In Praise of Denial

Mike Brennan: Denial 

(Acrylic on canvas, 24" x 30")

mikebrennan.me

It will surprise no one to discover that Shakespeare is the most oft-quoted of all English writers.

Whilst it's probably impossible even for literary scholars to definitively say what his greatest lines are, the good people at No Sweat Shakespeare have kindly provided a list of 50 famous quotes, beginning with To be, or not to be and ending with What light through yonder window breaks.*

It's not the worst list in the world, but it's hardly an imaginative or controversial selection. And, what's more, it doesn't include my own favourite line from Shakespeare: I know thee not, old man ...

This line, from Act 5 Scene 5 of Henry IV, Part 2, has particular resonance to me at this time and deserves much greater critical attention, because the need to deny - our elders, our loved ones, our teachers, our leaders, and, ultimately, ourselves - is an absolutely crucial requirement in the process of becoming what one is.** 

Prince Hal, upon assuming the crown and becoming king, knew it; Zarathustra, who instructs his followers that they must ultimately lose all masters and learn to hate their friends, knew it; and even Jesus, who accepted the kiss from Judas and predicted Peter's triple denial, knew it.

Indeed, Christ himself denied his own mother, when he notoriously put the question to her: Woman, what have I to do with thee? As a reader of Lawrence, I have long viewed this remark made to Mary as a sign of failure. But now - in the position of a long term, full-time carer for an elderly mother with dementia - I'm rather more sympathetic.

That is to say, I'm tempted - in order to preserve my own health and sanity - to turn my back and walk away, because too much love and loyalty to another, or to the past, can be deadly and anyone who wishes to live and fulfil their own destiny has to offer a seemingly cruel denial of someone or something at sometime or other, regardless of the consequences or the pain caused.  

We deny and must deny, says Nietzsche, because something in us wants to live and affirm itself.

There is even, we might suggest, an existential imperative to sell out (i.e., to compromise one's integrity and betray one's principles); not necessarily for personal gain, but in order to leap into the future and carry forward the banner of life. A creative individual must repudiate the familiarity of the past (including old relationships) if he or she is to adventure onward into the unknown.

But this isn't easy: far easier to martyr oneself and to shrivel away inside an old life; a victim of that moral poison and great depressant called pity.  

Notes

 
* Readers interested in the full list of quotes provided by No Sweat Shakespeare should click here.

** Obviously, I'm not talking about denial here in psychological terms, i.e., as a coping mechanism used to avoid confronting an emotionally disturbing truth, or denialism in the political sense of denying historical or scientific fact.

The line from Jesus can be found in John 2:1-5 and the line from Nietzsche in The Gay Science, IV. 307.

You Need Hands

Single release from The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1979)

I.

In his 1925 essay 'Why the Novel Matters', D. H. Lawrence challenges the mind/body superstition by musing on his hand in the act of writing. Why, he asks, should it be regarded as "a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it".  

Why indeed. For it is the hand which - animated with a life all its own - forms direct knowledge of the strange universe that it touches, grasps, and handles. And it is the hand which plays with a pen upon the page, slipping gaily along and jumping "like a grasshopper to dot an i".*

The hand, says Lawrence, is also capable of rudimentary thought and experiences boredom if obliged to engage in the same activity for too long. Ultimately, it has just as much ontological reality as the brain: "Why should I imagine that there is a me which is more me than my hand is?"    

Why indeed. In fact, the philosopher Martin Heidegger gives the human hand special significance, believing as he does that it is what distinguishes man from all other beasts, including the great apes. Thus, as noted in a recent post on simian aesthetics, whilst Heidegger would readily admit that a chimp possesses prehensile, multi-fingered appendages capable of holding and manipulating objects - including paintbrushes - he would not allow that a chimp has hands in the unique (Daseinesque) manner that human beings have hands.

For Heidegger, there's an ontological abyss between the hand of Picasso, for example, and the hand of Pierre Brassau, that is not simply based on evolved anatomical difference. Derrida, however, has interrogated Heidegger's thinking on the hand and animality and argues that his insistence that apes have no hands (only organs that can grasp) is simply dogmatic speciesism which, as with all such oppositional thinking (or dualism), serves to land him back in the metaphysical soup so to speak.    

II.

Those interested in knowing what Heidegger says in more detail are encouraged to read What is Called Thinking? (1951-52). In this crucial late text Heidegger addresses the question of the human and what defines our unique existence or way of being in the world (i.e., what puts the Da- in Dasein and sets man apart from all other species).

Not wanting to fall back into the ontotheology that sustains traditional humanism, his answer isn't the mind or anything to do with the soul, it is, rather, die Hand; man is a kind of signifying monster who seems to be desperately trying to articulate something and the hand is the organ par excellence with which he gestures, points, and indicates - as well as reaches, receives, carries and welcomes.

Or, as Max Bygraves once wrote:

You need hands 
To hold someone you care for 
You need hands
To show that you're sincere **

You also need hands, as Bygraves goes on to suggest, to wipe away a tear, to hold a new born baby, and to give thanks to God in prayer. I don't know if Heidegger knew this very popular song (a German version entitled Deine Hände by Gerhard Wendland was released in July 1959), but I think he may have liked it (then again, maybe not).   

