In Praise of Fighters: At the Gym and on the Battlefield with D. H. Lawrence

George Rodger's famous photo taken in Southern Sudan (1949) 

of a Nuba wrestling champion being carried victorious upon 

the shoulders of a friend - just the kind of young fighters 

D. H. Lawrence (and Leni Riefenstahl) swooned over  

georgerodgerphotographs.com

 

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence has a rather romantic understanding of combat in the heroic age before it became an affair entirely of machines and abstraction; when men still fought up close and personal with their enemy and didn't kill from a distance by simply pulling a trigger or pressing a button, devoid of all emotion; when men still had "all the old natural courage" [a] and were individual fighters, not mechanical-units.

In his essay 'Education of the People', for example, he riffs on what he terms the "profound motive of battle" [b], recalling its Latin etymology, battualia, meaning the physical exercise undertaken by those training to be soldiers or gladiators. You shouldn't go to the gym simply to keep fit - Lawrence regards this as a semi-pathological form of masturbation - but to reawaken the centres of volition located in the spine and prepare for battle:

 

"Not Mons or Ypres of course. Ah, the horror of machine explosions! But living, naked battle, flesh to flesh contest. Fierce, tense struggle of man with man, struggle to the death. That is the spirit of the gymnasium. " [158] 

 

That might sound terribly appealing to some people, but it's hard to imagine modern gyms promoting fierce, unrelenting, honourable contest, when they pride themselves on offering fun, community and fitness in a safe and friendly environment. And it's even more difficult to imagine modern parents sending their sons off to the gym so that they can be set against one another like young bantam cocks:

"Let them fight. Let them hurt one another. Teach them again to fight with gloves and fists, egg them on, spur them on, let it be fine balanced contest in skill and fierce pride. Egg them on, and look on the black eye and the bloody nose as insignia of honour [...]

      Bring out the foils and teach fencing. Teach fencing, teach wrestling, teach jiu-jitsu, every form of fierce hand to hand contest. And praise the wounds. And praise the valour that will be killed rather than yield. Better fierce and unyielding death than our degraded creeping life." [158-59]  

 

And the purpose of this rousing of the old male spirit in the young is, of course, to produce men who are superb and godlike fighters who, in their willingness to strip naked and fight to the death, can experience a great crisis of being. To quote Lawrence at length once more:

 

"What does death matter, if a man die in a flame of passionate conflict. He goes to heaven as the ancients said: somehow, somewhere his soul is at rest, for death is to him a passional consummation. But to be blown to smithereens while you are eating a sardine: horrible and monstrous abnormality. The soul should leap fiery into death, a consummation. Then nothing is lost." [159]

 

For Lawrence, then, war can be justified - and, indeed, glorified - providing it's an actual fight and not a mechanical slaughter or virtual game; "a sheer immediate conflict of physical men" [159]. That is to say, so long as it's a primal form of passion, rather than idealism or a sordid commercial-industrial consideration. What we should do - being master of our own inventions - is "blow all guns and explosives and poison gases sky-high" [160].     

But such a radical form of disarmament isn't tied to pacifism, obviously: Lawrence doesn't pretend you can (or should wish to) abolish war; he's still happy to send young men off to fight "armed with swords and shields" so that they may enjoy "a rare old lively scrap, such as the heart can rejoice in" [161]. 

 

And Lawrence is convinced that if the British set a lead here, the rest of the world will follow; that they too will destroy all their mechanical weapons in an act of reckless defiant sanity and agree to meet their enemy face to face and in their own skin. The whole world would at once give a great sigh of relief, says Lawrence; for there's "nothing which every man would be so glad to think had vanished out of the world as guns, explosives, and poison gases" [160].

II. 

If Lawrence's essay received very little serious consideration in 1920 (in fact, it wasn't even published until 1936), it's now inconceivable that our politicians and military commanders would give his work any thought whatsoever. 

 

For the fact is, casualties in war have become increasingly unacceptable to the Western powers and the aim today is to exterminate the enemy as quickly, cleanly, and as clinically as possible without suffering any undue losses from amongst one's own forces. War is now conceived as not only a non-contact sport, but a bloodless one as well, to be fought with the most sophisticated and smartest of technology. It's become, essentially, a computerised form of pest control.      

