EHT Collaboration

As a nihilistic anti-theist, it made me very happy when astronomers released the first image of a supermassive black hole yesterday, thereby demonstrating that at the heart of the universe is not a loving presence, or judgemental God, but rather an enigmatic object defined by its absence and darkness.

Certainly that's true for the Messier 87 galaxy (or M87, as it's known); a giant elliptical galaxy, fifty-five million light years from Earth in the constellation of Virgo, that was discovered by the French star-gazer Charles Messier in 1781.

And it's doubtless true for our galaxy also (in fact, the EHT team are presently working on producing an image of the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way and hope to have such sometime soon). 

Further, one is tempted to suggest that if there's any truth in the old saying that suggests the microcosm corresponds with the macrocosm - as above, so below - then maybe it's the case that what was once called the soul is nothing but a tiny and mysterious core of chaos; a dark source of eternal creation that exists beyond the event horizon of the known self; a place wherein psychological law collapses and all human reality is distorted beyond recognition.

And who knows, maybe we'll one day even have a picture of that ...

Notes

The astonishing image of the black hole was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (which is actually a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile) using a technique known as interferometry. 

Of course, crackpot conspiracy theorists are, with depressing predictability, already claiming online that - just like the NASA moon landings - the picture is fake and the 200 scientists involved in the collaborative research project are therefore wilfully attempting to deceive the public as part of some elaborate hoax. 

Punk Friends Reunited

I remember with vague fondness my time at Trinity and All Saints College, which was then a small Catholic institution affiliated with the University of Leeds, but which has since gained full university status and autonomy.

Although I was there under the pretext of studying for a degree in Sociology and Media, essentially, like many undergraduates at this time, I was more interested in extracurricular activities that might broadly be categorised as messing around and fucking about. 

This included the cultivation of my own punk persona, Jimmy Jazz - after the song by the Clash - and becoming part of a small gang of misfits that numbered amongst its members:

(i) Clive Hooker, a drummer and DJ from Northampton, with a speech impediment that unfortunately made him sound like Klunk from Stop the Pigeon.

(ii) August Finer, a bass player with a knicker-invading smile and a mohican haircut; ultimately, a nice, middle-class Jewish boy, from Knutsford, posing as a punk (but who did have a brother in The Pogues).     

(iii) Kirk Field, a drama student (who couldn't really act) and a vocalist (who couldn't really sing), but a clever, funny, charming personality with a quiff and a penchant for magic mushrooms who went on to become a successful tour operator and events organiser for people who like to party.

During the years 1981-84, we four were as thick as thieves. But, amazingly, the moment we graduated the magic spell that bound us together was completely broken; even my friendship with Mr. Field, which had been extremely intimate and intense, didn't long survive the move to London.

I suppose there were reasons for this - but no real reason - and I'm told that it's a common phenomenon; that adolescent friendships often blossom with spectacular colour, but then quickly fade and die and that it's pointless trying to hold the petals on.

Regrets? I have a few. But then again, too few to mention. Besides, any lingering sense of loss only adds a delicious poignancy to nostalgic reflections like this; which is how dead friendships can continue to give pleasure.           

If the opportunity ever arose, I'd be happy to meet any or all of the above for a drink. But I suspect there'd be moments of awkward silence. And underneath the delight of seeing them again there'd be a slight sense of boredom and embarrassment and a longing to get away as soon as possible ...  

On Poetry, Fashion and Punk

Sonia Delaunay and Tristan Tzara

Robe poème, Le ventillateur tourne ... (1922)

Photo: R. Riss / The Delaunay Estate (Paris)

According to an article in Vogue, poetry is back in fashion and a number of recent collections have been inspired by verse.

Pierpaolo Piccioli, for example, collaborated with several poets to create a series of garments for his autumn/winter 2019 Valentino collection, in an attempt to redefine romanticism for a digital generation (i.e., to transport millennials beyond the screen and into the realm of dreams). 

But of course, as Rosalind Jana reminds us:

"The dialogue between clothes and poetry isn’t a novel one. In the '20s, textile artist Sonia Delaunay collaborated with [...] Dadaist poets including Tristan Tzara and Joseph Delteil to cover a series of dresses in snippets of their poetry. She called them robes poèmes. None of the resulting works still exist, but illustrations show gorgeous, colour-blocked garments with words snaking across arms and descending down skirts."

