1885 (The D. H. Lawrence Birthday Post 2019)

DHL: Born 11/09/1885

As many readers will know, D. H. Lawrence was born on this day in 1885. 

To mark the occasion, I thought it might be interesting to examine a few of the other events that unfolded during this year, so as to have a better understanding of the world into which baby Bert was born, giving special emphasis to those things that Lawrence would himself later comment upon ...

20 January

On this date, an American, LaMarcus Adna Thompson, patents his design for an amusement ride known as a roller coaster which had opened at Coney Island a year earlier. I don't know if Lawrence and Frieda ever went on one, but I very much doubt it. We know, for example, what Lawrence thought of even an innocent merry-go-round and its "violent mechanical rotation", as depicted by the artist Mark Gertler. [1]

In brief, Lawrence didn't approve of sensational fun in which the body is worked by a machine.  

26 January

The year opens with British imperial forces fighting Islamic insurgents in foreign fields: the Sudanese campaign famously costing General Gordon his life after the siege - and subsequent fall - of Khartoum. In a letter to Dorothy Yorke, written in August 1928, Lawrence fantasises about yet another exotic adventure: "Let's go to Egypt [...] and go up the Nile and look at the desert and perhaps get shot in Khartoum like General Gordon". [2]


23 February

Convicted murderer John Babbacombe Lee was due to be hanged at Exeter Prison. However, after three failed attempts due to a faulty trapdoor stubbornly refusing to open, the medical officer in attendance declined to play any further part in the proceedings and the execution was called off. Lee's sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

Again, whilst I cannot say for sure what Lawrence's view of this would have been, he was a proponent of capital punishment, writing in an essay: "I know we must look after the quality of life, not the quantity. Hopeless life should be put to sleep, the idiots and the hopeless sick and the true criminal." [3] 

14 March

Gilbert and Sullivan's popular comic opera The Mikado opens at the Savoy Theatre, London, where it ran for over 670 performances. Lawrence makes a reference to one of the songs, 'Tit Willow', which describes the suicide of a rejected lover, in his first novel, The White Peacock (1911). [4]

17 June

The Statue of Liberty arrives in New York Harbour; a gift of friendship from the people of France and a sign of welcome to visitors to the United States. Lawrence first encountered this colossal neoclassical sculpture in person in July 1923. But, in an epilogue to Fantasia of the Unconscious written in 1921, he has already described Lady Liberty as brawny and suggested that the torch she holds aloft with which to enlighten the world, resembles a giant carrot:

"How many nice little asses and poets trot over the Atlantic and catch sight of Liberty holding up this carrot of desire at arms length, and fairly hear her say, as one does to one's pug dog, with a lump of sugar: 'Beg! Beg!' - and then 'Jump! Jump then!' And each little ass and poodle begins to beg and to jump, and there's a rare game round about Liberty, yap, yap, yapperty-yap!" [5]


15 September

Four days after Lawrence was born, the world-famous elephant Jumbo was killed by a freight train, in Ontario, Canada, as he crossed railroad tracks on the way to his box car.

Born in 1860, Jumbo was a large African bush elephant who was transferred to London Zoo from the Jardin des Plantes (Paris), in 1865. Despite huge public protest, he was eventually sold to P. T. Barnum, who took him to the US for exhibition at Madison Square Garden (NYC), in March 1882.

Lawrence would later write several poems about elephants - perhaps most famously 'Elephant' and 'The elephant is slow to mate', though mention should also be made of the series of Pansies that begins with 'Elephants in the circus' and ends with 'Two performing elephants'.

Although they don't mention Jumbo, they could easily have been written about him or any other elephant with "aeons of weariness round their eyes" and obliged to sit up "and show vast bellies to the children" who watch in half-frightened silence: "The looming of the hoary, far-gone ages / is too much for them." [6]

30 October

Seven weeks after Lawrence entered the world, American poet and Mr. Modernism himself, Ezra Pound, was born. During his early years in London, working as a teacher and attempting to forge a literary career, Lawrence met Pound on several occasions and formed a favourable impression:

"He is jolly nice: took me to supper at Pagnani's, and afterwards we went down to his room at Kensington. He lives in an attic, like a traditional poet - but the attic is a comfortable well furnished one. [...] He is rather remarkable - a good bit of a genius, and with not the least self-consciousness." [7]
     
And, for his part, Pound was supportive of Lawrence as a poet and full of praise for the latter's first book of verse, Love Poems and Others (1913). But, of course, the two men were as different as chalk and cheese, both in character and as artists, and initial friendship soon led to mutual disenchantment and hostility (Pound eventually describing Lawrence as detestable). 

