In Defence of Women in Love and the Teenage Mentality (A Response to Frances Wilson)

Photo of Frances Wilson by Jonathan Ring

 

 

I. 

 

Once, in 1983, when I was twenty-years-old, I was riding in a car with a producer from the BBC's Community Programme Unit, on the way to Derby to film a piece of CND propaganda masquerading as investigative journalism, entitled 'Doctors Against the Bomb'. 

 

Heading as we were to the East Midlands, it was perhaps inevitable that the name D. H. Lawrence entered the conversation: I said I loved Lawrence and his writing; he - the producer - told me with a patronising tone and superior little smile: "Everybody does when they're young. But, don't worry, you'll grow out of it."

 

It's something I've never forgotten: and I determined at that moment to never abandon Lawrence or repudiate his influence on my thinking (and, indeed, my life).  

 

 

II. 

 

I was reminded of this incident when I read the following crass sentence in Frances Wilson's new biography of Lawrence, Burning Man (2021):         

 

"Only if we agree with Birkin on all counts does [Women in Love] become the prophetic event that Lawrence wanted it to be, and the only people who agree with Birkin are teenagers." [1]

 

What this reveals, I'm sorry to say, is that Wilson is one of those high-brow readers who, whilst posing as a Lawrentian loyalist, sneers from her privileged position at his immaturity and despises a character like Rupert Birkin for displaying the uncompromising intensity of youth.  

 

She writes:

 

"There are wonderful things in Women in Love, but it is not the flawless masterpiece that Lawrence believed he had written. It is an experiment in the art of fiction [...] but we only have to compare the result with Virginia Woolf's The Waves to see that Lawrence has failed." [2] 

 

Did Lawrence ever claim to have written a flawless masterpiece? I don't think so. He wasn't interested in literary perfection - nor, for that matter, in comparative success. Besides, doesn't all great art ultimately fail? Its tragic beauty rests upon this fact.   

 

At the beginning of her study, Wilson says that, as an adolescent, she found Lawrence incomparable as an author and loved his fierce certainties:

 

"I liked the fact his women were physically alive and emotionally complex while his men were either megaphones or homoerotic fantasies, that he cared so much about the sickness of the world, that he saw in himself the whole of mankind; I liked his solidarity with the instincts, his willingness to cause offence, his rants, his earnestness, his identification with animals and birds, his forensic analyses of sexual jealousy, the rapidity of his thought, the heat of his sentences, and his enjoyment of brightly coloured stockings." [3] 

 

Alas, returning to Lawrence as a middle-aged biographer, she now finds that things have changed: 

 

"Where once I found insight, I now find bewildering levels of naivety; for all his claims to prophetic vision, Lawrence had little idea what was going on in the room let alone in the world." [4] 

 

Rather than consider that this disenchantment shows a loss of her own vitality, however, Wilson makes her snide little remark about Lawrence's fiction appealing only to teenagers. But, as Lawrence himself says, perhaps the mentality of a teenager is preferable to that of a jaded intellectual who now chooses to sit safely in judgement rather than risk falling in love.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 113. For a series of reflections on this book, click here and here.

[2] Ibid., pp. 112-113. 

[3] Ibid., pp. 2-3.

[4] Ibid., p. 3. This is a sentence that could have been written by Geoff Dyer; another author who claims to love Lawrence and has in part built his own career as a professional writer upon Lawrence, but then dismisses much of his work and transforms him from a figure of hate into a figure of ridicule, as if that's performing him a service.     

Little Hell Flames: On D. H. Lawrence's Poppy Philosophy

Bright Red Poppy (SA/2021)

 

 

This morning, a large bright red poppy has burst into flame at the top of my garden and it naturally triggers thoughts of Sylvia Plath's famous short verse* and, of course, D. H. Lawrence's philosophical remarks on the flower in his Study of Thomas Hardy** ...

 

Whilst for Plath the red poppy is a symbol both of pain and the release from pain (of sleep, of death), for Lawrence, the poppy reminds us that there is more to life than the will to self-preservation; that man - like flower - achieves his consummation or fourth-dimensional splendour by wasting himself, with no thought of the morrow.   

Even an old man, afraid of the coming winter, who warns the young against behaving like a "reckless, shameless scarlet flower" [8], can't resist watching as the poppy unfolds into being. For he knows in his innermost heart, where there is no fear, that the poppy's blaze of colour is what matters most; that even "the latent seeds were secondary" [8] and that without its outrageous redness, it is just another herbaceous plant growing wild by the roadside.  

 

And it is better that we too blossom like the poppy, rather than "linger into inactivity at the vegetable, self-preserving stage [...] like the regulation cabbage, hide-bound, a bunch of leaves that may not go any farther for fear of losing market value" [12]. For if we cannot flower into being, then we will thrash destruction about ourselves until we are rotten at heart. 

Lawrence concludes:

"The final aim of every living thing, creature, or being is the full achievement of itself. This accomplished, it will produce what it will produce, it will bear the fruit of its nature. Not the fruit, however, but the flower is the culmination and climax [...] 