And whilst Saddam Hussein was right to taunt the Americans on the eve of the 1991 Gulf War that they were a people unable to bear the loss of 10,000 soldiers in one battle, there's a practical reason for this beyond squeamishness, cowardice, or an inability to cope with loss, and it's to do with bio-politics. As Peter Sloterdijk notes, the contemporary method of waging war "suits societies with low biological reproductivity because on our side nowadays we have no sons to squander" [c].   

Thus, whilst Lawrence likes to blame moral idealism for the fact that we in the West have lost our desire to fight in the old sense of the word and turned into madmen and monsters who, in the name of Love, drop bombs on an unseen enemy "hoping to scatter a million bits of indiscriminate flesh" [162], it probably has as much to do with a sharply declining fertility rate.       

Notes

[a] D. H. Lawrence, 'With the Guns', Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 83.

[b] D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 158. Future page references to this book will be given directly in the text. 

[c] Peter Sloterdijk, 'Thus Spoke Sloterdijk', interview with Res Strehle, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Marglois, (Polity Press, 2016), p. 196.

For a related post to this one, click here. 

In Memory of Mascha Kaléko

Google Doodle of Mascha Kaléko by Ramona Ring

I. 

I must admit, I'm not a big fan of Google Doodles; i.e., the decorative changes made to the Google logo on their homepage in order to mark a wide range of anniversaries and events and memorialise the lives of dead artists, scientists, and other figures whom Google deem it appropriate that we should know (and presumably care) about.

Having said that, I was glad to see today's Doodle by the German illustrator Ramona Ring celebrating the life and work of the German-language poet Mascha Kaléko ...

II.

Kaléko quickly found success as a young poet in Berlin's avant-garde literary scene in the late-1920s and early-30s and her work captures something of the uniquely exhilarating - and uniquely monstrous - spirit of those times, as well as the daily life of ordinary citizens.

Her first collection - Das lyrische Stenogrammheft - was published in the same month that Hitler was appointed Chancellor (January 1933) and was soon subjected to Nazi censorship. Nevertheless, the following year, she published her second book, Kleines Lesebuch für Grosse.

Obviously, it would not have been wise as a Jewish woman to have stayed in her adopted homeland (Kaléko was born in what is now southern Poland) long after this date. For it was not only within her dreams that a storm was brewing. And so, in 1938, she fled Germany and emigrated to the US with her husband and child.

It wasn't until the end of the war, however, that Kaléko finally published her third volume of poetry, Verse für Zeitgenossen (1945). And it wasn't until 1956 that she could finally face visiting Berlin.

She returned to the city again in 1959, when she was awarded the Berliner Kunstpreis for literature, only to turn it down when she discovered that one of the judges - Hans Egon Holthusen, himself a poet and literary scholar - was also a former Nazi and member of the Waffen-SS.

That same year, she moved to Israel, where she continued to write poetry until her death in 1975. 

 

One of my favourite poems of hers is entitled Mein schönstes Gedicht and contains the following verse:

Mein schönstes Gedicht,
Ich schrieb es nicht.
Aus tiefsten Tiefen stieg es.
Ich schwieg es.

Which we might translate into English as:

My loveliest poem,
I didn't write it.
It rose from the deepest depths.
I silenced it.

 

 
Notes

Sadly, Mascha Kaléko remains little known in the English-speaking world and it wasn't until fairly recently that a representative selection of her poems became available in book form. See: No matter where I travel, I come to Nowhereland: the Poetry of Mascha Kaléko, trans. Andreas Nolte, (The University of Vermont, 2010). 
   

Photo of Mascha Kaléko (1933)    

Evolution as a Vaudeville of Forms: Notes on Genetic Drift and Ontological Seasickness

Peter Sloterdijk by Martin Sjardijn 

Oil on canvas (21.7 x 23.6 inches) 

saatchiart.com

  

 

I.

 

Say the word drift to me and, being a child of '68, I automatically think of Guy Debord's revolutionary theory of la dérive (1956) - defined by him as a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society. 

 

Basically, it's a random stroll through city streets, with no point or purpose and no fixed or final destination, leading to chance discoveries and encounters with strangers. The hope is that situations will arise from out of these encounters and from one's own disorientation and that one will also be able to slowly build up a new psychogeographical map of an otherwise alienating environment. 

 

For Debord and friends, the dérive was a necessary technique to combat the increasingly predetermined and boring experience of life lived within the world of capitalism and consumer culture, or what he termed the société du spectacle. 