The problem, as Helen Sword notes, is that whilst, formally, as a poet, Lawrence was very much a modernist and "an iconoclastic practitioner of Pound's famous dictum, 'Make it new'", he was, at the same time, "a modernist poet who cultivated [...] a distinctly anti-modernist stance". Unfortunately for Lawrence, his "oracular tone, visionary pretensions, lyrical cadences, overt sentimentality, highly personal subject matter, and lack of irony [...] earned him the antipathy of many members of his modernist cohort". [8]

And, indeed, it continues to lose him many readers today ...

Notes

[1] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), letter 1291, p. 660.

[2] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), letter 4603, p. 513.  

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Return to Bestwood', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 24. 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 15. 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Epilogue', Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 201-204. Lines quoted are on p. 203.

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'Elephants in the circus' and 'Two performing elephants', The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 369 and 370. The other two poems mentioned - 'Elephant' and 'The elephant is slow to mate' - can be found in the above on pp. 338-343 and 403-04 respectively.

[7] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), letter 132, pp. 144-45. This letter was written to Louie Burrows on 20 November, 1909. Comparing himself to Pound, Lawrence also wrote in this letter: "He is 24, like me, but his god is beauty, mine, life."  

[8] Helen Sword, 'Lawrence's Poetry', The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Anne Fernihough, (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 119-135. Lines quoted are on p. 120. See also Michael Bell's essay in the above work, 'Lawrence and Modernism' (pp. 179-196), in which he argues that Lawrence's complex and critically important relation to modernist writers "is most clearly illustrated by the case of his coeval Ezra Pound" [179].

Pamela and the Lost World of Soho

 Luxor Press (1955)

We are all born naked; but we are not all born to be naked. For as Nietzsche says: "A naked human being is generally a shameful sight."*

But that's not true of everyone. There are some, like the glamour model and actress Pamela Green, who look fantastic either in or out of their clothes and it's fitting that she made the first full-frontal screen appearance in a British feature film; as Milly, in Michael Powell's pervy psychological thriller, Peeping Tom (1960). 

Born in 1929, and the only child of an English father and a Dutch mother, Pamela spent her first ten years living in the Netherlands. Shorty before the outbreak of war, however, she and her parents moved to England.

Always keen on painting and drawing, in 1947 she was accepted on to a course at St. Martin's, where she also began working as a life model in order to help pay for her studies. Miss Green soon discovered, however, that she could make much better money by posing for photographers who were not particularly interested in art. Her saucy snaps proved so popular with punters that many Soho bookshops and backstreet newsagents stocked postcard sets featuring her and, indeed, supplied by her.

Fans could also see Pamela in the flesh working as a dancer in several West End theatres, including the Hippodrome, or on stage in shows that incorporated static tableaux of the type made famous by the Windmill; i.e., shows in which models were nude, but remained perfectly motionless, like statues, in accordance with the laws of the land.

In 1955, a pictorial monograph was published by Luxor Press entitled Pamela, featuring photographs by her lover and business partner George Harrison Marks, with whom she set up Kamera Publications, responsible for several top shelf magazines. As their success grew, the couple ventured into the world of 8mm striptease films, producing classics such as Naked as Nature Intended (1961), written and directed by Marks and starring Miss Green in a happy state of undress.

Between the the two of them, Marks and Green established a commercial porn business that was as quintessentially British as the retail empire founded by Marks and Spencer and very much rooted in a time and place - i.e. Soho in the 1950s - that is now, regrettably, long vanished; a bohemian utopia where artists, writers, actors, showgirls, prostitutes, pornograpers and other queer fish all gaily lived and rubbed along.