As a philosopher on the catwalk, I'm naturally excited by this combination of words and fabrics - or text and textiles - animated by the body of the wearer. However, as more punk-provocateur than poet, I'm perhaps more interested in the possibilities that fashion provides for political sloganeering rather than the reproduction of lines of verse.    

Thus, lovely as Delaunay's colourful designs could be - and as amusingly avant-garde as Tzara's poems were - I prefer the clothes of - or inspired by - McLaren and Westwood that incorporated Situationist slogans and lyrics by the Sex Pistols. I'm not sure to what extent (if any) these items brought about social and cultural change, but they certainly made one feel heroic and dangerous at the time.

I remember, for example, riding the rush hour tube in my youth and attempting to antagonise commuters by wearing a hand-painted shirt that read: 'Wise up sucker! Punch your boss, not the clock!'       

c. 1984/85

Notes

Rosalind Jana, 'Why Poetry is Back in Fashion', Vogue (15 March 2019): click here to read online.

The poem by Tristan Tzara that appears on the dress design by Sonia Delaunay above reads in the original French:

Le ventillateur tourne
dans le coeur de la tête
La fleur du froid serpent
de tendresse chimique

Susan de Muth's English translation reads:

The extractor fan turns 
In the head's heart
Bloom of the cold snake
Of chemical tenderness

See: Tristan Tzara and Susan de Muth, 'Dress Poems', Art in Translation, (Routledge, 2015), Vol. 7, No. 2, 304-308. Published online 17 August 2015: click here.    

When Ancient and Modern Worlds Collide: Notes on the Profane Fate of Plato's Sacred Olive Tree

A preserved section of Plato's olive tree

Agricultural University of Athens

According to legend, the ancient Greeks had the minor deity and culture-hero Aristaeus to thank for teaching them three essential skills: cheese-making, bee-keeping and - most crucially of all - the care and cultivation of olive trees.

For whilst the Greeks liked their feta and honey, they really loved their olive oil ...

Not only was the latter a key ingredient in their cuisine, for example, but they would anoint their kings and champion athletes with it. Indeed, even ordinary citizens, including philosophers, liked to rub olive oil onto their bodies in order to keep the skin supple and healthy.

Thus, it's really no surprise to discover that Plato's Academy was situated next to a sacred olive grove dedicated to the goddess Athena. It's believed that each of the twelve gated entrances to the school had its own tree standing as an evergreen sentinel and symbol of wisdom, fertility, and purity.

But there was also one very special olive tree under which Plato was said to have taught his students. And this tree continued to stand for thousands of years - long after the Academy itself had crumbled into dust - until, on one fateful day in October 1976, a bus was driven into it, breaking the noble trunk in two.

The upper section was taken to the Agricultural University where it has been preserved and displayed ever since. The lower part, however, including the enormous roots, remained at the original site until being dug up in January 2013 to serve as firewood by local people adversely affected by the Greek financial crisis.

Or so the popular story goes, as reported widely at the time by both local and international media ...  

Seeking to clarify the situation, however, the General Directorate of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage issued a (seemingly little-read) statement a few days later explaining that Plato's olive tree had, in fact, been uprooted and killed - not merely damaged - as a result of the accident 37 years earlier.

A new tree, with three trunks, had been planted in its place by the Agricultural University of Athens and it was one of these that was removed, having died, on January 6th, 2013 (the other two trunks remaining intact and in situ).       

Whilst there are amusing aspects to this tale, one can very well imagine what Plato - who esteemed truth above all things - would think of fake news: False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Photo: Olive Oil Times Collection

A Vagina Monologue

Poster for the film Chatterbox starring Candice Rialson 

(dir. Tom DeSimone, 1977)

I.

Many people are familiar with Eve Ensler's critically acclaimed but philosophically problematic play, The Vagina Monologues (1996). But not everyone knows of the artistic tradition to which it belongs and which can be traced back to an ancient folkloric - and phonocentric - origin.      