Insisting that thought is not a disembodied or merely cerebral process, Heidegger argues that man only really thinks when he creatively engages with the world with his hands. If he (somewhat predictably) writes of carpenters and cabinet-makers working away in some hamlet on the edge of the Black Forest, we are surely encouraged to extend what he says to include all people - but not Koko the gorilla or Congo the chimp.

Apes lack hands because they do not dwell within language (and so can never sing along with Max), concludes Heidegger, displaying the same problematic anthropocentrism that has characterised so much Western philosophy.

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Why the Novel Matters', Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 193. 

Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, (Harper and Row, 1968). Originally published as Was Heißt Deken? (Max Niemeyer Verlag,1954), the book consists of a series of lectures given by Heidegger in 1951-52 at the University of Freiburg. To read online as a pdf, click here.  

Jacques Derrida, 'Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand', trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., in Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John Sallis, (University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 161-96. To read online as a pdf, click here. 

* Like Lawrence, Roland Barthes also liked to muse upon the physical act of writing - or what he termed scription - i.e., "the action by which we manually trace signs". Ultimately, for both men, writing is the hand and, in a wider sense, the body: "its impulses, controlling mechanisms, rhythms, weights, glides, complications, flights ..." It hardly needs to be said that Barthes had no time for the typewriter or word processor (in this he has much in common with Heidegger who believed it tore writing away from the essential domain of the hand and mechanically passed the word along, turning it into an element of commerce and communication). See Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980, trans. Linda Coverdale, (Northwestern University Press, 2009), p. 193.

** Max Bygraves, You Need Hands (Decca, 1958). Written by Max Bygraves (under the name Roy Irwin). Performed by Max Bygraves with The Clarke Brothers and Eric Rogers and his Orchestra. Lyrics © Lakeview Music Publishing Co. Ltd. Click here to play on YouTube. For me, the song has special interest due to the fact that Malcolm chose to record it for The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and his performance of the song with Helen of Troy, in Highgate Cemetery, is one of the more touching scenes in Julien Temple's 1980 film: click here.

Simian Aesthetics 2: The Case of Pierre Brassau

Pierre Brassau (aka Peter the Chimp) 
seen here in his studio

Having discussed the case of Congo in the first post in this two-part series on simian aesthetics, I'd like here to say something on the amusing tale of Pierre Brassau - aka Peter the Chimp - and his fraudulent foray into the art world ...  

Peter, a four-year-old West African chimpanzee who resided at a zoo in Sweden, was at the centre of a 1964 hoax perpetrated on the art world by the tabloid journalist Åke Axelsson, who came up with the idea of exhibiting a series of paintings made by a monkey under the pretence that they were by a previously undiscovered (human) artist called Pierre Brassau.

Axelsson sought to demonstrate that contemporary art critics were full of shit and wouldn't be able to tell the difference between canvases daubed with paint by a great ape and those produced by leading members of the avant-garde.

(Axelsson, of course, thereby betrays his own prejudices: he's a sneering reactionary who dislikes (because he doesn't understand) modern art and he's full of anthropocentric conceit in that he doesn't for one moment consider the possibility that a chimp might be able to produce art that is of genuine interest and value.)

Having enlisted the help of his keeper, Axelsson gave Peter painting materials and encouraged him to express himself. Unfortunately, at first Peter seemed to prefer eating the oil paints - particularly the cobalt blue - rather than using them to decorate a canvas. However, he eventually got the hang of it and produced a number of abstract works. 

Axelsson then selected what he believed to be the four best and arranged for their exhibition at a gallery in Gothenburg, alongside works by an international array of artists.

Praise for Brassau's work was almost unanimous, with one critic, Rolf Anderberg, writing that whilst most of the canvases on display were ponderous, those of Brassau were painted with powerful strokes that twisted with furious fastidiousness and determination. Brassau, concluded Anderberg, "is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer".

After the hoax was revealed, Anderberg - to his credit - refused to change his opinion and insisted that, ape or not, Peter's work was still by far the best at the exhibition. A private collector, Bertil Eklöt, seemed to agree and purchased one of the works (albeit at the bargain price of just $90).

As for what happened to Peter once his brief career as an artist came to an end, I don't know. He was transferred to Chester Zoo, in 1969, and, presumably, he lived out the rest of his life happily eating bananas in anonymity.


For more detail and images, visit the Museum of Hoaxes website: click here.

For the first post in this two-part series on simian aesthetics, click here.

A Pierre Brassau original 

(untitled, 1964, oil on canvas)

Simian Aesthetics 1: The Case of Congo the Chimp

Congo and one of his more mature works

Everyone knows that monkeys make great copyists. We even have a verb in English, to ape, meaning to mimic someone or something closely (albeit in a rather clumsy, sometimes mocking manner). But what isn't so widely known is that they can also be original artists, producing works that have real aesthetic value and interest in and of themselves and not merely because they are produced by the hairy hand of a non-human primate.  

Take the case of Congo, for example, who, with the help of the zoologist and surrealist Desmond Morris, developed a lyrical style of painting that has much in common with abstract impressionism.