      And I know that the common wild poppy has achieved so far its complete poppy-self, unquestionable. It has uncovered its red. Its light, its self, has risen and shone out, has run on the winds for a moment. It is splendid. The world is a world because of the poppy's red. Otherwise it would be a lump of clay. [...] I tremble at the inchoate infinity of life when I think of that which the poppy has to reveal, and has not as yet had time to bring forth." [12-13]  

 

 

Notes

 

* I'm referring here to 'Poppies in July', rather than 'Poppies in October'. But both poems can be found in Ariel (Faber and Faber, 1965), Plath's second book of verse, published two years after her death and edited (somewhat controversially) by Ted Hughes. (In 2004, a new edition of Ariel was published which for the first time restored Plath's own selection and arrangement of the poems.)  

 

** D. H. Lawrence, 'Study of Thomas Hardy', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press,1985), pp. 1-128. Page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. Note that although I only quote from chapter I, Lawrence it still singing the praises of the red poppy coming into bloom in chapter II: 

 

"His fire breaks out of him, and he lifts his head, slowly, subtly, tense in an ecstasy of fear overwhelmed by joy, submits to the issuing of his flame and his fire, and there it hangs at the brink of the void, scarlet and radiant for a little while, imminent on the unknown, a signal, an out-post, an advance-guard, a forlorn, splendid flag, quivering from the brink of the unfathomed void, into which it flutters silently [...]" [18]    

Healthy Body, Healthy Mind: Notes on NHS Values

A touching expression of ontological gratitude ... 

or a sinister form of zen fascism?

 

 

I. 

 

Anyone who has recently visited a UK hospital will doubtless be as astonished as I was by the amount of time, effort, and money that is put into the promotion of so-called NHS values, which, essentially, reduce to three key terms: respect, equality, and compassion. 

All fair enough, you might think. But at Queen's Hospital, in Romford, Essex [1] - which happens to be my local hospital - they have really gone to town and decided to expand upon the NHS vision, wildly proliferating values in what might almost be described as a metastatic manner. 

 

This is illustrated by the above poster, designed by a team determined to list as many moral adjectives as they can think of, in order to thank patients, visitors, and staff for being (amongst other things) human, obliging one to wonder who or what they feared they might encounter stalking the wards. 

 

Personally - and for the record - I've no objection to being treated by a robot, an alien, or a highly trained chimp, provided they are competent and go about their business with the minimum of fuss. 

 

And not only do I not care if they lack the (all too) human touch, but I don't expect them to be fun either; there are far too many idiots in far too many professional roles - doctors, teachers, trendy vicars and tubby office managers - posing as chilled out entertainers.    

 

 

II. 

 

But who is responsible for this zen fascist propaganda - or The Pride Way [2] - in our hospitals?

 

Well, in my region - Barking, Havering and Redbridge - the team responsible for teaching, coaching and empowering staff in The Pride Way is called the Kaizen Promotion Office. Based at Queen's Hospital, but working across all Trust sites, the KPO are dedicated to excellence and have adopted their methodology from the Virginia Mason Institute (part of the Virginia Mason Medical Centre in Seattle):

 

"Our KPO Team of specialists have been trained and mentored in The Pride Way tools and methodologies, and these tools have in turn been taught to others in the Trust through the many training and support opportunities provided by the Team, through both formal and informal training, coaching, Rapid Process Improvements Workshops (RPIW) and Kaizen events." [3]     

 

This way of speaking, thinking, and working could, of course, only have roots in the United States. And so now everything begins to make sense ...

 

The irony is that the British people pride themselves on the (supposedly) unique nature of their health care system and fear it being sold off to the Americans. But the latter - over-paid, over-earnest, and over-keen on woke corporate bullshit - are already over here ...    

 

 

Notes 

[1] Along with King George Hospital, in Goodmayes, Queen's Hospital is part the of Barking, Havering and Redbridge NHS University Hospitals Trust which also operates a number of clinics at sites in the surrounding areas. 

[2] PRIDE is an acronym for the values and behaviours which staff at BHR hospitals are expected to embody: Passion, Responsibility, Innovation, Drive, and Empowerment. To learn more about how these terms are being used, visit https://www.bhrhospitals.nhs.uk/our-vision-and-values/ 

 

[3] I'm quoting from https://www.bhrhospitals.nhs.uk/the-pride-way/

 

 

On Being an Odonto-Medical Wonder

Stephen Alexander:  

The Colour of Pain (2021)

 

 

I. 

 

The first post published on Torpedo the Ark was entitled Reflections on the Loss of UR6; a poem in which I considered the violent act of tooth extraction and the subsequent sense of trauma as your tongue probes the empty space where once a molar had been. 

 

What the post didn't mention, however, was that the verse was based on an actual incident. Nor does it inform readers that the tooth extracted - UR6 - possessed such an unusually deep and powerful root that my dentist had real problems removing it (much to her professional embarrassment). 