Today, London’s once sleazy yet exhilarating district of pubs, cafes, and clubs, has been transformed by the relentless tide of gentrification and every red light dimmed. I fully support the work being done by Tim Arnold, Stephen Fry, Colin Vaines and others involved with the Save Soho campaign, but, in all honesty, there's very little left to preserve other than memories; for even the spirits of the dead seem to have departed ...  

Notes

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), V. 352, p. 295. 

Readers interested in knowing more about Pamela Green should visit her official website: pamela-green.com

Those interested in the work of Harrison Marks should visit: thekameraclub.co.uk.

The Picture of Sebastian Horsley

Maggi Hambling: Sebastian IX (2011)

Oil on canvas (53 x 43 cm)

There have only been two deaths that have touched me to the extent that I often dream of the individuals in question and wake up thinking of them. Both men died in the same annus horribilis (2010) and both men I continue to mourn to this day: Malcolm McLaren and Sebastian Horsley.

Malcolm I knew better and for much longer and he had the more profound effect upon me. Sebastian, I met only twice, if I recall correctly, and although we exchanged a few emails - and I attended his funeral at St. James's Church, at the invite of one of his former lovers - I wouldn't say we were friends or close in any respect.

It's rather queer, therefore, that since his death my affection for Horsley has intensified and he has continued to haunt my imagination and dreams. In other words, he means more to me dead than he meant to me alive and perhaps that explains why the (slightly ghoulish) posthumous portraits of Horsley painted by Maggi Hambling continue to fascinate.

Hambling, well-known for her portraits of the dead, has said it's her way of coping with the loss of persons, like Sebastian, to whom she was close, whilst at the same time honouring their memory. It is, of course, a strategy other artists have also employed; see for example Heide Hatry's Icons in Ash project: click here. 

Having little talent for image-making, however, this isn't a strategy of mourning that's open to me. All I can do is write little posts like this one, in fond memory; admire the work of others, such as Hambling; and keep dreaming ...

ANT/Music: Cut off the Head, Legs Coming Looking for You

I. ANT

Actor-network theory (ANT) is based on the idea that everything in the social and natural world exists in a constantly changing network of relationships, outside of which nothing can be said to exist independently (not even external forces). Because this network unfolds upon a flat ontological field, all objects, ideas, processes etc., are equally important in any given situation or relationship.

Problematically, for those who cling to the belief in human exceptionalism, ANT anticipates OOO (object-oriented ontology) in that it considers nonhuman actants on a par with human subjects within a network and should therefore be described in the same terms; this is called the principle of generalised symmetry. There are differences, for example, between people and inanimate objects, but the differences are generated within the system of relations and are nothing fundamental.

Whether this makes ANT a posthuman or an inhuman theory depends, I suppose, on one's perspective. But the key thing is that agency is located neither in human subjects nor in nonhuman objects, but, rather, in heterogeneous associations between them (and doesn't imply intentionality). Again, some critics find this objectionable on moral and/or political grounds.    

ANT is sometimes described as a material-semiotic method, in that it maps relations that are both material (i.e., constructed between things) and semiotic (i.e., constructed between concepts). Anti-essentialist, ANT is more concerned with how things work, rather than with what things are, or why they exist (some might argue that ANT is so concerned merely to describe rather than explain, that it hardly even qualifies as a theory).

It was first developed in the early 1980s by French thinkers Michel Callon and Bruno Latour and drew on a wide range of intellectual resources from within philosophy, sociology, and science and technology studies. If it reflected many of the concerns found within poststructuralism, it was, at the same time, committed to a certain English model of empiricism.      

As is often the way with fashionable new theories, ANT soon became popular as an analytic tool with scholars across a wide range of disciplines - cultural studies and literary criticism included - who developed it in their own manner to best suit their needs. This range of alternative approaches - some of which are incompatible - means that ANT is now difficult to define and often confused with other forms of situational analysis and process philosophy.

Indeed, I'm not sure it's very helpful (or even meaningful) to still talk about ANT and some early proponents are now critical of the term itself: network, for example, is perhaps almost as problematic as the term theory and has a number of undesirable connotations. Latour has jokingly suggested that it might have been more accurate to call ANT actant-rhizome ontology, though, as he points out, this isn't a name that trips off the tongue and lacks the sexy acronym.      