The vagina loquens is a particularly popular motif in France. When not working on his Encyclopédie, for example, the philosopher Diderot was also writing a novel entitled Les bijoux indiscrets (published anonymously in 1748), whose story concerns an African sultan who possesses a magical ring - given to him by a genie - that when rubbed and pointed in the right direction grants female genitalia the autonomous power of speech.   

This is often awkward for the women concerned, as what shameless cunts most like to speak of when given the opportunity is past amorous experience, including acts of infidelity that their owners might prefer to keep secret and remain silent about.

Now, whilst I quite like this idea of an independently-minded, free-speaking vagina, nobody likes a rat and nobody wants a snatch that snitches. Also, I have problems with the idea of locating a moral-confessional notion of truth in the vagina, thereby simply turning the cunt into another form of soul and reviving traditional ideas of sex and subjectivity.


II.

In effect, this brings us back to some of the philosophical criticisms made of Ensler's play. For example, some feminists, trans activists and genderqueer individuals are far from happy to see women being reduced once more to their biology and are dismissive of the claim that they can be politically empowered via a form of cunt-awareness. 

Critiquing The Vagina Monologues from a very different perspective - but with even more overt hostility - is Camille Paglia, who regards the play as a bourgeois perversion of feminism and a psychological poison that denigrates men and celebrates victimhood.

Whilst I don't quite share Paglia's almost obsessive insistence on discussing female sexuality in terms of elemental mysteries and bloody horror, I do agree with her that Ensler's sentimental and complacent humanism in which the vagina is turned into a user-friendly safe space and given a winning personality is deeply depressing.

Ultimately, of course, it's not for me to suggest what a speaking vagina might have to tell us. But one would hope it might amuse and challenge, rather than bore to tears by merely repeating what it's already heard the mouth blabber on numerous occasions.

Either that, or, preferably, just stay mute with a noiseless soft power of its own that lies beyond all truth (unless it be the truth of zero), all identity, and all metaphysics of presence. In fact, that's precisely what I want the cunt to be; a kind of ontological black hole or site of sheer loss, as silent and as inviting as a freshly dug grave. 

In Support of Rachel Riley (With a Brief Note on Israel and Anti-Zionism)

Photo: Mike Marsland / Getty Images

I.

Apart from being very beautiful and highly intelligent, Countdown's resident mathematician and co-presenter, Rachel Riley, is also a woman of great courage and integrity - as demonstrated by her standing up to the anti-Semitism of those who regard themselves as belonging to the radical left (and/or Corbyn's Labour Party), something for which, as might be imagined, she has received appalling abuse from online cowards. 

Born in Rochford, Essex, educated at Oxford, Ms. Riley describes herself as Jewish (albeit non-religious) and so is sensitive to the question of anti-Semitism and fully entitled to speak out on it: this is not prostituting her heritage, as one (now suspended) member of the Labour Party tweeted; nor is she poisoning the memory of her ancestors (quite the contrary).   

Despite the abuse - much of it followed by the hashtag #BoycottRachelRiley - I'm glad to see Ms. Riley announce her intention to carry on sharing her views on social media and elsewhere. I'm also pleased to see that several of her celebrity pals have come to her defence, including David Baddiel, David Schneider and Katherine Ryan.

I'm not a celebrity. Nor am I a friend of Ms. Riley's. But I would also like to add my support here. Special mention should also go to the actress Tracy Ann Oberman who, like Rachel Riley, has dared to take a stand and call out anti-Semitism. She too has my admiration and fond regards.

II.

Many people insist that anti-Zionism is distinct from anti-Semitism and I'm broadly sympathetic to this argument; clearly, there can be perfectly legitimate criticism made of Israel and its government.

Having said that, we all know that anti-Zionism is often a coded (or disguised) form of anti-Semitism and, ultimately, like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, I think one has to show solidarity with the State of Israel and question the thinking behind Deleuze's support for Palestinian terror attacks, or Badiou's desire to see Israel disappear off the face of the earth (perceiving as he does its very existence to be a crime).       