 

Indeed, the root was of such an unusual length and size that it and the tooth were featured in a dental journal.

 

 

II. 

 

I was reminded of this latter fact recently whilst sitting having my lower right leg photographed and filmed with professional equipment in the Emergency Department at Queen's Hospital, for possible use in a medical journal and/or as teaching material for medical students. 

 

Not that there's anything particularly interesting or aesthetically pleasing about my leg as a limb in itself. But the swelling, deep bruising, and inflammation, is, apparently, of a highly unusual and perplexing nature; it could be superficial thrombophlebitis; it might simply be an infection of some kind or a ruptured vein; or it may betray a DVT - even though the position is all wrong. 

 

(No one wanted to mention the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, though this remained an unspoken subtext.)

 

Whatever the cause, I signed a consent form agreeing that images of the discoloured leg could be used in a case study and I find that my discomfort is lessened by the knowledge that my unidentified limb - just like my anonymous tooth - serves the cause of medical science in some small way. 

 

Now pass those pre-filled syringes so I can inject an anticoagulant into my stomach ...  

 

 

Eurotophobia and the Case of Yulia Tsvetkova

Yulia Tsvetkova: 'Living Women Have Body Hair - And It's Normal!' 

Drawing from the series A Woman is Not a Doll (2018) 

 

I. 

 

I closed a recent post discussing the case of Caterina Sforza and her provocative act of vulvic defiance in the face of her male enemies by suggesting that the latter is not something that would work today in a porno-epilated culture; i.e., a culture in which the cunt has been rendered null and void, having lost its monstrous beauty and magical power.  

 

For whilst today, there may still be some men with an aversion to or dislike of female genitalia - perhaps on aesthetic grounds, for example - there is no real horror or fear of the cunt in the old sense. Even Freudians have largely abandoned their anxieties around castration and the old folk idea of vagina dentata has become laughable; the contemporary cunt, alas, has lost its teeth as well as hair.    

Having said this ... It seems that I was being somewhat Eurocentric and had failed to consider what the case of Yulia Tsvetkova tells us about eurotophobia in Vladimir Putin's Russia ...

II.

 

Yulia Tsvetkova is a 27-year-old artist and LGBTQ+ activist, currently under house arrest and facing criminal prosecution for creating and circulating homosexual propaganda and pornography; the latter consisting of no more than simple drawings of the female body posted on a feminist website in order to counter unrealistic and stereotypical images of women (an example of which can be seen above).

 

Well, that's not quite true; even the Russian authorities have conceded that these drawings do not in fact constitute pornography. Thus the charges against Tsvetkova relate, rather, to her role as the administrator of an online community who upload explicit (if often abstract) depictions of female genitalia to a page named after Eve Ensler's 1996 play, The Vagina Monologues. 

 

This, it seems, is too much: images of vaginas worked in elaborate embroidery or painted in delicate watercolour, trigger an ancient disturbance in the Russian male psyche; a primitive fear and hatred not so much for the cunt-as-organ, but for the cunt-as-symbol - one which obliges them to consider that most dreadful of suppositions: Supposing truth to be a woman ... [1]

 

It's a supposition that subverts the entire phallocratic order and its values; one that invites us to reconsider the world from a gynocentric perspective in which truth is not something that can be clearly identified and fixed, but something hidden, ever-changing, and prone to leakage. 

 

Ultimately, in thinking truth as woman - and in terms of the cunt - is to think truth not as presence, but, rather, as absence. Thus male anxiety before the gaping vagina is essentially a terror of staring into the void; a site of sheer loss in which everything becomes zero and Man struggles to maintain his hard-on. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] It was Nietzsche, of course, who first raised this supposition concerning the nature of truth; see his Preface to Beyond Good and Evil. See also chapter 3, Vol. 1, of The Treadwell's Papers, by Stephen Alexander, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 55-80, wherein I discuss this remark at length, developing a sexual politics of what D. H. Lawrence terms cunt-awareness. 

 

For more information on the case of Yulia Tsvetkova, visit freetsvet.net. 

 

Or to send an email to the Russian authorities demanding that charges against Tsvetkova are dropped, visit her Amnesty International page by clicking here. 

  

Notes on the Case of Caterina Sforza

Lorenzo di Credi: Portrait of Caterina Sforza 

 (c. 1481-83)

 
Se io potessi scrivere tutto, farei stupire il mondo!

 

 

I. 

 

Nietzsche's critique of nineteenth-century feminism is a simple one: it marks a loss of style and a surrender of intelligence:

 

"There is stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which a real woman - who is always a clever woman - would have to be ashamed from the very heart." [1]  

 

Often mistakenly thought of as a misogynist, Nietzsche seemed to have a thing for strong, smart, stylish, women who do not aspire to become more like men or demand equality, but affirm themselves as singular beings in their own right. 

 

Women, for example, like Lou Andreas-Salomé, who not only charmed Nietzsche to the extent that he asked for her hand in marriage, but also captivated Rilke and Freud. And women like Caterina Sforza, about whom I wish to speak here, with particular reference to an astonishing incident mentioned by commentators including Machiavelli and Valentine de Saint-Point ...