 

But say the word drift to a biologist, however, and they think of something entirely different ...

 

 

II.

 

Genetic drift - in the simplest of all possible nutshells - is a change in the gene pool due to a random event (or series of events) rather than natural (non-random) selection. 

 

For some biologists, it plays a relatively minor role in evolution compared to the latter. But others, such as the Japanese biologist Motoo Kimura, argue that most evolutionary changes at the molecular level - and most of the variation within and between species - are due to genetic drift acting on neutral mutations.

 

I suppose the concept of genetic drift excites philosophically for much the same reason as punctuated equilibrium (contra phyletic gradualism) excites; namely, because it is about contingency and chance rather than a slowly unfolding form of deterministic logic. This may not make it true - but it makes it sexier and more seductive to people like me. 

 

 

III.

 

Peter Sloterdijk is also excited by the thought of genetic drift, as we can see in the following passage:

 

"We can't really imagine today how shocking the idea once was that God did not conceive the species, and that neither the archetypal content of a species nor its physical appearance are fixed once and for all. That is the real shock of the nineteenth century: the genetic drift, the idea that the original images of humans and beasts, of plants and everything that grows and blossoms, are not permanently fixed but drift in evolution, as we say today. That is worse than the worst seasickness because it affects ontological forms, as it were. When the species drift we become ontologically seasick - suddenly we have to watch fish becoming amphibians and the latter becming terrestrial animals; we witness a mammoth transforming into an elephant, and wolves turning into dogs - and all sorts of other monstrosities."

 

This is not just evolution as a kind of freak show, as Thomas Macho suggests, but as a vaudeville of forms, and evolutionary drift puts an end to all ontological security and comfort - God is dead, "because he is no longer any good as a guarantor of the species". 

 

Sloterdijk continues:  

 

"No Catholic defence front can change that, and humanism can only offer a weak alternative in this respect. We can see this quite clearly in the current genetics debate, with Catholics and old-fashioned humanists very heavily over-represented. They think it is a good idea to erect a corral round the human gene and shoot at everybody who tries to change it in some way. The unfortunate thing about this issue is that normal reproduction has long since been exposed for contributing to species drift, and every normal sexual act among humans infinitesimally advances this drifting. We must finally realise that the potential of the genus per se is monstrous. In fact, anthropology is only possibe now as a branch of general monstrology."    

 

This, it seems to me, is a vital issue, as we flow with the movement of our culture towards an age in which biology will have ever-greater importance; allowing us not only to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, but prune and shape the Tree of Life itself. In future, evolutionary drift will increasingly be subject to bio-technology and human intervention, turning existence into an experimental field.

 

Of course, this will lead to endless ethical debates, but let's not give too much time to those reactionaries living in a hothouse of moral overexcitement. For it's difficult "to stay in such hyper-moral hothouses for long without getting breathless. If you're interested in a cultured style of living, you should protect the house of being from overheating" - if you catch my drift.  

 

 

Notes

 

Guy Debord, 'Theory of the Dérive' (1956): click here to read on Situationist International Online. 

 

Peter Sloterdijk, 'Raising Our Heads: Pampering Spaces and Time Drifts', a conversation with Thomas Macho, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), pp. 82-105. Lines quoted are on pp. 97, 98, and 105. 

 

This post is for Andy Greenfield, who kindly advised me on it.  

Cars (Have You Ever Stopped to Think Who's the Slave and Who's the Master?)

Sleeve for the single 'Cars' by Gary Numan 
from the album The Pleasure Principle  (Beggars Banquet, 1979) 

Click here to play on YouTube

 

I. 

 

After a recent post, someone sent me the following email:

'I don't know who Peter Sloterdijk is, but, one thing's for sure, this so-called philosopher knows nothing about the history of horses, nor how they are still being exploited and abused by human beings even today - particularly those within the racing industry. His overly-fanciful observation on post-historical horses leading lives of leisure at their own pace may have been intended to be amusing, but it ultimately serves to distract from the continuing cruelty and hardship faced by many animals. I suspect this well-paid German professor spends more time riding around in a BMW than he does caring for horses, so should stick to speaking of what he knows - money and machines!'

 

Now, I don't know if my correspondent's suspicions are correct, but, funny enough, Sloterdijk does quite often speak about cars and their cultural and philosophical significance; as symbols, as commodities, as expressions of identity, etc.