Congo first came to Morris's attention in 1956 when, aged two, he was given a pencil and paper. It was obvious the young chimp had innate drawing ability and a basic sense of composition. In addition, Congo had a very clear idea of whether a picture had or had not been completed: if a work was taken away that he didn't consider finished, he would scream and work himself up into a tantrum; but once he considered a work to be done, then he would refuse to work on it further, no matter what inducements were made.

Within a couple of years Congo had made several hundred sketches and paintings and during the late 1950s he made frequent TV appearances, showcasing his talents live from London Zoo alongside Morris. Congo became even more of a simian cause célèbre when the Institute of Contemporary Arts mounted a large exhibition of his work (along with that by other talented apes) in the autumn of 1957.

Discussing this event in a recent interview,* Morris explained that the importance of the show lay in the fact that it was the first time that zoology and fine art had come together in order to examine the evolutionary roots of man's aesthetic delight in images. Morris also recalls how originally nervous the ICA were about the exhibition, worrying, for example, that other all too human artists might find the idea absurd and insulting. Thankfully, it was decided by ICA founders Roland Penrose and Herbert Read that the show had to go on. 

And, as it turned out, critical reaction to the exhibition within the art world and wider media was mixed, but mostly on the positive side. Indeed, when Picasso heard about Congo, he immediately showed interest and hung one of the chimp's paintings on his studio wall. Later, when asked by a journalist why he had done so, Picasso went over and bit him.

Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí were also impressed by Congo's work. The former delighted in the intelligence of composition and the latter compared Congo's attempt to control his brushstrokes favourably to the random splashing of Jackson Pollock, saying that whilst Pollock painted with the hand of an animal, Congo painted with a hand that was quasi-human.**

Sadly, Congo's brief but glittering career as an artist ended with his death from tuberculosis in 1964, when he was aged just ten years old. His legacy, however, lives on, and in 2005 Bonham's auctioned a number of his paintings alongside those by Renoir and Warhol. Amusingly, whilst the works of these illustrious human painters didn't sell on the day, Congo's sold for far more than expected, with an American collector snapping up three works for over $25,000. 

We arrive, finally, at the obvious question: Is a picture painted by a chimpanzee really a work of art?

For me, the answer has to be yes and to argue otherwise does seem suspiciously like speciesism. Of course, as Desmond Morris acknowledges, this is not to say Congo was a great artist or that his work deserves the same critical attention as that given to work of the human artists named above. But neither does it deserve to be dismissed as rubbish. Ultimately, Congo's fascinating canvases are, as Morris says, "extraordinary records of an experiment which proves beyond doubt that we aren't the only species that can control visual patterns".    

Notes

*A transcript of this interview in which Morris discusses the controversial exhibition Paintings by Chimpanzees (1957) can be found on the archive page of the ICA website: click here. The transcript is the third of a three part series based on an interview by Melanie Coles with Desmond Morris at his studio in Oxford, 2016 (ed. Melanie Coles and Maya Caspari).

See also Desmond Morris's study of the picture-making behaviour of the great apes in relation to the art produced by humans; The Biology of Art, (Methuen, 1962). 

**Heidegger, of course, wouldn't allow this statement to pass unchallenged, believing as he did that the human hand is what distinguishes man from all other beasts, including the ape. Thus, according to Heidegger, whilst chimps possess prehensile organs capable of holding and manipulating objects, they do not have hands in the unique manner that humans being do. Indeed, for Heidegger, there is an ontological abyss between Pollock's hand and Congo's. I shall discuss this at greater length in a forthcoming post.

Readers interested in part two of this post on simian aesthetics - the case of Pierre Brassau - should click here.

D. H. Lawrence and the Poetry of Evil

Surprisingly, evil isn't an idea that features very often in Lawrence's poetry. 

Indeed, prior to the handful of late verses that I wish to comment on here, I can recall only two earlier poems in which the concept appears: 'Cypresses', wherein Lawrence makes the Nietzschean claim that life-denial is the only real form of immorality; and one of the Pansies in which he suggests that the root of our modern iniquity is free trade and so calls for a religiously inspired communism (as if that wouldn't result in the tyranny of evil men). 

Happily, the Last Poems Notebook provides some further reflections on the question of evil ...

Evil is homeless

In this verse, Lawrence challenges the conventional idea that evil is located in (or leads to) Hell. Hell, he says, is the "home of souls lost in darkness", not of evil. For evil is decentred and without dwelling-place. It flourishes on the "outskirt fringes of nowhere"; a non-place [ου-τοπία] where grey carrion-eaters roam in perpetual twilight and human beings fall into fixed automatism.

What then is Evil?

The invention of the wheel is often seen as marking a great leap forward for humanity, having a fundamental impact on the development of civilisation. For Lawrence, however, "the wheel is the first principle of evil" - both within the external world of things and material activity and within the inner workings of the psyche.

For when the mind consists of a circle in a spiral and a wheel within a wheel, turning "on the hub of the ego" and driven by the will - and when "the wheel of the conscious self spins on in absolution", liberated from "the great necessities of being" (such as strife and kisses) - then, says Lawrence, we witness the birth of pure evil.  