 

 

II. 

 

Caterina Sforza (1463-1509) was an Italian noblewoman, raised in the refined Milanese court who, from an early age, was noted for her bold and impetuous nature. For whilst, like her siblings, she received a classical education from her tutors, her grandmother encouraged Caterina to also take inspiration from the notorious condottierri from whom she was descended. 

 

A skilled huntress, Caterina also loved to dance, conduct experiments in alchemy, and involve herself in the complicated - and violent - politics of her day. Invariably, this brought the independent-minded and free-spirited woman into conflict with some powerful men, including Cesare Borgia, who at one time had her imprisoned.     

 

Following her marriage to Girolamo Riario, Catarina went to live in Rome with her husband, who served his uncle, the Pope. Upon her arrival, in May 1477, the fourteen-year-old Caterina found the city buzzing with cultural fervour and political intrigue; a city in which material interests and the desire for power far exceeeded spiritual matters.

 

Although Caterina's husband told her not meddle in affairs of state, thanks to her extroverted and sociable character she quickly integrated into aristocratic Roman society, becoming much admired for her beauty and highly respected for her intelligence. Before long, this young woman became an influential intermediary between Rome and other Italian courts, particularly Milan.   

 

Unfortunately, following the death of Sixtus IV, in 1484, the lives of Caterina and her husband were thrown into turmoil ... Riots and rebellions spread throughout Rome and their home, the Palazzo Orsini, was looted and almost destroyed. 

 

Then, worse, in 1488, Girolamo was killed and Caterina found herself at the mercy of her enemies, which leads us to the incident that I wanted to discuss in particular ...

III.

 

According to legend, Caterina was besieged inside a fortress and when her enemies threatened the lives of her children whom they held captive, she stood on the walls, exposed her lower body and, pointing to her cunt, cried: Do it! Kill them in front of me if you want to! I have what's needed to make more! 

 

Now, true or not, this is an astonishing act not only of defiance, but of what Baudrillard terms seduction. 

 

For the effect of this genital display was to render her enemies uncertain of how to respond. Not knowing how to reply, or what to do, they backed down and backed away, sparing her children. Caterina had effectively stripped them of their power and agency, reducing them to impotence. Baudrillard also describes this as the revenge of the object. 

 

Caterina was one of the few women discussed at length by Machiavelli in his writings: if he only briefly mentioned this act of genital defiance in The Prince, he recounted the story at some length and with a certain vulgar relish, in both his Discourses on Livy and Florentine Histories.   

 

And, four centuries later, Valentine de Saint-Point also recalls the story in her Manifesto della Donna futurista (1912) [2]. 

Arguably, what this demonstrates is that prior to our epilated culture of feminism, digital pornography, and labiaplasty, when a woman lifted up her skirt and displayed her cunt, it invoked profound horror in male onlookers. Indeed, even gods, demons and insects were disconcerted by this apotropaic act of magical indecency.

      

Sadly, however, the cunt has now been rendered null and void having lost much of its monstrous beauty and magical capacity. Women have been fatally exposed in the name of sexual emancipation and and close-up images of their exposure are today endlessly circulated via the media; an act of violent and systematic exorcism [3]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), Pt. VII, §239.       

      Nietzsche continues in this important section for an understnding of his sexual politics: "That in woman which inspires respect and fundamentally fear is her nature, which is more 'natural' than that of the man, her genuine cunning, her beast-of-prey suppleness, the tiger's claws beneath the glove [...]." I don't know if Nietzsche was thinking of any woman in particular here, but it's interesting to note that Caterina Sforza was nicknamed La Tigre.   

 

[2] See the recent post on Valentine de Saint-Point and her two Futurist manifestos: click here.

 

[3] I'm self-plagiarising here from an earlier post on Torpedo the Ark, entitled Anasyrma: Upskirt Politics and Vulva Activism (15 Nov 2013): click here. 

 

Readers interested in knowing more about the heroic women of the Renaissance - rulers, philosophers, artists, saints, consorts, courtesans, etc. - might like the following site on Tumblr: Fuck Yeah, Renaissance Women! Several posts on Caterina Sforza can be found here.

 

For a (kind of) follow up post re: vulva activism and the case of Yulia Tsvetkova, click here. 

 

D. H. Lawrence and a Postcard from Paris

Erotic French postcard featuring a photo of 

Alice Prin (aka Kiki de Montparnasse) 

by Julian Mandel (c. 1920)

 

 

D. H. Lawrence opens his essay 'Pornography and Obscenity' with a liberal acknowledgement that "what is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another" [1]. It's a fine definition. 