 

II.

 

In a 1995 interview [1], for example, he argues that the driver and motor vehicle form a unity in much the same way as previously man and horse formed a unity, as symbolised by the figure of the centaur; that man is always imagining himself as faster and more powerful than he is. The car, in other words, is not simply a means of transport; it is also a means of intoxication. 

But it is also a means of regression, says Sloterdijk, for the car is also a kind of womb, or uterus on wheels and many drivers become aggressive on account of this. For regressed individuals often feel the need to childishly assert themselves; revving their engines, attacking the space, running red lights, dangerously overtaking others, etc., proving they are kings of the road. 

That's why perfectly reasonable people often become raging maniacs behind the wheel and why there will always be fatal traffic accidents; "cars are connected with a kind of archetypal violence" that is immune to all the road safety propaganda in the world. 

 

III. 

 

In a later interview [2], meanwhile, Sloterdijk develops his theory of the car and the reason for its irresistible (quasi-religious) attraction for so many people:

"The car is a machine for increasing self-confidence. [...] The car gives its driver additional power and reach. [...] I think we have to see the vehicles of humans in the first place as a means of idealization and intensification, and consequently as a kinetic anti-depressant. The big demand for automobility certainly comes from people who want the vehicle for increasing their radius of action and capability. [...] Two out of three movements are escapes: people drive to their lovers, they take trips to the countryside and on holiday, they go visiting, or they use their car for letting off steam. We could almost think people use the car as revenge on the heavy demands of settledness."   

Whilst I understand that, I tend to agree with D. H. Lawrence that, ultimately, the soul needs to travel naked and light and on her own two feet along the open road - not by car. I also agree with Deleuze who insists that the most important trips are measured in terms of intensity, not distance covered, and that the true nomad moves even when standing still.

Sloterdijk knows this, I think, which is why he acknowledges that people who belong to more magical cultures "achieved their exalted feelings with soul journeys, and no driving licence exists for that". However, Sloterdijk - himself a motorist - concedes that:

"The automobile can also take us to places we have never visited before. It is not just the means of regression [...] it can also give us access to new, open places, it can also be a medium of coming-into-the-world. [...] If they were only a means to re-create a womb-like situation and return to an inner world, then they would merely be 'homecoming vehicles'."

But cars are not just that; they can also be a means for many people of making a great escape or exodus of some kind, though this undoubtedly requires more than a Sunday morning drive to Homebase. In fact, one might suggest - like Ballard - that what it requires is not so much a car ride as a car crash; i.e. something which "harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status" [3] into a single event. 

Commenting on the delirious, sacrificial aspect of driving, Sloterdijk notes that road deaths will never result in a call for the banning of cars; "because mobility is actually the occult kinetic religion of modernity". Thus, at present, there's not the slightest chance of restricting the desire to build still more roads and manufacture still more vehicles, no matter how many lives are lost, or how much damage is done to the natural environment. 

 

Having said that, even the age of the horse eventually passed ... 

 

Notes

[1] Peter Sloterdijk, 'Uterus on Wheels', interview with Walter Saller, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), pp. 23-24. The line quoted from is on p. 24.

[2] Peter Sloterdijk, 'We're Always Riding Down Maternity Drive', interview with Mateo Kries, in Selected Exaggerations, pp. 40-48. The lines quoted are on pp. 42, 43, and 47.  

[3] J. G. Ballard, 'Sci-Fi Seer', interview with Lynn Barber, in Penthouse, Vol 5, No. 5, (May 1970), pp. 26-30. Click here to read in full.

Readers interested in this topic might also like to read David Gartman's essay entitled 'Three Ages of the Automobile: The Cultural Logics of the Car', in Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 21, Issue 4-5, (October 2004), pp. 169-195.   

Hold Your Post-Historical Horses! It's the D. H. Lawrence Birthday Post 2020

Detail from an original artwork by James Walker / Izaak Bosman (2018)

See D. H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage: click here

 

 

According to D. H. Lawrence: "While horses thrashed the streets of London, London lived" and in losing the horse - with the arrival of motor vehicles - we have lost ourselves. 

 

For horses - as real flesh-and-blood creatures and not merely as symbols that roam in the "dark underworld meadows of the soul" - give us lordship and link us directly to the surging potency of the living cosmos, or what Lawrence sometimes refers to as God [1]. 