II. Music

I have to admit, that whenever I hear the word ant, I think of Adam and Antmusic, rather than of Bruno Latour and actor-network theory: indeed, that's why I find the acronym ANT sexy, not because I'm a formicophile.  

'Antmusic' was the third single released by Adam and the Ants from the LP Kings of the Wild Frontier (1980); an album that brilliantly captured the post-punk spirit of the times and which, as one critic says, uniquely walked a line "between campiness and art-house chutzpah" with bravado, swagger, and "gleeful self-aggrandizement".* 

Although not as strong as the previous two singles - 'Kings of the Wild Frontier' and 'Dog Eat Dog' - 'Antmusic' should have been number one at the beginning of 1981 and the fact that it was held off the top spot by a re-release of John Lennon's 'Imagine' (after his murder in NYC) tells us something about the maudlin and mournful sentimentality of the record buying British public, that always prefers to look back, nostalgically, rather than try another flavour.   

Notes

* Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Kings of the Wild Frontier, review on the music database Allmusic: click here.

Play: Adam and the Ants, Antmusic (Ant/Pirroni) single release from the album Kings of the Wild Frontier (CBS Records, 1980): click here. The music video was directed by Steve Barron.

D. H. Lawrence and the Novel (Part 2)

Rhea Daniel: Portrait of D. H. Lawrence (2017)

doodleaddicts.com

D. H. Lawrence was acutely concerned with the (moral) question of the novel: its conventional limitations and future possibilities.

After writing three earlier essays on this theme - two of which we discussed in the first part of this post - Lawrence wrote a further couple of essays on the novel in 1925, neither of which were published in his lifetime (or even typed). They first appeared in print in Phoenix (1936), along with other posthumous texts, edited by Edward D. McDonald. 

III. Why the Novel Matters

For Lawrence, the novel matters because it teaches us to recognise and to revere the life of the body; to know that "paradise is in the palm of your hand" [194], which - if you put it in Latin - would make a fitting motto above the door of a school of masturbation, were such an institution ever to be established.

Priests and philosophers may prefer to talk of the spirit - or the soul, or the mind - but the novelist knows that every individual ends at their own finger-tips. It's a simple truth, says Lawrence, but one that it's difficult to get people to agree on and stick to. It's also the core idea of his vitalism and for Lawrence, nothing is more amazing than life which exists nowhere but within the living body; be that the body of a man or even a cabbage in the rain.

One of the reasons that Lawrence hates modern science is because, in his view, the latter has no use for living bodies; it is only interested, rather, in the organism, which is a metaphysical overcoding of the body and its organs and the establishment of a bio-logical hierarchy within it. Great novelists are interested in dis-organ-ising the body and building what Deleuze and Guattari term (after Artaud) a body without organs, or what Lawrence describes as "a very curious assembly of incongruous parts" [196]. 

Novels, of course, are not actually alive; they are "only tremulations on the ether" [195]. But the novel can make the living body of man tremble and unleash strange forces and flows of becoming. That is why the novel is "the one bright book of life" [195] and can help prevent readers from joining the legions of the undead (according to Lawrence, there are many men and women walking about like zombies and eating their dinners like masticating corpses).   

Thus, the novel doesn't teach you how to be good: it does, rather, something far more important than that; it cultivates an instinct for life ...

IV. The Novel and the Feelings

Lawrence isn't impressed with civilised humanity, always harping on the same old note: "Harp, harp, harp, twingle-twingle-twang!" [201] The note itself is okay; it's the exclusiveness (and repetition) that becomes unbearable. He also thinks that we are poorly educated concerning the self, despite the fact that, as a species, we have "combed the round earth with a tooth-comb, and pulled down the stars almost within grasp" [201].

Ultimately, most individuals know more about the composition of celluloid and the latest fashion in shoes than about the stormy chaos within. But, says Lawrence, the times they are a-changin' and "wild creatures are coming forth from the darkest Africa inside us" [202]. If you listen carefully, you can hear them calling, although some are completely silent, like slippery fishes. Lawrence calls these wild creatures feelings, which he contrasts with emotions:

"Emotions are things we more or less recognise. We see love, like a woolly lamb, or like a [...] decadent panther [...] We see hate, like a dog chained to a kennel. We see fear, like a shivering monkey. We see anger, like a bull with a ring through its nose, and greed, like a pig. Our emotions are our domesticated animals, noble like the horse, timid like the rabbit, but all completely at our service." [202] 

For the feelings, we do not as yet even have a language - and most often do not even allow that they exist, despite the fact that we only exist "because of the life that bounds and leaps into our limbs and our consciousness, from out of the original dark forest within us" [203].