The Evil World-Soul

Although he doesn't here speak of the demiurge, Lawrence does insist on the existence of a malevolent world-spirit. However, he again blames this on man and technology; "it is the soul of man only, and his machines / which has brough to pass this fearful thing called evil".   

Using a word that was very much in vogue in the 1920s - having only recently entered the English language via Karel Čapek's seminal sci-fi play R. U. R. - Lawrence declares: "The Robot is the unit of evil. / And the symbol of the Robot is the wheel revolving."

Later in this series of verses, Lawrence identifies more familiar sources of evil, such as war,  although it's important to note that he insists that strife is a good thing and that killing one's mortal enemy may in fact be a pure form of passion and communion. 

Murder, however, is always evil and modern warfare fought with guns, explosives and chemical weapons, is essentially murderous and thus, as such, profoundly evil. 

Departure

Finally, we come to a poem in which Lawrence calls upon a few individuals to find their courage in the face of the corruption that threatens them and decisively turn their backs on it: "Now some men must get up and depart / from evil, or all is lost." 

Lawrence also extends his list of evil things to include not only old favourites, such as spinning wheels, but also all forms of abstraction: as found in the fields of finance, science, education, popular culture, politics, etc. We must say no to all these things - setting up a profitable business, turning on the radio, believing the false claims of astronomers - if we are to make ourselves impregnable against evil.     

Of course, this would mean leading a life at such odds with almost everyone and everything that one might question both the feasibility and desirability of doing so ...

Notes

All of the above poems may be found in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), as can the related verses 'Doors', 'Death is not Evil, and 'Evil is Mechanical'. 

Readers might be interested to know that Lawrence originally wrote a 123-line poem entitled 'When Satan Fell' which he then broke into the evil series of verses discussed here. 

The poem in Pansies that I mention is 'The root of our evil' (ibid., 418-19). 

Surprise musical bonus: click here. 

 

Art, Sex and Dolphins (with Reference to the Work of Jeff Koons)

Jeff Koons: Antiquity 2 (2009-2011)
Oil on canvas (102 x 138 inches)

I.

Inhabiting as they do all the world's oceans, it's not surprising that dolphins have long played a role within human culture and appear in the stories of many sea-faring peoples, including the ancient Greeks, who regarded them as benevolent beings and symbols of good fortune.

Indeed, the modern name, dolphin, derives from the Greek δελφίς (delphís) and is related to the word δελφύς (delphus), meaning uterus. It might therefore be interpreted as meaning a fish born of a womb. For many Greeks, the deliberate killing of a dolphin was an immoral act that rendered the perpetrator unclean before the gods. 

This isn't surprising, as the Greeks not only regarded these intelligent and friendly marine mammals as messengers of Poseidon, but associated them with several other deities, including Apollo and Aphrodite; the latter of whom was often depicted riding on the back of a dolphin - which brings us to the painting by Jeff Koons shown above ...

II.     

I've been interested in Jeff Koons and his work ever since Malcolm McLaren told me about him (and Julian Schnabel) in the mid-1980s and one of my happiest memories is of seeing his monumental sculpture Puppy (1992) at the Guggenheim Bilbao (I don't like dogs, but I do love flowers).   

Thus, I was naturally excited to learn that the Ashmolean - the world's oldest university museum of art and archaeology - was putting on an exhibition of his work, curated by the artist himself (in collaboration with Norman Rosenthal).

The show features seventeen pieces - fourteen of which have never been exhibited in the UK before - spanning his entire career and selecting from some of Koons's most important series of works, including Antiquity, in which, via a clever use of montage, he blurs the distinction between popular contemporary culture and the art of the classical world - always a fun thing to do.      

For Koons, ultimately, there is nothing different between what he does now and what the artists of the past were doing then: honouring those who have gone before and extending an aesthetic tradition that reaches back to prehistory.

But, it seems to me, he's also interested in what turned the ancients on; to see how modern ideas of sexuality compare and contrast with those from the Graeco-Roman world. Thus Gretchen Mol (in full Bettie Page mode) is transformed into Aphrodite, riding an inflatable dolphin, and holding tight to a toy simian incarnation of Eros.*   

Now, before the usual objections are raised, it's worth remembering that Aphrodite was continually being reimagined by Greek artists themselves; each vision of loveliness "drawing on subjective compositional fantasies", as Norman Rosenthal puts it. Art, no matter how hard some may pretend otherwise, has always been a bit pervy.

Indeed, according to D. H. Lawrence, half the great artworks of the entire world "are great by virtue of the beauty of their sex appeal" and we should be grateful for this fact. For sex is "a very powerful, beneficial and necessary stimulus in human life". Only the grey Puritan finds this objectionable. The rest of us "rather like a moderate rousing of our sex" by visual imagery, music, and literature. 

 
Notes

Norman Rosenthal, 'Jeff Koons and the Shine and Sheen of Time', essay in the exhibition catalogue, (Ashmolean Museum / University of Oxford, 2019), p. 26. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 239-240. I very much doubt that Lawrence would like the work of Jeff Koons. I suspect, rather, that he would brand it as pornography; an attempt, according to his definition of the term, to insult sex and degrade human nudity.   