And I say this not as someone who has a vested interest in politics or is particulary well-informed about all the issues, but, rather as someone who, like Larry David, would be perfectly happy to eat great chicken anywhere and who knows that the penis doesn't care about race, creed, or colour ...*


* Note: I'm referring here to the season 8 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm entitled 'Palestinian Chicken', (dir. Robert Weide, 2011) in which Larry, a Jew - a big Jew - meets Shara, a virulently anti-Semitic Palestinian (played by Anne Bedian). Despite their differences, they are instantly attracted to one another and amusingly use the political and religious tension between themselves to heighten and intensify a sexual encounter: click here.   

What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?

But don't tell my heart / My achy breaky heart

I just don't think he'd understand

As Nietzsche was fond of pointing out, in so far as antithetical values exist, then things often originate in their opposite.

Thus, it's not surprising that the modern American success story is one rooted in the terrible failure of the original pioneers in conflict with the inhuman conditions of the continent itself. They eventually tamed the American wilderness, but at an appalling cost to themselves and it was later generations who reaped the reward of their efforts.    

D. H. Lawrence, who has a unique insight into American history and literature, identifies this cost, arguing that in order to break the back of the country, the early Americans had to sacrifice something essential within themselves: "the softness, the floweriness, the natural tenderness" [119].  

In other words, America was conquered and subdued, but only once the pioneers were heart broken.

This broken heartedness had two main consequences: firstly, the people became creatures of pure will; secondly, they (unconsciously) became physically repulsive to one another. With regard to the first of these consequences, Lawrence writes:

"The heart was broken. But the will, the determination to conquer the land and make it submit to productivity, this was not broken. The will-to-success and the will-to-produce became clean and indomitable once the sympathetic heart was broken." [120] 

Having repeatedly come up against the malevolent spirit of the American continent and been defeated by it, the early settlers lost their instinctive belief in the inherent kindness of other people and the essential goodness of the universe itself (a belief which, according to Lawrence, lies at the core of the human heart).

When this happens, the result is either "despair, bitterness, and cynicism" [120], or people make their hearts hard - hard enough to eventually shatter - and exercise a new (individual) will; a will-to-succeed if possible, but, ultimately, to persist no matter what and in the face of everything:

"It is not animality - far from it. [...] They have a strange, stony will-to-persist, that is all. [...] It is a minimum lower than the savage [...] Because it is a willed minimum, sustained from inside by resistance, brute resistance against any flow of consciousness except that of the barest, most brutal egoistic self-interest."[123]

Of course, they continue to worship a benevolent God and subscribe to a moral world order - continue to be good neighbours and upstanding citizens, etc. - but their faith and behaviour no longer comes from the heart and they are no longer genuinely connected by a shared warmth of fellow-feeling. They fall out of touch into wilfulness and idealism. And this leads to the second consequence:

"While the old sympathetic flow continues, there are violent hostilities between people, but they are not secretly repugnant to one another. Once the heart is broken, people become repulsive to one another [...] They smell in each other's nostrils. [...] Once the blood-sympathy breaks, and only the nerve-sympathy is left, human beings become secretly intensely repulsive to one another, physically, and sympathetic only mentally and spiritually." [121]

I don't know if there's any truth in this great psychic and physical transformation, but, amusingly, it helps Lawrence explain the American twin obsessions with plumbing and personal hygiene:

"The secret physical repulsion between people is responsible for the perfection of American 'plumbing', American sanitation, and American kitchens, utterly white-enamelled and anti-septic. It is revealed in the awful advertisements such as those about 'halitosis', or bad breath. It is responsible for the American nausea at coughing, spitting, or any of those things. The American townships don't mind hideous litter of tin cans and paper and broken rubbish. But they go crazy at the sight of human excrement." [121] 
 
As Lawrence goes on to note, this repulsion for the physicality of others - and, indeed, our own bodies - has spread from America to Europe and the rest of the modern world, as our literature reveals:

"There it is, in James Joyce, in Aldous Huxley, in André Gide [...] in all the very modern novels, the dominant note is the repulsiveness, intimate physical repulsiveness of human flesh. It is the expression of absolutely genuine experience." [122]

Of course, Lawrence wrote this ninety years ago, so doubtless things have changed since then; though whether they have changed for the better or for the worse is debatable. Perhaps the inward revulsion for any kind of physical contact with other people has only intensified and extended - thus the triumph of social media.