 

But what Lawrence doesn't mention is the great horse manure crisis of the 1890s. By this date, London and other large cities around the world faced the very real prospect of being buried beneath huge piles of horseshit. 

 

On average, a horse will produce between fifteen and thirty-five pounds of faeces each day. So when you have tens of thousands of these animals transporting people and goods around a city the scale of the problem is significant. 

 

(I'll not even mention the two pints of urine that every horse pisses out each day; nor the fact that many working horses who died on the job were often left to rot in the street before eventually being carted away.)

So whilst Lawrence might abhor the motorised traffic that has crushed all the living adventure out of London and which now rolls on massively and overwhemingly, going nowhere [2], it's worth considering the excremental reality of horses.

Further, it might help horse lovers out there to also reflect upon something pointed out by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk:

"Incidentally, there are almost as many horses today as there were in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, but they have all been reassigned. They are almost all leisure horses, hardly any workhorses nowadays. Isn't it an odd comment on today's society that only horses have achieved emancipation? Humans are still work animals just as they always were [...] but the horses standing in German paddocks today are all horses of pleasure, post-historic horses. Children stroke them and adults admire them, and we feel very sorry for the last workhorses we see now and then [...] All the other European horses have managed to do what humans still dream of - horses are the only ones for whom historical philosophy's dream of a good end to history has become reality. They are the happy unemployed that evolution seemed to be moving towards. For them, the realm of freedom  has been reached, they stand in their paddock, are fed, have completely forgotten the old drudgery and live out their natural mobility." [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 101-02.   

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Why I Don't Like Living in London', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 121.

[3] Peter Sloterdijk, 'We're Always Riding Down Maternity Drive', interview with Mateo Kries (1999), in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), p. 44. 

 

I'm not entirely convinced that what Sloterdijk says here is correct; for example, there were an estimated 3.3 million horses in late-Victorian Britain, whereas in 2019 there were, according to the British Equestrian Trade Association, around 847,000 horses in the UK (down from 946,000 in 2015). The fact is, with the coming of the automobile, most horses were put out to graze - or sent to the knacker's yard. 

 

For an equine journey through human history, see Susanna Forrest, The Age of the Horse, (Atlantic Books, 2016): for further details on both book and author, click here.  

My Pagan Self Revealed (Reflections on a Mexican Devil Mask)

I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus 

and would rather be a satyr than a saint

I.

I have already written elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark about how, for me, the way to move beyond the ruins of the late 1970s was not via a poppy new romanticism or a shameless embrace of free market capitalism, but, rather, towards a post-punk paganism inspired by a wide range of influences including Nietzsche, Lawrence, Jung, Crowley, McLaren, and Jaz Coleman.*

Thus, after 1982, I defined myself less as an anarchist and more as an anti-Christ and the task, as I saw it then, was to aggressively confront Occidental reason and Christian morality with its absolute Other by promoting a pessimistic vitalism tied to an anti-modern politics. 

In other words, safety pins were replaced by horns on head and the vintage Mexican devil mask that I can be seen holding in the photo above became the face of my soul; i.e., my essential self is a concealed self, a disguised self, the product of playful dissimulation. This is what Wilde refers to as the truth of masks and those who are profound enough to be superficial will understand the philosophical importance of this fact.  

II. 

The native peoples of Mexico have had a thing for the making and wearing of masks for millennia; i.e., long before the Spanish arrived - or the tourists. Obviously, the masks had a ritual and magical significance and were worn during religious ceremonies and festivals. Sometimes they had human features; sometimes animal.

And sometimes they incarnated deities, demons, or devils; the latter often having real horns and images of snakes, lizards, or frogs added to the usually grotesque facial design.

Although my mask is hand-carved from wood, traditional masks were also made from other materials including clay, leather, and wax. After the Conquest of Mexico (1519-21), the Spanish outlawed indigenous beliefs, but Christian evangelisers were happy to exploit the love of masks, dance, and spectacle to propagate their faith amongst the natives.

Often, however, rather than successfully replace old cultural traditions with entirely new forms, masked events became a strange amalgamation of paganism and Catholicism. It was Carnival - but not as the Europeans originally understood it.

Today, masked festivals remain very popular and prevalent in parts of the country with large numbers of native peoples and old customs and beliefs live on, if only in a commercialised and aestheticised form.           