*Interestingly, it was only some time after Koons had photographed the actress in 2006 that he discovered images of Aphrodite astride a dolphin and made the mytho-aesthetic - or what some would term archetypal - connection that inspired the Antiquity series. 

For more information on the exhibition Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean (7 Feb - 9 June 2019), click here. 

Thanks to Maria Thanassa for her help with this post.

Personal Love Counts So Little: Further Reflections on the Queer Case of Lou Carrington

Emerald Green Sacred Sex Graffiti (2015)
by Deprise Brescia / fineartamerica.com
 

As torpedophiles will recall, D. H. Lawrence's short novel St. Mawr is the story of a young woman who, having quickly exhausted the limits of love in a conventional (all-too-human) sense, embarks on an affair with a stallion.

However, her search for a form of transpersonal sex doesn't end in the stable. For ultimately, even a relationship with a handsome bay horse doesn't quite meet her needs. She yearns for something else, something bigger, something that can only be found perhaps beneath the radiation of new skies.

Thus it is that Lou ends up living on a small tumble-down ranch near Santa Fe. She hasn't got and doesn't want a man in her life: "She wanted to be still: only that, to be very, very still, and recover her own soul. [...] Even the illusion of the beautiful St. Mawr was gone." [137]

Lou adopts an asexual - almost anti-sexual - position, beyond man and beast, with spooky-erotic elements of spectrophilia:

"Because sex, mere sex, is repellent to me. I will never prostitute myself again. Unless something touches my very spirit, the very quick of me. I will stay alone, just alone. Alone, and give myself only to the unseen presences, serve only the other, unseen presences." [138]

Unable to bear the triviality and superficiality of her human relationships - and finding that even a fling with a horse can only take you so far - Lou decides she will model her life henceforth on that of the Vestal Virgins:

"They were symbolic of herself, of women weary of the embrace of incompetant men, weary, weary, weary of all that, turning to the unseen gods, the unseen spirits, the hidden fire, and devoting herself to that, and that alone. Receiving thence her pacification and her fulfilment." [138-39]

And these unseen presences are manifested in the landscape of her new home; "it seemed to her that the hidden fire was alive and burning in this sky, over the desert, in the mountains. She felt a certain latent holiness in the very atmosphere ..." This despite the tourists in their motor-cars, the "rather dreary Mexicans" and the Indians lurking with "something of a rat-like secretiveness and defeatedness in their bearing" [140].   

The question is: how do you come into touch with the spirit of place? That is to say, how does one polarise oneself with the vital effluence of the environment? It requires, as Lou recognises, submission above all else. One must consent to be seized by a new electricity and undergo a transformation of self - not just psychologically, but physically, as one's bones, blood, and flesh are all subject to a new molecular disposition.

It's a slow and terrible process in which one is essentially violated from behind and below by the destablising malevolence of the world. Loving a man, or a horse, is a piece of cake in comparison. Those environmentalists who, in their naive idealism and anthropocentric conceit, think there's nothing easier or more beautiful than communing with nature are laughably mistaken.

The earthly paradise they dream of is, in reality, inhuman and uncaring; not only does man not exist for it, but neither does a merciful deity watching over man. In the American Southwest: "There is no Almighty loving God. The God there is shaggy as the pine-trees, and horrible as the lightning." [147] Jesus isn't going to help you against the intense savagery of a world that contains mountain lions, pack-rats, porcupines, tumbleweed, and black ants in the kitchen cupboard.    

This is something that Lou, like the woman from New England who owned the ranch before her, will have to learn: that the dark gods and fanged demons to whom she wishes to submit were "grim and invidious and relentless, huger than man, and lower than man" [150].  

Whether she does learn - and whether she finds that something bigger that she desires (and which she conceives in terms of sacred sexuality) - isn't something we can say for sure, as Lawrence ends the story of Lou Carrington at this point, concluding with a little speech from the latter to her mother, in which she insists on her determination to henceforth keep herself to herself:

"'There's something else for me, mother. There's something else even that loves me and wants me. I can't tell you what it is. It's a spirit. And it's here, on this ranch. It's here, in this landscape. It's something more real to me than men are, and it soothes me, and it holds me up. I don't know what it is, definitely. It's something wild, that will hurt me sometimes and will wear me down sometimes. I know it. But it's something big, bigger than men, bigger than people, bigger than religion. It's something to do with wild America. And it's something to do with me. It's a mission, if you like [...] to keep myself for the spirit that is wild, and has waited so long here: even waited for such as me. Now I've come! Now I'm here. Now I am where I want to be: with the spirit that wants me. And that's how it is. [...] And it doesn't want to save me either. It needs me. It craves for me. And to it, my sex is deep and sacred, deeper than I am [...] It saves me from cheapness, mother. And even you could never do that for me.'" [155]

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'St. Mawr', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).  

For the earlier post in which I discuss Lou Carrington's affair with St. Mawr, click here.

For a post in which I discuss Lawrence's understanding of the spirit of place, click here. 