 

However, it isn't long before he puts his reactionary hat back on and calls for the rigorous censorship of what he terms genuine pornography. Genuine pornography - which Lawrence distinguishes from the erotic aspect of art - is secretive in nature and almost always underworld. Secondly, it is an affront to sex and the human spirit:

 

"Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. This is unpardonable. Take the very lowest instances, the picture post-cards sold underhand, by the underworld, in most cities. What I have seen of them have been of an ugliness to make you cry. The insult to the human body, the insult to a vital human relationship! Ugly and cheap they make the human nudity, ugly and degraded they make the sexual act, trivial and cheap and nasty." [2]         

 

Blimey! It makes you wonder what kind of cards Lawrence had been shown; as well as where, when, and by whom ...? As he'd been in Paris for a month shortly before writing his essay, it's possible that he was shown some saucy postcards by one of the bouquinistes plying their trade along the banks of the Seine. 

 

The amusing thing is that - just a few lines later - Lawrence feels obliged to acknowledge that "the human nudity of a great many modern people is just ugly and degraded, and the sexual act between modern people is too often the same, merely ugly and degrading". This would suggest that genuine pornography is actually a truthful representation of bodies and acts; a form of graphic realism that does away with the ideal fantasy of sex as something pure and pristine.   

 

There's a further irony in the fact that later in the same year - 1929 - thirteen of Lawrence's paintings would be seized by the police from the Warren Gallery in London and described by an octogenarian magistrate in pretty similar terms - gross, coarse, hideous, unlovely and obscene.

 

Now, if we think Frederick Mead's reaction unfair and slightly hysterical, then mayn't we also challenge Lawrence's view of French postcards ...?   

 

 

II.

The pornographic postcards with which Lawrence confesses at least a vague familiarity, have, for us, a kind of sepia-toned charm that makes one nostalgic for a time gone by. And, whether Lawrence wants to admit it or not, such images have a long, complex, and intimate relationship with the history of art and photography in which the human figure is so central. 

 

By the 1860s and '70s, nude photos were all the rage in Paris, though the authorities still had a degree of control over their production and circulation. However, thanks to a relaxation of censorship laws and new methods of photographic reproduction, the trade in (increasingly risqué) images in the form of carte postales grew dramatically during the following decades, both in the domestic market and internationally. 

 

Not only did street vendors offer such, but they were sold by wine merchants, café owners, tobacconists, barbers, and, of course, the second-hand booksellers who lined the Seine. As one commentator notes: "It is entirely possible that some two to four million nude photographs were in circulation by the end of the nineteenth century, many of them graphically pornographic ..." [3] 

 

Some cards featured anonymous prostitutes or working-class girls looking to make a little extra cash; others featured well-known models and performers, happy to pose au naturel or take part in a little faux lesbianism for the camera. Often sold in sets of up to a dozen, the cards were avidly collected (though, for obvious reasons, rarely posted in the mail). 

 

By the time of Lawrence's death in 1930, the heyday of the French postcard had pretty much come and gone and the 1940s and 50s saw the rise of the pin-up magazine, which, one suspects, Lawrence would not have approved of either.

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 236.   

[2] Ibid., p. 241. 

       

[3] Raisa Rexer, 'The Naked Truth About French Postcards', on the Wonders and Marvels website, click here.

 

Readers interested in this topic might like to see Nigel Sadler's book Erotic Postcards of the Early Twentieth Century, (Amberley Publishing, 2015), in which he explores the changes in social attitudes, fashions, and technology through the medium of erotic postcards. 

Every Woman Adores a Futurist: On the Manifestos of Valentine de Saint-Point

Valentine de Saint-Point by Rossana Borzelli (2016)

Acrylic and oil on metal (250 x 125 cm)

singulart.com

 

 

When one thinks of Futurism, one automatically thinks of machines and machismo. For Futurism is the technophallic art movement par excellence; an Italian boy's club obsessed with speed, dynamism, virility, and violence; one which prides itself on its anti-feminism and proto-fascism. 

 

Indeed, Marinetti even made contempt for women - along with worship of war - one of Futurism's founding principles in his Manifesto of 1909, describing them as a form of inert matter (i.e., passive lumps of flesh).  

 

Despite this, there were women attracted to and associated with Futurism; one of whom - Valentine de Saint-Point - even wrote two manifestos of her own ...

 

 

Manifesto della Donna futurista (1912) [1]

Responding directly to Marinetti's misogyny, Saint-Point published her Manifesto della Donna futurista in which she amusingly insists, amongst other things, that men and women are equal - but equally mediocre and thus equally deserving of contempt:

 

"Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. They are all equal. They all merit the same scorn." 

 

Later in the text, she challenges the binary idea of two separate sexes; there are, rather, just exceptional individuals, born from within strong cultures, who possess both masculine and feminine traits:

 

"It is absurd to divide humanity into men and women. It is composed only of femininity and masculinity. Every superman, every hero, no matter how epic, how much of a genius, or how powerful, is the prodigious expression of a race and an epoch only because he is composed at once of feminine and masculine elements, of femininity and masculinity: that is, a complete being." 

  

Unfortunately, Saint-Point doesn't show fidelity with her own argument; she repeatedly falls back into the language of men and women and it's pretty clear that what she values most are traits and values traditionally associated with the fomer, such as virility, for example, perhaps the key term of her manifesto: 

 

"What is most lacking in women as in men is virility. That is why Futurism, even with all its exaggerations, is right. To restore some virility to our races so benumbed in femininity, we have to train them in virility even to the point of brute animality."