* Note: Readers interested in this earlier post to which I refer - with my reflections on Pagan Magazine - can read it by clicking here. And for another post on the truth of masks, click here. 

Fairy Tale

Frances with Fairies (1917) by Elsie Wright 

I. 

I suppose it's fair to say that the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best remembered as the creator of Britain's most famous fictional detective. Less well known is the fact that, despite his training in medical science, he was fascinated by paranormal activity and psychic phenomena. 

 

Indeed, Conan Doyle was a believer not only in the efficacy of spiritualism, but in the existence of fairies and published a book on the latter - The Coming of the Fairies (1922) - in which he set out his views and reproduced the Cottingley Fairies photographs, convinced as he was of their authenticity.  

II. 

In 1917, two young girls in West Yorkshire - Elsie Wright, aged 16, and her cousin Frances Griffiths, aged 9 - produced a couple of photographs purporting to show fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Public reaction to the pictures was mixed; some people believed them to be genuine and insisted that they provided firm evidence for the existence of supernatural beings; others, not quite so willing to accept the validity of the photographs, simply smiled at the idea that these magical figures from European folklore might actually be real and noted the très moderne hairstyles that the fairies modelled. 

Interestingly, whilst Elsie's mother, Polly, was in the first camp, her father, Arthur, a keen amateur photographer, immediately dismissed the images as a prank and was only concerned that the girls may have tampered with his camera.

The pictures became public in 1919 when Polly attended a meeting of the Theosophical Society in Bradford. At the end of the meeting, she showed the photographs taken by her daughter and niece to the speaker and, as a result, they were displayed at the Society's annual conference in Harrogate later that year.

 

Here, they came to the attention of a leading theosophist, Edward Gardner, who recognised the importance of the pictures; the fact that two young girls had not only been able to see the fairies, but also materialise their presence sufficiently for their images to be recorded on a photographic plate, demonstrated that psychic photography was possible.

 

Gardner was soon selling prints at his lectures and, before long, Conan Doyle came to hear of them. Never one to miss an opportunity, the latter quickly gained permission from Arthur Wright to use the images (free of charge) to illustrate an article he had written for the 1920 Christmas edition of The Strand Magazine. He also arranged with Gardner for the girls to take more fairy photos.

The two men were ecstatic with the results and believed the new pictures confirmed the truth of their theories concerning fairies and other psychic phenomena. Critics, however, were increasingly scornful; G. K. Chesterton is said to have remarked that when it came to this sort of thing, Conan Doyle's mentality was unfortunately more Watson than Holmes. The public also were growing tired of this fairy tale ...

It wasn't until 1982, however, that Elsie and Frances finally admitted in an interview what surely everyone with eyes can see; namely, that the photographs were faked using cardboard cut-outs of dancing girls copied from a popular children's book of the time and given wings (although both maintained that there really had been fairies at the bottom of the garden).

III.

As the author of Genocide in Fairyland - an unpublished collection of contemporary tales - I have to admit that I have a certain fondness for fairies, elves, goblins, and little people of every variety. I even agree with Conan Doyle who wrote that recognition of their existence would jolt the material modern mind 'out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and make it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life.' 

 

Primarily, however, my thinking on this subject has been shaped by the following (extraordinary) passage from an essay by D. H. Lawrence, in which he argues that fairies are not merely an imaginative reality:

"Fairies are true embryological realities of the human psyche. They are true and real for the great affective centres, which see as through a glass, darkly, and which have direct correspondence with living and naturalistic influences in the surrounding universe, correspondence which cannot have mental, rational utterance, but must express itself, if it be expressed, in preternatural forms. Thus fairies are true ..."
 

 

See:

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies, (Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., 1922). This work can be read online thanks to the good people at arthur-conan-doyle.com - click here. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press,1988), p. 127.  

Beyond Good and Alcohol

Alcoholic drinks do not agree with me. A single glass of wine 

or beer is amply sufficient to turn life into a valley of tears.

 

Nietzsche didn't just despise the moral narcotic of Christianity; he also hated alcohol and often wrote of the negative effect that booze has on the character.

Thus, although he'd enjoyed a drink or two in his student days, Nietzsche was pretty much a teetotaler all his adult life and insisted that for free spirits, such as himself, a refreshing drink of water was enough (or, on special occasions, maybe a small glass of milk). 