The Man and the Dreaming Woman: Notes on D. H. Lawrence's The Witch à la Mode

Cover of the Blackthorn Press 

Kindle edition (2014)

I. Opening Remarks

'The Witch à la Mode' was one of Lawrence's earliest short stories, though it remained unpublished in his lifetime.*

First written in 1911, under the title 'Intimacy', it anticipates his second novel, The Trespasser (1912), and the character of Winifred Varley was, like the character Helena, based on the Croydon schoolteacher Helen Corke, whom Lawrence had met in the winter of 1908/09 and eventually developed feelings for; feelings stronger than friendship and other than the deep affection that she claimed to have for him.

Indeed, even in 1911, whilst engaged to Louie Burrows, Lawrence continued to make sexual demands upon Helen. Unfortunately, she continually knocked him back, frustrating his desire and stultifying his passion, leaving him ironic and bitter towards her.

'The Witch à la Mode' is born out of this sexual frustration and sardonic anger; when Lawrence finally came to the realisation that she would never be physically responsive to him and never want more than a kiss goodnight.

In a letter written in January 1910, Lawrence complained of Jessie Chambers (the prototype of Miriam in Sons and Lovers and to whom he had been unofficially engaged for several years): "She refuses to see that a man is male, that kisses are the merest preludes and anticipations, that love is largely a physical sympathy ..."

This could just as easily have been said of Helen Corke and the female characters in his fiction based upon her. As Elizabeth Mansfield notes: "He [Lawrence] came to think of Helen Corke as one of the 'Dreaming Women' whose 'passion exhausts itself at the mouth'". Ultimately, Helen offered Lawrence what Winifred Varley offers Bernard Coutts; an intense spiritual relationship rather than a physically fulfilling one.

Some critics have rather lazily suggested that Winifred was frigid. Others, like Howard Booth, have suggested we might think of her as a romantic asexual; the kind of woman, as Oliver Mellors would say, who loves everything about love, except the fucking, and who only agrees to sex, if at all, as a kind of favour.     

However, it's equally possible that, like Helen Corke, Winifred was a repressed lesbian or a bisexual who attempted to walk on neutral ground but was ultimately more drawn to her own sex than to men - even whilst many men were fatally attracted to her.** 


II. The Tale

"When Bernard Coutts alighted at East Croydon", writes Lawrence, "he knew he was tempting Providence." And so it proves ...

But Coutts is a man of desire whose spirit exulted in living dangerously and loving fate in all good conscience; a man who is roused by the electric blue sparks of a tram car and who excitedly greets the stars overhead.

He arrives at Laura Braithwaite's house. Laura is a young widow and a friend of his. Coutts has just returned from the Continent. Laura enquires about his fiancée, Constance, waiting for his return up in Yorkshire. She also asks him about Winifred, with whom, clearly, he has had a thing. Laura informs Coutts that Winifred is due to visit, having been invited to do so. Sure enough, at about half-past seven, she arrives - awks!

"When she entered, and saw him, he knew it was a shock to her, though she hid it as well as she could. He suffered too. After hesitating for a second in the doorway, she came forward, shook hands without speaking, only looking at him with rather frightened blue eyes. She was of medium height, sturdy in build. Her face was white, and impassive, without the least trace of a smile. She was a blonde of twenty eight, dressed in a white gown just short enough not to touch the ground. Her throat was solid and strong, her arms heavy and white and beautiful, her blue eyes heavy with unacknowledged passion." 

Both parties blush upon seeing one another. However, any momentary discomfort caused by the situation is soon forgotten as Coutts, an agalmatophile, has his attention seized by a pair of alabaster statues, two feet high, standing before an immense mirror hanging over the marble mantelpiece in the drawing room:

"Both were nude figures. They glistened under the side lamps, rose clean and distinct from their pedestals. The Venus leaned slightly forward, as if anticipating someone's coming. Her attitude of suspense made the young man stiffen. He could see the clean suavity of her shoulders and waist reflected white on the deep mirror. She shone, catching, as she leaned forward, the glow of the lamp on her lustrous marble loins."  

This, I think, is an astonishing passage, and I'm surprised it receives no comment in the explanatory notes provided by the Cambridge editor, or, indeed, by Howard Booth who is always looking to queer the circle, so to speak, and explore a range of non-normative sexualities. His suggestion that Winifred is asexual deserves consideration, but seems to be based on pretty flimsy evidence as far as I can see, whereas this passage provides compelling evidence of Coutts's statue fetishism.

Indeed, one might suggest that the main reason Bernard is so fascinated by Winifred is because of the solid whiteness of her figure and impassivity. In other words, she is statue-like and her unnaturalness is a consequence of this, rather than her sexual orientation (or absence of such). This is why, for example, when Winifred entertains the other guests by playing her violin, Coutts can't help looking from her to the Venus figure, until intoxicated by his own pervy pygmalionism.  

Anyway, let us return to the tale ...

Having left the party at Laura's house, Bernard and Winifred stroll together, hand-in-hand, but having immediately fallen back into the same dynamic of love and hate: "He hated her, truly. She hated him. Yet they held hands fast as they walked." They arrive at her house and she asks him in.