 

Every woman, she insists, "ought to possess not only feminine virtues but virile ones, without which she is just a female". Once they've been made to man-up as it were - and perhaps even grow a pair - then woman are capable of waging war even more ferociously than men - remember the Amazons! 

 

Saint-Point wants warrior women; not wise or virtuous women, or women who value peace and dream of healing the world. She also wants women who surrender to lust - the second great term of her Futuristic vocabulary - and rediscover their instinctive cruelty. We should stop preaching spiritual justice to women in the name of a mistaken feminism; the latter is an error that undermines their instincts and fertility, falsifying their primordial fatality.

 

The new woman - the Futurist woman - the woman who recognises sentiment as a weakness, will be a sensual woman who understands that lust is the basis of her strength; a bit like the prostitute who incites her illicit lovers to express their darkest desires. 

 

Saint-Point ends her manifesto with the following rallying cry:

 

"Woman [...] go back to your sublime instinct, to violence, to cruelty [...] incite your sons and your men to surpass themselves. You are the ones who make them. You have all power over them. You owe humanity its heroes. Make them!" 

 

Saint-Point would develop her (cod-Nietzschean) philosophy in a second manifesto - the Futurist Manifesto of Lust - published a year later ...

 

 

Manifesto futurista della Lussuria (1913) [2]

 

Conceived as a reply to those critics who had laughed at her earlier manifesto, Saint-Point here expands upon her erotic theory of lust as an "essential part of life's dynamism" and, indeed, as a virtue that drives individuals towards self-overcoming. 

 

For lust is not just a desire for pleasure or to know the body of another. Lust, says Saint-Point, is also the "expression of a being projected beyond itself [...] the joyous pain of a flowering". And fucking - or the union of flesh, as she calls it - is the "sensory and sensual synthesis that leads to the greatest liberation of spirit". 

 

This being the case, if a strong man is to realise his full spiritual potential, then he must realise also his full carnal potential and deny himself nothing when it comes to the pleasures of the flesh: the warrior is fully justified in enjoying the spoils of war and to show moral restraint is a sign of weakness. In other words, rape is both a normal and natural part of warfare; the recreation of life after the slaughter of the battlefield.     

 

And what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Or, in this case, the (male) artist, who has the same desires and same need for pleasure as the warrior; artists should feel no shame in raping their models once the latter have finished sitting for them. As Saint-Point writes - in capitals, just so we hear loud and clear what she's saying:

 

"ART AND WAR ARE THE GREAT MANIFESTATIONS OF SENSUALITY; LUST IS THEIR FLOWER [and] LUST EXCITES ENERGY AND RELEASES STRENGTH."

Lust, also, it seems, makes the world go round; including the world of business, finance, and media; "it drives the great men of business who run the banks, the press, and international trade to increase their wealth". 

 

Essentially, lust is Saint-Point's term for what Nietzsche calls the will to power and desires of all kinds - "whether they are considered normal or abnormal" - are always the supreme spur to action and the most magnificent expressions of our wellbeing.   

Again echoing Nietzsche, Saint-Point calls for the destruction of Christian morality, which considers lust a sin or vice; something shameful to be denied: "We must stop despising desire, disguising it in the pitiful clothes of old and sterile sentimentality" and we must, she says, reject everything associated with romantic love: "counting daisy petals, moonlight duets, heavy endearments, false hypocritical modesty". 

 

Whenever beings - of whatever sex - are drawn together by physical attraction, we should let them "dare to express their desires, the inclinations of their bodies" and transform lust into an erotic (albeit sometimes brutal) art form that allows us to bring sex to full conscious realisation. 

 

In other words, lust must be guided by will, not just instinct and intuition, so that in this way the joys of fucking will result in guaranteed orgasm for both parties. 

 

One can't help wondering if Saint-Point isn't directing her remarks here to a lover who has sadly failed to excite her in the way she hoped ...? And one also can't help wondering quite how seriously she expects us to take what she writes, either here or in her earlier manifesto; for just twelve months later she would declare: 

 

'I am not a Futurist and never have been. I do not belong to any school.'       

 

Notes

 

[1] Valentine de Saint Point, The Manifesto of [the] Futurist Woman (Response to F. T. Marinetti), trans. Bruce Sterling (2008): click here. 

      All quotes are taken from this translation available on italianfuturism.org (an excellent website established by Jessica Palmieri, in 2007, in order to encourage the exchange of ideas and disseinate information about Italian Futurism).

 

[2] Valentine de Saint-Point, Futurist Manifesto of Lust, trans. J. H. Higgit (1973): click here.

      Again, all quotes are taken from this translation available on italianfuturism.com

 

 

Readers interested in this topic might like to see a short essay by Adrien Sina and Sarah Wilson, 'Action féminine: Valentine de Saint-Point', in Tate Etc., issue 16 (Summer 2009): click here to read online.   