For whilst there may be various forms of online abuse and trolling to contend with, at least friends don't smell on Facebook ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Bottom Dogs, by Edward Dahlberg', Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 117-24. All page refs. given in the post are to this work.   

It's worth noting that despite what Lawrence says here about the dangers of a broken heart, he had himself expressed a poetic preference for such: "For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. / It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack." See 'Pomegranate', in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923): click here to read online. It can also be found in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), on p. 231. 

The image used for this post is the Broken Heart Emoji on Apple iOS 11.2: see emojipedia.org for details.

The lyric quoted underneath is from 'Achy Breaky Heart', a country song written by Donald L. Von Tress and most famously recorded by Billy Ray Cyrus for the album Some Gave All (Mercury Records, 1992). The track was also released as a single on 23 March 1992. The lyrics are © Universal Music Publishing Group.

D. H. Lawrence's Vision of a Demonic America

Jasper Johns: Flag (1954-55)

moma.org

I. 

I've never been to America. But I have always loved all things American, including the people. Perhaps this is due in some mysterious way to the fact that my mother-to-be dated a GI during the War (he even proposed and planned to take his teen-bride back with him to New York, but my mother-to-be said no).

Whatever the reason, I've always thought of myself as, in some sense, American and I fully appreciate why so many Brits - including Christopher Hitchens and Johnny Rotten - are proud to become US citizens.

Despite his determination to remain English in the teeth of all the world, I also believe D. H. Lawrence would have made a fine American. Indeed, it's rather surprising that he didn't settle in the States and turn his back forever on the country of his birth, which treated him so poorly on so many occasions.*        

For whilst Lawrence despised many aspects of modern life in America - telephones, tinned meat, automobiles, indoor plumbing, incomes and ideals, etc. - he was fascinated by the spirit of place and the alien quality also of American art-speech that he discovered in the classic literature:

"The furthest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached. The European moderns are all trying to be extreme. The great Americans I mention just were it." [12]

I think that's true: which is why, for example, I think The Scarlet Letter a more provocative novel than L'histoire de l'œil.

I also think Lawrence might be right to suggest that the real American day hasn't dawned as yet. And that when it does, it'll surprise everyone - not least the pale-faced, apple-pie loving idealists who think of themselves as the true Americans of today. For the America to come will be one that has reckoned at last with the full force of the daimon that belongs to the American continent itself.   

Troubling as it is to contemplate, I admire Lawrence's queer dark vision of a demonic America, inhabited by a people whose destiny "is to destroy the whole corpus of the white psyche, the white consciousness" [81]. This doesn't mean primitive regression - Lawrence is clear that there can be no going back - but it does entail a dusky-bodied posthumanism with a rattle snake coiled at its heart.**  

II.

Even before he had made his first visit in 1922, Lawrence was pinning his highest hopes on America. In a letter of October 1915 to the American editor, critic and poet Harriet Monroe, he writes:

"I must see America. I think one can feel hope there. I think that there life comes up from the roots, crude but vital. Here the whole tree of life is dying. It is like being dead: the underworld. I must see America. I believe it is beginning, not ending." 

Lawrence's contrasting of American vitality with European deadness is a constant in his work from this period. Thus, it's not surprising to find that in a foreword written for Studies in Classic American Literature, he attempts to persuade Americans to get up off their knees before European culture and tradition and be thankful for their own barbaric freedom from the past.

Like Nietzsche, Lawrence is only interested in serving history to the extent that it serves life; when it becomes disadvantageous - i.e., when it merely instructs without increasing or directly quickening human activity - then he's happy to draw a line under it.

It's a pity, says Lawrence, that Americans are always so wonderstruck by European monuments: "After all, a heap of stone is only a heap of stone - even if it is Milan cathedral. And who knows that it isn't a horrid bristly burden on the face of the earth?" [381]

He continues:

"America, therefore, should leave off being quite so prostrate with admiration. [...]
      Let Americans turn to America, and to that very America which has been rejected and almost annihilated. [...] America must turn again to catch the spirit of her own dark, aboriginal continent.
      That which was abhorrent to the Pilgrim Fathers and to the Spaniards, that which was called the Devil, the black demon of savage America, this great aboriginal spirit the Americans must recognise again, recognise, and embrace. The devil [...] of our forefathers hides the Godhead which we seek. [...]
       It means a surpassing of the old European life-form. It means a departure from the old European morality [...] It means even a departure from the old range of emotions and sensibilities. [...]
      [...] Now is the day when Americans must become fully, self-reliantly conscious of their own inner responsibility. They must be ready for a new act, a new extension of life. They must pass the bounds." [383-85]       