Coming over all Nietzschean, Lawrence argues that man is the only creature who has deliberately - and successfully - tamed himself, fatally mistaking tameness for civilisation. The problem is that tameness, like an addictive drug, destroys us in the end, by robbing us of self-control and the power of command.

We thought tameness would lead to happiness - and, in a sense, maybe it has; albeit the happiness of the last man. But, ultimately, it leads to madness and an orgy of destruction, and unless we "connect ourselves up with our own primeval sources" [204] we shall degenerate inside our own enclosures.

We have, says Lawrence, to un-tame ourselves and learn to cultivate the feelings. But, of course, that's not easy: "It is nonsense to pretend we can un-tame ourselves in five minutes. That, too, is a slow and strange process, that has to be taken seriously." [204]

Psychoanalysis won't help - for the Freudians show the greatest horror of all when confronted by the Old Adam, whom they regard as a monster of perversity. We have to listen, rather, "to the voices of the honorable beasts that call in the dark paths of the veins of our body" [205].

And if we can't hear their voices within ourselves, well, then, we can do the next best thing: "look in the real novels, and there listen in" [205]. Not to the didactic assertions or personal opinions of the author, "but to the low, calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods of their destiny" [205].

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Why the Novel Matters' and 'The Novel and the Feelings', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 191-98 and 199-205.

Readers interested in part one of this post on 'The Future of the Novel' and 'Morality and the Novel', should click here. 

D. H. Lawrence and the Novel (Part 1)

Henry Rayner: Portrait of D. H. Lawrence (1929)

D. H. Lawrence was acutely concerned with the (moral) question of the novel: its conventional limitations and its future possibilities. No surprise, therefore, that he wrote several short essays on the subject ...

I. The Future of the Novel

Is the novel still in its infancy as an art form - or is it on its death-bed? 

It was a question in 1923 and it's still a question now, almost 100 years later; albeit no longer a question that many people care about (which perhaps says more about us rather than the contemporary novel).

The answer, for Lawrence, is that the "pale-faced, high-browed, earnest novel which you have to take seriously" [151] is senile precocious. That is to say, it's childishly self-absorbed: I am this, I am that, I am the other.    

One assumes that Lawrence is not referring to his own works here, though heaven knows his novels can be so sincere and intense at times, that one might fairly describe them as earnest and overwrought. Lawrence, though, is taking a pop at the novels by writers such as James Joyce and Marcel Proust; authors who "tear themselves to pieces, strip their smallest emotions to the finest threads" [152]. 

He doesn't think much of the smirking popular novel either; just as self-conscious and also written by those who think it funny to drag their adolescence into middle age and even old age.

The novel, declares Lawrence, has got to grow up: by which he means stop with the played out emotional and self-analytical stunts and find the "underlying impulse that will provide the motive-power for a new state of things" [154].

Interestingly, this requires that fiction and philosophy come together again: reuniting into a new form of myth and a new way of understanding. The novel has got a future, concludes Lawrence, providing it has the courage to "tackle new propositions without using abstractions [and ...] present us with new, really new feelings [...] which will get us out of the old emotional rut [155].    

II. Morality and the Novel

What is the business of art?

"The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment." [171]

That's a succinct and interesting definition: one that might be said to anticipate actor-network theory, even whilst remaining anthropocentric in that it posits man as the centre of a universe about whom all things revolve. 

And morality?

"Morality is that delicate, forever trembling and changing balance between me and my circumambient universe, which precedes and accompanies a true relatedness." [172]

That's another concise definition: one that allows us to understand why it is Lawrence values the novel above all else. For whilst works of philosophy, religion, or science are all of them busy trying to nail things down with laws and fixed ideals in order to establish stability, the novel insists on difference and becoming.