Whilst washing his hands in the bathroom, he thinks of Constance and, although he loved her, he realises that she bores and inhibits some vital part of him. Winifred, on the other hand, herself being intense and unnatural, allows him to become who he is: i.e., just as queer as she.

Indeed, Winifred insists on his exceptional nature and is "cruel to that other, common, every-day part of him" - the part that can contemplate married life, for example; "she could not understand how he could marry: it seemed almost monstrous to her: she fought against his marriage".    

Ultimately, Winifred rather frightens Coutts. He sees the witch in her and realises that were they to attempt a life together the result would not be good: "'You know, Winifred, we should only drive each other into insanity, you and I: become abnormal.'"

His main concern is that Winifred only wants to use him as a kind of human orbuculum in which to see visions and reflections of life, but doesn't care a fig for him as a man of flesh and blood (which is a bit rich coming from him if, in fact, I'm right about his agalmatophilia).

Inevitably, they embrace and kiss in a typically Lawrentian manner (i.e. one marked with a shocking degree of violence). But that one kiss is enough for Winifred: her passion ebbs unnaturally. And Coutts is left feeling profoundly frustrated in a state of epididymal hypertension: "His whole body ached like a swollen vein, with heavy intensity, while his heart grew dead with misery and despair."

He had wanted, like Pygmalion, to bring her to life with a kiss; to set her pulse beating and blood flowing. But Winifred had remained defiantly statuesque. Unable to ignite her sex, Coutts (accidently) kicks over a lamp and sets the room ablaze instead.

Howard Booth says this final incident sees Bernard "burnt not by [his] passion but by the very lack of desire [in Winifred]". I'm not sure I quite agree with that, but I do agree that Lawrence seems to be coming down firmly on the side of conventional married life.

For having saved Winifred from the flames, Coutts abandons her in order to achieve the (hetero)sexual maturity that he had earlier confessed he (instinctively) wants; i.e., to become a good husband and father, growing fat and amiable in domestic bliss.
 

Notes

* Lawrence first wrote the story - then called 'Intimacy' - in 1911. He revised it in 1913, changing the title to 'The White Woman', and subsequently, following slight further revision, to 'The Witch à la Mode'. It was first published in Lovat Dickson's Magazine in June 1934 and was included in the posthumous collection A Modern Lover, published by Martin Secker in October of that year. It can be read online as an ebook thanks to The University of Adelaide: click here.   

** Neutral Ground was the title of Helen Corke's novel, published in 1933, that attempted to delineate a point on the sexual spectrum somewhere between hetero and homosexuality where she felt most comfortable locating herself. Elizabeth Mansfield tells us that in a letter written to Lawrence's biographer Harry T. Moore, Helen "defined Neutral Ground as 'an honest attempt to deal with the problem of a Lesbian temperament'". 

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Witch à la Mode', Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories, ed. John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 54-70. All lines quoted are from this edition of the text.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Intimacy', The Vicar's Garden and Other Stories, ed. N. H. Reeve, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 123-38.

D. H. Lawrence, letter to Blanche Jennings (28 Jan. 1910), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. 1 (1901-13), ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 153-54.

Elizabeth Mansfield, Introduction to D. H. Lawrence's The Trespasser, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 18.

Howard J. Booth, 'Same-Sex Desire, Cross-Gender Identification and Asexuality in D. H. Lawrence’s Early Short Fiction', Études Lawrenciennes 42  (2011), pp. 37-57.  Click here to read online.

Aces High: Reflections on Asexuality

Asexual flag 

I. 

One of the reasons that Nietzsche has a difficult time accepting the idea of aesthetic detachment - he derides the idea as immaculate perception - is because sex is such a crucial aspect of his Dionysian philosophy and the lover, he says, is not only a stronger but more valuable type of human being:

"His whole economy is richer than before, more powerful, more complete than in those who do not love. The lover becomes a squanderer: he is rich enough for it. Now he dares, becomes an adventurer, becomes an ass in magnanimity and innocence [...] this happy idiot grows wings and new capabilities."    

Nietzsche insists that our sexuality reaches into the uppermost summit of our spirit and that beneath all our purest thoughts and high ideals lie unconscious libidinal investments that attest to the fact we are first and foremost creatures of desire. This is not to say that an erotic motive is to be attributed to all human activities, but that an element of sex is never far away.

For Nietzsche, as for so many nineteeth century thinkers, sex is the great clue to being and the truth of ourselves. I suspect he would refuse to conceive of asexuality except in purely negative terms - as evidence of retarded puberty, for example, or a form of degeneracy.


II.

Unfortunately, there are still people today who regard asexual individuals either with suspicion, contempt, or a mixture of both; believing them to be unfeeling and unnatural, almost inhuman in their apparent indifference to sexual pleasure.

Personally, however, I rather admire those individuals who have refused - inasmuch as asexuality does involve behavioural choice - to be amorous subjects and stepped beyond LGBT whilst remaining happily within the uncanny order of Q (much to the annoyance of some within the allosexual community).

What's more, I sometimes think that the reason individuals who pride themselves on their sexual identity and orientation sometimes feel threatened by and hostile towards asexuals is due to the fact that the latter (a) do not find them attractive and (b) refuse to make themselves available for fucking.       