Pornosurrealism: Autumn 1929

Ceci est une pipe

 

 

If there is one picture in which Surrealist art, nude photography, and porn all come together, it's a notorious image by Man Ray featuring his mistress and muse Kiki de Montparnasse displaying what Humbert Humbert would describe as the magic and might of her own soft mouth ... [1]

 

The picture - one of four sexually explicit images taken by Ray of himself and his lover - appeared in the avant-garde magazine Variétés, alongside equally explicit poetry written by Benjamin Péret and Louis Aragon (two pioneers of literary Surrealism).

 

The story goes that when editor of the Brussels-based magazine, Edouard Mesens, complained he was having trouble paying the printers, Aragon suggested a special issue should be published in order to increase sales. Keen to contribute, Péret argued that nothing is more special - or sells better - than sex and he volunteered to provide some risqué verse (about little girls lifting up their skirts and masturbating in the bushes, for example).

 

Aragon explained the idea to Ray, who excitedly agreed to provide some photos - which, conveniently, he just happened to have hidden in a drawer of his desk. As one commentator notes:

             

"Even with the faces cropped, Aragon knew who'd posed for them. The male body, hairy and pale, was obviously Ray's. And everyone in Montparnasse would recognise as Kiki's the mouth, lipsticked in a Cupid's bow, clamped around his penis ..." [2]

 

André Breton edited the special special edition and called it 1929. He divided the poetry into four sections, named after the seasons, and each was illustrated with a tipped-in photograph by Ray. The initial print run of 215 copies were intended for private sale in Paris, but most were seized at the border by the authorities and destroyed. 

 

The few copies that escaped the clutches of the French customs offcials were sold (under the counter) at hugely inflated prices to art lovers, for whom the work embodied the freedom, dark humour, and daring eroticism that defined Surrealism. It has since become a collectors item; as has the first English edition published (somewhat belatedly) in 1996 [3].       

 

Notes

 

[1] Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, ed. with preface, introduction, and notes by Alfred Appel Jr., (Vintage Books, 1991), p. 184. 

 

[2] John Baxter, 'Man Ray Laid Bare', Tate Magazine, issue 3 (Spring 2005): click here to read online.  

 

[3] 1929, by Benjamin Péret, Aragon, and Man Ray, (Alyscamps Press, 1996). Although the work is said to have been translated by Zoltan Lizot-Picon, it is actually a collaboration between the art scholar and critic Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno and André Breton's biographer Mark Polizzotti. 

      Whilst - predictably - HM Customs and Excise declared it pornographic and prohibited its importation into the UK, the book was, however, allowed to circulate freely within the United States as a work of art.         

 

 

We Are Transmitters: Reflections on Síomón Solomon's Audiopoetics

"As we live, we are transmitters of life. 

And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us." [1]

 

 

Rüdiger Görner describes Síomón Solomon's 'Spills of mire I swallowed inside the tower' as "an inspirational meditation on the poetics of audio drama" [2] and I'm happy to endorse this view and echo the praise. 

 

Consisting of five short movements, the text is pretty much perfect as is and hardly needs commentary; it certainly doesn't deserve to be summarized or stripped to its bare bones (so that these can in turn be ground down into fine dust in the name of analysis) 

 

And so, what follows are mostly just brief reflections of my own, inspired by Solomon's in the first three movements [3] ...

 

 

(i) On dying of imagination (or dancing to the radio till you're dead)

 

What do fictional adultress Lady Chatterley and epileptic post-punk icon Ian Curtis have in common? The answer is that both regarded the act of listening to the radio as a potentially suicidal gesture, as Greil Marcus terms it [4].    

 

Lawrence provides a short but rather terrifying description of Sir Clifford Chatterley turning on and tuning in to his newly installed radio and becoming queer in the process, much to Connie's amazement and horror:

 

"And he would sit alone for hours listening [...] with a blank, entranced expression on his face, like a person losing his mind, and listen, or seem to listen, to the unspeakable thing." [5]
 

As for Curtis, the radio, says Solomon, functioned in his imagination not merely as  device to dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to, but as "an acoustic accelerant of auto-destruction, a transmission machine for self-slaughter" [6], that leads to an everlasting silence that might be construed as the ultimate example of dead air; i.e., the void that exists "in the dark heart of hearing" [7].

 

 

(ii) 'Sometimes a wind blows': A quick wor(l)d in David Lynch's ear

 

For some, the ear is the most poetic organ. For others, it's the most open and obliging organ. And for ear fetishists all around the lobe - which, if Solomon's account is true, includes filmmaker David Lynch - aural sex is the only game in town [8].

 

For D. H. Lawrence, hearing is "perhaps the deepest of the senses" [9] and the one we have no choice about; i.e., we can't close our ears in the same manner we can shut our eyes, although we can of course block our ears with beeswax, like Odysseus, should we wish to do so.