Lawrence writes:  

"The novel is the highest complex of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered. Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue outside of its own place, time, circumstance. If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail." [172]

And immorality?

Immorality is the attempt by an author, for example, to impose themselves upon a text and tip the balance one way or the other, thus bringing to an end the tembling instability upon which everything in the social and natural world - including the world of fiction - depends. They might not even intend to do this; often the immorality of the novel is due to the novelist's unconscious bias or predilection.  

For an artist to remain moral, he or she must affirm a general economy of the whole in which all things, all ideas, and all feelings are admitted and none are thought to be supreme or exclusively worth living for:

"Because no emotion is supreme, or exclusively worth living for. All emotions go to the achieving of a living relationship between a human being and the other human being or creature or thing he becomes purely related to.
      All emotions, including love and hate, and rage and tenderness, go to the adjusting of the oscillating, unestablished balance between two [actants ...] If the novelist puts his thumb in the pan, for love, for tenderness, sweetness, peace, then he commits an immoral act: he prevents the possibility of a pure relationship [...] and he makes inevitable the horrible reaction, when he lets his thumb go, towards hate and brutality, cruelty and destruction." [173]

This helps explain why Lawrence often brands seemingly pure and innocent works false and obscene and why he famously advises readers to always, always trust the tale, not the teller.

If the novel reveals or helps establish vivid relationships that gleam with a fourth dimensional quality, then it is a moral work, no matter how the relationships may be judged from the perspective of conventional morality. And if these relationships also happen to be new and displace old connections, then even better - no matter how much pain they cause, or what offence they may give:

"Obviously, to read a really new novel will always hurt, to some extent. There will always be resistance. The same with new pictures, new music" [175] - but who wants art that only makes comfortable and complacent?  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Future of the Novel' and 'Morality and the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 149-155 and 169-176. 

See also the first version of 'Morality and the Novel' which is published as an appendix in the above, pp. 239-245. It ends with the following two lines that essentially summarise Lawrence's thinking on the novel: "The novel is the one perfect medium for revealing to us the changing glimmer of our living relationships. The novel can help us live as no other utterance can help us. It can also pervert us as no other can." [245] I have to admit - as a perverse materialist - the latter notion intrigues and I wish Lawrence had said more about it. 

Readers interested in part two of this post on Lawrence's essays 'Why the Novel Matters' and 'The Novel and the Feelings', should click here. 

On the Quickness and Allure of Objects

Phoebe Stadler: Saucy (c. 1920)

collections.vam.ac.uk

Was ist Schnelligkeit? asks Heide. And it's an interesting question.

I suppose, for me at least, the quality of quickness is something I understand in relation to the work of D. H. Lawrence and in terms of an object-oriented ontology.

In his essay 'The Novel' (1925), Lawrence describes the quick as an invisible flame of impersonal presence that flickers in the words and deeds of the individual. Unless, that is, they belong to the legions of the undead; living corpses with ready-made sensations who drive to work, chew their fast food, stare at the screen, and engage in idle talk that merely passes the word along (what Heidegger calls Gerede).

These men and women are awfully lifelike, but lifeless; for they have no quickness, writes Lawrence.

It's important to be clear on this point: the corpse-bodies Lawrence fears have not become less than human, but, strange as it may sound - unless one hears this phrase with Nietzschean ears - all too human (which is to say, all too limited and cut-off). Quickness is, therefore, certainly not the same as human being; in fact, it's the non-human element of man which is found in all things.

Lawrence likes to call it the God-flame, but I prefer to describe it as object-allure, if only because I find his religious language unhelpful and off-putting.* Either way, it means we have two types of object: (i) those that are quick (though not necessarily alive in the conventional organic sense of the term) and (ii) those that are dead (again, not in the sense that they lack or have lost life, but in the sense that they aren't quick or very alluring - and so don't really affect us in the same way).

Lawrence writes:

"In this room where I write, there is a little table that is dead: it doesn't even weakly exist. And there is a ridiculous little iron stove, which for some unknown reason is quick. And there is an iron wardrobe trunk, which for some still more mysterious reason is quick. And there are several books, whose mere corpus is dead, utterly dead and non-existent. And there is a sleeping cat, very quick. And a glass lamp, that, alas, is dead." 