 

Alcohol, he insisted, dulled intellectual and emotional intensity and those who consume it - like the beer-swilling Germans - do so at their peril; they wilfully make themselves stupid as well as obese.      

 

Having said that, it's hard to imagine Nietzsche lending his support to the temperance movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, which is clearly a form of finger-wagging puritanism that coincided with Christian revivalism and women's suffrage (something else that Nietzsche was not a fan of).

Thankfully, Nietzsche is liberal enough to call for individual decision making on the basis of personal need, rather than a general prohibition on the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol; for this saves him from falling into fanaticism on the subject.     

 

 

Education, Education, Education à la D. H. Lawrence

Hey, teachers, leave them kids alone!

 

I. 

 

Former schoolteacher D. H. Lawrence always retained an interest in education and held typically strong views on the subject, some of which I would like to discuss here as set out in a long essay entitled 'Education of the People'. Composed of twelve sections, this work goes way beyond anything we might encounter in the Times Educational Supplement.* 

 

In places, the language used resembles Lawrence's later study Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), though readers will be relieved to know that I'll not be making reference here to plexuses, planes, and ganglia, nor discussing his neurophysiological account of consciousness. As far as possible, I want to remain in the classroom and focus on Lawrence's thoughts on a new national curriculum ...

II. 

 

Lawrence opens his essay with three questions: "What is education all about? What is it doing? Does anybody know?" [87]

Whether he answers his own questions is debatable, though he clearly thinks he knows what education is all about - or, rather, what education should be all about - and has a good idea of what it should do; namely, develop the individual and not simply produce model citizens. For Lawrence, the ultimate aim of education has to be to "recognise the true nature in each child, and to give each its natural chance [...] helped wisely, reverently, towards his own fulfilment" [99].  

That sounds pretty idealistic to me - which is ironic, as Lawrence vehemently attacks all forms of idealism in this essay - and, obviously, I'm uncomfortable with the language used here; particularly when Lawrence maps this line of thinking on to a conventional model of class, so that the latter too becomes a question of nature rather than politics.

In the blink of an eye, Lawrence moves from know thyself to know thy place and fulfilment is privileged over freedom and equality. He might believe in universal education, but he certainly doesn't believe in universal suffrage and thinks that liberal democracy pisses on the spark of divinity that exists in every man, woman and child and which gives them their ontological uniqueness. 

 

III.

 

The first thing Lawrence calls for is the defeat of fear; particularly the fear of failure and of not being able to earn a living. We should educate our children to be fearless, he says; to have courage and a little insouciance. After all, what's the worst that can happen? You might be unemployed and penniless - you might even starve to death - but why worry about it? "It isn't such an awful thing, if you don't care about keeping up appearances" [91] or preserving yourself like a fat green cabbage. 

The second thing that Lawrence advocates is leaving children alone as much as possible; teach 'em the three Rs and then let them find their own aims and concerns. If they choose not to study, then that's their business: "Is not radical unlearnedness just as true a form of self-expression, and just as desirable a state, for many natures (even the bulk), as learnedness?" [95]

And in order to ensure this unlearnedness, Lawrence advocates the educational system be restructured from top to bottom along the following sensible lines:
 

Send all children to state schools aged seven for four hours a day; three hours given over to reading, writing, and arithmetic; one hour devoted to PE or domestic science. The schools will teach children of both sexes and all classes, so they might gain a radical understanding of one another both in their common humanity and essential differences.  

At the age of twelve, divide the children into two groups; the first shall be sent to secondary schools, "where an extended curriculum includes Latin or French, and some true science" [97]; the second group, who will not be sent to the secondary schools, will have their intellectual education reduced to two hours, "whilst three hours will be devoted to [...] martial exercises and the rudiments of domestic labour" [97]. This second group of children will form a "vigorous, passionate proletariat of indomitable individuals" [106] and artisans.

When the secondary students are about to turn fifteen, further divide them in two; those who "according to their own nature and capacity" [97] have learnt all they can from books, shall be given apprenticeships for "some sort of semi-profession" [97] and will form a reliable middle-class. The remaining students, who display a natural inclination for scholarship, shall be admitted into colleges at sixteen; they, says Lawrence, belong to the highest class and will become our doctors, lawyers, priests, professors, and artists of the future. 

"Such", concludes Lawrence, "is a brief sketch of a sensible system of education for a civilised people" [99]. 

 

 

IV.