III.

Before going any further with this defence-cum-celebration of asexuality, let's just be clear on a few important points ...

Firstly, asexuality is distinct from abstention and celibacy; i.e., it's not merely an expression of ascetic idealism. Indeed, some religious writers openly condemn asexuality as delusional and immoral. The Jesuit priests David Nantais and Scott Opperman write:

"Asexual people do not exist. Sexuality is a gift from God and thus a fundamental part of our human identity. Those who repress their sexuality are not living as God created them to be: fully alive and well. As such, they're most likely unhappy."

This characterisation amuses me and I have to admit that I'm quite happy to think of asexuality as a form of blasphemous living that refuses consummation. Better that, than attempts to portray it as a medical disorder, a form of sexual dysfunction, or the result of bad conscience concerning the body. 

Finally, it should be noted that some asexuals may in fact engage in erotic activity despite lacking any real desire to do so - perhaps as a matter of courtesy or curiosity - although most prefer romantic relationships that involve non-physical activity (apart from hand-holding and the odd cuddle), friend-focused non-romantic relationships, and/or queer-platonic relationships that invent new ways of associating.

There are, thankfully, no hard and fast rules governing the so-called ace community and there are also plenty of grey areas (of ambiguity) to explore.     


IV.

For me, then, asexuality holds a good deal of interest as something that (potentially) challenges sexual normativity and offers (passive) resistance to the coital imperative to fuck over and over and over again; what one critic refers to as the tyranny of orgasmic pleasure. 

The socially cherished myth that sex is the most basic and universal of instincts - often repressed and thus in need of liberating so that men and women can lead happy, fulfilled lives - is one that Michel Foucault and Judith Butler began to deconstruct decades ago, but it seems that more work still needs to be done convincing people that sexuality is not a natural given, but a historical construct. Essentialism, alas, continues to exert itself - not least in the idiocy of identity politics.

Notes

The black stripe in the asexual pride flag is for those individuals who identify as asexual; the grey stripe represents those who are demi- or semi-sexual; the white stripe is for those who subscribe to or manifest some full form of sexuality; and, finally, the purple stripe is to display solidarity with members of the wider queer community. 

For more information on asexuality visit the website of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), founded in 2001 by David Jay. I don't necessarily share or endorse the views expressed here; particularly the reactive attempt to make of asexuality an intrinsic identity or orientation and to present asexuals as people with 'the same emotional needs as everybody else'. How dreary and disappointing if that's the case! I'm hoping, like Ela Przybylo, that asexuality might prove to be a bit more provocative and create spaces of complication. See her essay, 'Crisis and safety: the asexual in sexusociety', in Sexualities, (SAGE, 2011), 14 (4), pp. 444-461. Click here to read online via Academia.edu

Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, (Vintage Books, 1968), 808, pp. 426-27.

David Nantais and Scott Opperman, 'Eight myths about religious life', Vision (Vocation Network, 2002): click here to read online. 

Immaculate Perception: On Aesthetic Detachment and Emasculated Leering

Henri Matisse: The Artist and His Model (1919) 
henrimatisse.org

I.

Zarathustra famously takes a pop at those moon-like individuals who claim to be able to view everything - including the nakedness of a beautiful young woman - objectively and with aesthetic detachment.

Such hypocrites, who claim to gaze upon life without desire whilst secretly possessed by the will to ravish, lack innocence and their emasculated leering (which they term contemplation) is a sign not of spiritual superiority, but bad conscience and cowardice. Or, in a word, Kantianism.       

For Zarathustra, creators should be full of Sonnenliebe; i.e., they should not merely reflect but directly illuminate and enrich the world with value via an outpouring of energy. Even, it is better they destroy in innocence, than simply stand back and look on coldly.     


II.

I thought of these words by Nietzsche when I recently came across an astonishing remark made by Henri Matisse, whose writings contain numerous references to his relationship with models: 'The naked body of a woman must awaken in you an emotion which you seek in turn to express [...] The presence of the model helps to keep me in a sort of flirtatious state which ends in rape.'

Now, before members of the #MeToo movement call for an immediate ban of his work, it should be noted that Matisse is not, of course, speaking literally and, indeed, he is not referring to the rape of the model. On the contrary, he seems to regard the creative process as involving a form of self-rape and speaks of how he is enslaved and ravished by the model upon whom he is absolutely dependent.

Interestingly, Delacroix also confessed that his beautiful young models robbed him of his vital energies (so much so, that he eventually resorted to working from nude photographs).  

Of course, feminist critics concerned with the imperialism of the male gaze and the power imbalance as it is conventionally understood to exist between (male) artist and (female) model, will probably find this disingenuous and be quick to dismiss it as such; isn't it merely another example of powerful men pretending that they - and not the women stripped bare - are really the victims as they hide behind their easels (or cameras), cock in hand à la Terry Richardson.    

See: Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II. 37. 

It's important to note that Nietzsche is not simply advocating an active, practical existence over a life of contemplation. On the contrary, he insists that the true creator differs both from the actor and spectator in his possessesion of uniquely creative energy. See The Gay Science, IV. 301.