Thus, interestingly - according to Lawrence - there are degrees of quickness; though he claims not to know how or why this is so, even if he knows for certain that it's the case. Probably, he speculates, the quickness of the quick lies in a "certain weird relationship" between objects; one that is "fluid, changing, grotesque or beautiful".

Again, I would discuss this relatedness in terms of allure; objects attract and lead other objects, including ourselves, into temptation and it's in this way that we and all things come into touch. The more they entice us, the stronger their allure, the quicker they are; the more we come into touch - with "snow, bed-bugs, sunshine, the phallus, trains, silk-hats, cats, sorrow, people, food, diphtheria, fuchsias, stars, ideas, God, tooth-paste, lightning, and toilet-paper"** - the quicker we are.

Of course, even dead objects retain some power of attraction and can seduce us - they like to be tickled as Lawrence puts it - but ultimately they lead us not into touch but into the void. Dead objects, in other words, tease but don't deliver the goods; they are indifferent to those doing the tickling and drain the quick of their quickness. They are strange attractors, like black holes.       

Notes

* I like the word allure as it is drawn from the language of seduction, which is the appropriate language in which to discuss objects philosophically. One might also note that the modern English word quick is of Germanic origin and is related not only to the Dutch term kwiek, meaning sprightly, but the German word keck, meaning saucy; another term belonging to the language of seduction. In sum, quickness goes beyond merely a question of speed - it's more than Schnelligkeit - just as it's more than vitality.

** With the use of a list like this, composed of seemingly random objects, Lawrence wishes to show that there are no absolutes; all things exist relative to one another upon a flat ontological field and/or within a general economy of the whole. We can call this a democracy of objects, like Levi Bryant, or a democracy of touch, like Lawrence.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Novel', Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 177-90. Lines quoted p. 183.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Cry of the Masses', Poems Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 511-12.

Hamartiology: Notes on the Greening of Sin and Carbon Offsetting

Image: Ron Barrett

The New York Times (2007)

I.

Sin - a concept crucial to Christianity - was defined by Augustine as a transgression against God's eternal law, be it by word, deed, or desire.  

Today, however, when everyone is environmentally aware and more concerned about global warming than seeking spiritual salvation, sin seems to involve a transgression against Nature or a defilement of the Earth (sometimes personified as the Greek goddess Gaia).

In other words, we no longer condemn people for missing the moral mark, but eagerly judge individuals, corporations, and governments for failing to hit targets to reduce their carbon emissions or recycle plastic waste ...   

II.

Because no one really wants to be punished for their sins, the Catholic Church came up with the clever idea of an indulgence - which is a kind of get out jail free card that allows for the remission of sins or, at the very least, mitigates the temporal punishment that one might otherwise have expected to receive for wrongdoing.   

By the late Middle Ages, indulgences were hugely popular but abuse of the system was widespread; a problem which the Church recognised, but seemed either unable or unwilling to address. Chaucer famously mocks the idea of holy relics and the unrestricted sale of indulgences in The Pardoner's Tale and, later, Protestant reformers were relentless in their attacks on what they regarded as a sign of worldly corruption. The only thing that indulgences guaranteed, said Luther, was an increase in profit and in sin.  

Finally, in response, the Church did take action: in 1562 the Council of Trent suppressed the office of pardoners and reserved the publication of indulgences to bishops only. Shortly afterwards, Pope Pius V cancelled all issuing of indulgences involving fees or other financial transactions.

But now, however, in this age of green sin, they're back in the form of carbon offsets ...


III. 

A carbon offset is a sleight of hand in which an emission of greenhouse gases made in one place is offset by a reduction in emissions made elsewhere, thereby guaranteeing the blissful state of carbon neutrality.

There are two markets for these carbon offsets: a compliance market, in which large companies and institutions buy them up in bulk in order to comply with international regulations and agreed caps; and, secondly, a much smaller scale voluntary market in which individuals as well as companies purchase carbon offsets so as to mitgate their own greenhouse gas emisssions from things like transport (particularly air travel).  

Carbon offset vendors - i.e., the new pardoners - will happily meet all your needs; even providing other services should you require them, such as measuring your very own carbon footprint.