 

It is, I think, a deeply disappointing model which basically reinforces the class system as it presently exists and continues to entrench the division between manual and intellectual labour, wherein the latter is socially privileged.

 

The only difference is that Lawrence seeks to remove the accident of money from his social system so that the classes will "derive through heredity, as the great oriental castes" [107]. Such a system, he says, is organic and vital; there's nothing automatic or mechanical about it. Oh, and it's also fundamentally religious in character, established upon the living religious faculty; i.e., the "inward worship of the creative life-mystery" [108]. 

 

Ultimately, Lawrence adopts the sow's ear/silk purse argument, insisting that we are all determined by our true nature and that it's dangerously mistaken to try and force all children to think or express themselves creatively: "Every teacher knows that it is worse than useless trying to educate at least fifty per-cent of his scholars" [96], writes Lawrence. 

 

Indeed, it might even be preferable to exclude them from elementary schools altogether and the "imbecile pretence of culture" [112] that only renders them neurasthenic. Better to keep them ignorant but robust - or as swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, and as hard as steel, as someone else also keenly interested in the education of the young would later put it.**  
  

 

V.

It will be surprising to some readers to learn that Lawrence was as opposed to self-expression in children as the development of smirking self-consciousness. Surprising too, to discover he also hates the cultivation of imagination:

"Down with imagination in school, down with self-expression. Let us have a little severe hard work, good, clean, well-written exercises, well-pronounced words, well-set-down sums: and [...] for the rest, leave the children alone. Pitch them out into the street or the playgrounds and take no notice of them. Drive them savagely away from their posturings.

       There must be an end to the self-conscious attitudinising of our children. The self-consciousness and all the damned high-flownness must be taken out of them, and their little personalities must be nipped in the bud. Children shall be regarded as young creatures, not as young affected persons."  [126-27]

 

Now, that's something I can agree with at last ...   

    

Notes

* Funnily enough, Lawrence submitted an earlier, much shorter version of 'Education of the People' to the Times Educational Supplement. Perhaps unsurprisingly the work was rejected.

 

** In a speech of 14 September, 1935, Hitler famously set out his vision of German youth; not only was it to be slender and supple, but Flink wie die Windhunde, Zaeh wie Leder, Hart wie Kruppstahl. This is not to suggest that Lawrence was a Nazi - or that Hitler was a Lawrentian.  

 

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Page references given in the text refer to this edition. 

 

Readers interested in a related post to this one on returning to school in the age of coronavirus, should click here. 

 

 

Back to School in the Age of Coronavirus

The schools in England are finally reopening this week, having been closed since March (not because children were dropping like flies or the elderly residents of care homes, but because of the collective hysteria triggered by Covid-19).

So it seems a good time to once more pose the three questions asked by former teacher D. H. Lawrence in an essay written 100 years ago: "What is education all about? What is it doing? Does anybody know?" [87]. 

I suspect that, as a matter of fact, nobody today has the faintest clue as to what goal education should serve - unless it's to produce a politically correct, genderfluid, socially distanced generation all wearing face masks.    

Who's responsible for this: the teachers ... the parents ... the politicians? Or perhaps it's what some people like to call the system, referring to a faceless bureaucratic machine. But as Lawrence notes, saying that is really saying nothing:

"The system, after all, is only the outcome of the human psyche, the human desires. We shout and blame the machine. But who on earth makes the machine, if we don't? And any alterations in the system are only modifications in the machine. The system is in us, it is not something external to us. The machine is in us, or it would never come out of us. Well then, there's nothing to blame but ourselves, and there's nothing to change except inside ourselves." [90] 

We're all responsible, as adults, for creating a climate of fear and a culture of resentment into which we raise our children, rather than opposing values, of courage and insouciance, for example, upon which they might better base their lives. For if you can't prevent young people being frightened for (and of) their own existence, "you'll educate them in vain" [91].  

Which is really a crying shame:

"It is a shame to treat children as we treat them in school, to a lot of [...] lies, and to a lot of fear and humiliation." [92].

And the answer? Obviously, it is to overcome our fear. Unfortunately, I suspect that's going to take even longer than the search for a vaccine. Until then:

"Teach the three Rs and leave the children to look out for their own aims. That's the very best thing we can do at the moment, since we are all cowards." [93]

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 85-166. All page references given in the text refer to this edition. 

 

For a related post on D. H. Lawrence and education, click here.