In a sense, as these lines indicate, Lawrence is transferring Nietzsche's project of a revaluation of all values into the wild west. One can almost picture the overman in a poncho, cowboy hat and spurs - a bit like Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name. (Readers might think I'm only teasing here, but, as Lawrence says, the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic ... and a killer.)*** 

 thedigitalpilgrimage.wordpress.com 

Notes

* In a letter written to his friend Catherine Carswell in 1916, Lawrence makes it clear that he had, at this time, determined that he wanted to leave England for good and at the earliest possible opportunity, transferring all his life to America, a country in which he could "feel the new unknown". 

** See what Lawrence writes in 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo' (Final Version, 1923), in Studies in Classic American Literature, pp. 126-28. And see also his remarks in 'Indians and an Englishman', in Mornings and Mexico and Other Essays, pp. 119-20. The essential point is that whilst Lawrence advocates Americans picking up where the native peoples left off, he also wants those who accept this challenge to perfect the old way of being as a new body of truth in the future; not make a vain and naive attempt to simply return to the past: I can't cluster at the drum any more. 

*** Reading Eastwood's movies - particularly the Dollars Trilogy - in terms of a postmoral existentialism, is not an original move on my part; several scholars have produced interesting work in this area. See for example the collection of essays ed. Richard T. McClelland and Brian B. Clayton, The Philosophy of Clint Eastwood, (University Press of Kentucky, 2014).

 
Bibliography

D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.

D. H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
 
D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II (1913-16), ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), letter 1028, to Harriet Monroe, 26 October, 1915.

D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III (1916-21), ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), letter 1306, to Catherine Carswell, 7 November, 1916.

Nietzsche, 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life', Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1997). 


Many thanks to James Walker of The Digital Pilgrimage for use of the Lawrence as cowboy image.

He That Aches With Amorous Love: Lawrence's Critique of Walt Whitman's Idealism

Lawrence's essay on Whitman in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) is more piss-take than critical analysis. Lawrence is particularly mocking of the American poet's claim to be he that aches with amorous love, which he thinks a ludicrous assertion born of the latter's idealism rather than genuine feeling.

Better, says Lawrence, to have a belly-ache, which is at least localised. For man is a limited creature and if he aches with love (i.e. physical longing) it's usually for someone or something specific; such as the girl next door, for example. Only some sort of superhuman being aches with amorous love for the entire universe: "And the danger of the superman is that he is mechanical." [149]  

Whitman insists on some kind of elective affinity between himself and every Tom, Dick and Harry he should ever happen to encounter and relates this to the gravitational pull of the earth: 'Does not all matter, aching, attract all matter? / So the body of me to all I meet or know.' 

In what is, for me, a crucial passage, Lawrence writes:

"What can be more mechanical? The difference between life and matter is that life, living things, living creatures, have the instinct of turning right away from some matter, and of blissfully ignoring the bulk of most matter, and of turning towards only some certain bits of specially selected matter. As for living creatures all hurtling together into one great snowball, why, most very living creatures spend the greater part of their time getting out of sight, smell or sound of the rest of the living creatures. Even bees only cluster on their own queen. And that is sickening enough. Fancy all white humanity clustering on one another like a lump of bees.
      No Walt, you give yourself away. Matter does gravitate, helplessly. But men are tricky-tricksy, and they shy all sorts of ways." [149]  

If Whitman finds himself gravitating towards everyone it's a sign not only of his promiscuous idealism, but of something having gone very wrong with him; the "lonely phallic monster" [150] of his individual and sensual self has either been murdered or mentalised. Or allowed to go all mushy and leak out into the universe.    

Healthy individuals keep themselves to themselves; happy to meet and embrace a few others, but unwilling to touch most people with a barge-pole.