I'm not the first critic to liken these carbon offsets to indulgences; i.e., a way for the rich and powerful to pay for absolution rather than changing their extravagant lifestyles or harmful business practices. Indeed, several environmental organisations have expressed concern that carbon offsetting is merely a convenient way to virtue signal on the one hand whilst continuing to pollute and consume on the other.   

Think Harry and Meghan, for example, whose sins are bright scarlet, even if they paint themselves as green as green can be ...

On Benevolent Sexism

I.

Even sexism, it seems, isn't as unambiguous a term as one might have previously believed. For according to some theorists, sexism has two components: hostile sexism on the one hand and benevolent sexism on the other.

The first is an overtly negative - often violent - form of misogyny that deals in untenable evaluations and stereotypes based on a strict binary model of gender. I think we might all agree that it's not something to be very proud of, or that there's much to be said about such stupidity.     

But sexism in its more benevolent form is, I think, worthy of further reflection ...


II.

Just to be clear from the outset: I'm perfectly happy to concede that sexism - even at its most benevolent - involves prejudice and may have negative consequences, whatever the motivation or intent of the male agent. But I think it might also be conceded that often the things we're told are harmful actually make us feel good, whilst the things we're supposed to value often make us miserable in practice.

As the author and journalist Ed West notes:

"Sexual freedom, for example, makes people depressed much of the time [...] A money-obsessed culture, with its intense competition, stress and inequality, also causes us to be miserable [...] Ethnic diversity we know makes people unhappy because they vote with their feet. Likewise sexual equality, or at least sexual equality that refuses to acknowledge the biological reality of sex; and I can't imagine the idea of 'microaggressions', in which people are encouraged to see slights in every experience, is very good for one's mental health."

That's a conservative-cum-reactionary viewpoint (unsurprisingly perhaps from the deputy editor of The Catholic Herald who blogs for The Spectator), but West is touching on something important here; particularly when it comes to microaggressions (or sins) which only the righteous and the woke whose eyes are fully open can perceive.   

III.

One of the fields where we can witness gender politics being played out is etiquette; for some feminists, it's manners that maketh the benevolently sexist man and they consider it insulting if a chap holds a door open for them, or offers to help carry their luggage up a flight of stairs.

The gent in question might regard his actions as simply a form of kindness, but his polite actions are part of a tradition founded upon cultural representations of women as the weaker (and less competent) sex and thus problematic from the perspective of feminism. For those who base their sexual politics upon such a perspective, chivalry is simply a disguised form of oppression that entrenches gender inequality.       

But most (heterosexual) women seem not to think like this; in fact, the evidence is that they like to be shown a little courtesy by members of the opposite sex - be they loved ones, work colleagues, or simply strangers on a train. Interestingly, there is also evidence to suggest that men like making these small gestures; that civility - as a playful exercise of power - makes everyone happy.   

Unfortunately, contemporary culture seems to be more concerned with political correctness rather than joie de vivre ... 

See: Ed West, 'Don’t knock 'benevolent sexism'  - it makes us happy', The Spectator, (25 March 2014): click here.

Good Husbands Make Unhappy Wives

According to a report in The Sun, a woman is seeking a divorce from her husband because he smothers her with affection and showers her with gifts. He also refuses to argue, takes care of the housework, and generally makes her life unbearable with his loving behaviour.

When she complained about his weight, he even put himself on a strict diet and exercise regime - what a monster! And I say that not in a joking manner, but in all seriousness; he is a monster of kindness, perhaps, but a monster all the same and I can understand the woman's frustration and her longing for conflict in order to keep the relationship spicy. 

D. H. Lawrence often writes about this in his work; about the boredom experienced by modern women married to husbands who are perfectly polite and decent at all times, but who grind on the nerves.

In one short verse (or pansy), he writes:   

Good husbands make unhappy wives

so do bad husbands, just as often;

but the unhappiness of a wife with a good husband

is much more devastating

than the unhappiness of a wife with a bad husband.

I don't know if that's true, but, if so, then we can rule out good husbands as the answer to Freud's famously exasperated question: What do women want? 

See: 

Alahna Kindred, 'Smothered with Affection', The Sun, (24 August 2019): click here.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Good husbands make unhappy wives', The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 395.