Responding to this latter point, Lawrence writes:

"We may voluntarily quicken our hearing, or make it dull. But we have really no choice of what we hear. Our will is eliminated. Sound acts direct, almost automatically, upon the affective centres. And we have no power of going forth from the ear. We are always and only recipient." [10]  

 

One suspects that Solomon would challenge Lawrence's thinking here, particularly the latter claim, believing as he does that "the physical ear is not merely a passive cavity or vacuous opening but a transfigurative chamber of auditory fantasy" [11]. 

However, Solomon might be rather more sympathetic to (or at least more intrigued by) what Lawrence says here about music:

 

"The singing of birds acts almost entirely upon the centres of the breast. [...] 

      So does almost all our music, which is all Christian in tendency. But modern music is analytical, critical, and it has discovered the power of ugliness. Like our martial music, it is of the upper plane [... acting] direct upon the thoracic ganglian. Time was, however, when music acted upon the sensual centres direct. We hear it still in savage music, and in the roll of drums, and in the roaring of lions, and in the howling of cats. And in some voices still we hear the deeper resonance of the sensual mode of consciouness." [12]      

 

 

(iii) 'The Ether Will Now Oblige'

 

I'm pleased that Solomon brings the Italian Futurists into his discussion of audiopoetics. 

 

I'm particularly pleased to see Luigi Russolo, author of The Art of Noise (1916), given a shout out, as he anticipated Lawrence's thinking in Fantasia concerning the relationship between sound and the material unconscious - just as he anticipated everything that was to unfold in music-as-technology in the twentieth-century. 

 

In another memorable passage, Solomon writes:

"As a culture transforms, the aesthetic spectrum of listening, its scale of aural tolerances and refusals, is continuously recalibrated. Accoring to Russolo's epistolary argument, the ear of the Classical age in music could never have borne the modern orchestra's arduous dissonances. The introduction of nineteeth-century machine technology decisively ushered in the advent of noise - which immediately claimed, it is asserted, an absolute sovereignty over human sensibility. As for us multi-layered, late and lonely moderns [...] while we may still be shaken by Wagner and Beethoven, are we any longer stirred?" [13]

 

If it's true, on the one hand, that noise annoys, so do we moderns love - and seem to need - a constant stream of machine-produced sound as a "stimulant whose manufactured proliferation [...] has become perversely anaesthetizing and/or a form of consensual ambient pollution" [14] 

 

The one thing we do not want - and seem to fear - is silence. For that, we no longer have ears, even though it is the silence - that great bride of all creation - from which we are born and to which we must return [15]. 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'We are transmitters', in The Poems,  Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 389.

 

[2] Síomón Solomon, 'Spills of mire I swallowed inside the tower (an audiopoetic symphony in five short movements)', in Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), pp. 89-119. 

      Professor Görner's comment is taken from his blurb on the back cover of this book. He goes on to add that, in short, "Solomon's work is a stunning testimony to the significance of the audiopoetic in our increasingly prosaic world". 

[3] It's not that I didn't find the last two sections - which discuss Greek (amphi)theatrics and the politics of the Hörspiel respectively - of interest, but they belong to areas of research about which I have almost no knowledge and so don't feel qualified to join in the conversation.      

[4] Greil Marcus, The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs, (Yale University Press, 2015), p. 33, quoted by Solomon on p. 90 of Hölderlin's Poltergeists.

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 110.

   

[6]  Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 90. 

      Solomon is referring to the Joy Division debut single, 'Transmission', released in October 1979 on Factory Records. Readers unfamiliar with the track - and with Ian Curtis - are encouraged to click here and watch the official video (a live performance on Something Else (15 Sept 1979)). 

 

[7] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 91. 

 

[8] Solomon notes of the Blue Velvet director: "Legend has it that Lynch became so fixated with his film's prosthetic ear that he and his make-up supervisor Jeff Goodwin came to regard it as a character in its own right - calling it 'Mr Ear', redesigning it out of silicone rather than latex and even embellishing it, in a superbly disquieting fetishistic signature, with locks of Lynch's own scissored hair." See Hölderlin's Poltergeists, pp. 99-100. 

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 103. 

[10] Ibid.

 

[11] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 101. 

[12] D. H.Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, pp. 103-104. 

      It's interesting that Lawrence mentions the howling of cats as a form of singing that acts directly on the sensual centres. According to Johnny Rotten, his mother once described Kate Bush's singing as sounding like a bag of cats and yet, despite this - or because of this - Rotten loves Kate Bush, as does Síomón Solomon, who describes her musical persona as an angel-cum-banshee. See Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 93.  

 

[13]  Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, pp 102-103.

 

[14] Ibid., p. 103. 

[15] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Silence', in The Poems, Vol. I., p. 612. 

 

 

This is the 5th - and possibly final - post in a series inspired by Síomón Solomon's work in Hölderlin's Poltergeists. The earlier four posts are: 

How Fascism Makes Killers Of Us All

 

There is No Tongue That is Not Forked

 

A Brief Note on the Life and Work of Stephan Hermlin

What's in a Name? Quite a Lot When That Name is Scardanelli