Whitman, however, insists with false exuberance on grasping everyone to his bosom, believing as he does in One Identity as the great desideratum: "Walt becomes in his own person the whole world, the whole universe, the whole eternity of time", until he reaches the supreme state of Allness. Or until, as Lawrence rather cruelly says, he becomes a fat old man bloated with "senile, self-conscious sensuosity" [151].    

Lawrence - to his credit - knows that there are many things outside of himself that, in their very otherness, he can never know or assimilate: "But Walt wouldn't have it. He was everything and everything was in him. He drove an automobile with a very fierce headlight, along the track of a fixed idea, through the darkness of this world." [152]

Whitman was a great poet. But the very greatest poets are those who sleep under bushes in the dark and prefer the trackless wildernesses, or the woodpaths, to zooming along the Highway of Love in one direction only. For it becomes a dead end at last, as we'll eventually discover. 

Ultimately, Whitman's major mistake was confusing his own message of sympathy, with Christian moral-idealism: "He didn't follow his Sympathy. Try as he might, he kept on automatically interpreting it as Love, as Charity." [158]

What a shame, says Lawrence, that Whitman didn't see that sympathy is a form of compassion, i.e.,  feeling with rather than feeling for, and has nothing to do with identifying (or merging) with others in the name of solidarity, social justice, and self-sacrifice.

In other words, sympathy means "partaking of the passion" [159] which inspires the other; it doesn't mean that their experience, their pain, their struggle, is yours. It means lending support where and when you can, but without trying to walk in shoes (or wear headscarves) that don't belong to you. 

For sympathy also means drawing limits, even to love, and preserving integrity: Love what the soul loves; hate what the soul hates; be compassionate, but don't be an indiscriminate. And remember: it's better to display starry indifference, than sentimental stupidity and false feeling. 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman', Studies in Classic American Literature (Final Version, 1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 148-61. 

See also the Intermediate Version (1919) of the Whitman study in the above edition, pp. 358-69, and the 1921-22 version which appears as Appendix V, pp. 401-17. In many respects, these versions are more interestingly complex, although Lawrence's argument remains the same: Whitman is the best modern example of the great triumph into infinitude. 

Every Little (Act of Animal Cruelty) Helps ...

A nest full of swallows 

Photo by Amy Sancetta / AP

The shocking tale of retail giant Tesco using nets to prevent returning swallows from nesting in one of their trolley parks, was widely reported in the press earlier this month and rightly caused a storm of protest from bird lovers up and down the country and across social media.   

As the writer and conservationist Kate Blincoe rightly argued, this isn't just a small inconvenience for the birds, but an action that can have fatal consequences, as swallows - a species that, like so many others, has suffered a significant decline in numbers during recent decades - return faithfully to the same breeding sites year after year.

At best, therefore, the extensive use of netting in this case - making the birds' summer home completely inaccessible - will result in no eggs being laid (and thus no young being raised); at worst, the adult birds may become trapped and die. What it doesn't do is encourage the birds to find alternative nesting sites, as some spokescunt for the supermarket suggested.

Thankfully, after Kate and others started an online campaign to save the swallows - and after hundreds of customers threatened to boycott the Norwich store at the centre of the row - Tesco relented and removed the netting, allowing the birds to find refuge after their long migratory flight from Southern Africa.    

Unfortunately, however, just as one swallow does not a summer make, nor does one happy ending mean the national scandal of bird netting has been resolved. For this incident in a Tesco trolley park is by no means an isolated one. Farmers and developers all over England, are covering trees and hedgerows with nets in order to prevent birds from nesting, so that they can then dig the trees and hedgerows up - a practice that is not only perfectly legal, but increasingly widespread as more and more land is set aside for new housing.     

I agree entirely with Ms. Blincoe, using nets in this manner is not only vile and pernicious, it's anti-life. And every little act of animal cruelty such as this helps reinforce my misanthropic contempt for Man.  

See: Kate Blincoe, 'Are nets to stop swallows nesting any way to treat the natural world?', The Guardian (21 March 2019): click here to read online.

See also: Samantha Fisher, 'Why are nets appearing over trees and hedges?', BBC News website (23 March, 2019): click here. 

Sign: the petition to make netting hedgerows to prevent birds from nesting a criminal offence: click here.