Reflections Beneath an Old Tree at Halloween

Halloween Tree (SA/2021)

 

 

It's amusing how, at Halloween, everyday objects can take on a slightly spooky aspect (and I'm not just talking about the cat). 

 

Indeed, some things, like the tree at the end of my road, actually possess a sinister quality; the naked, twisted branches reaching upwards remind one of Lawrence's description of bare almond trees sticking grimly out of the earth like iron implements and feeling the air for strange currents [1].

Faceless and silent, trees terrify in their primeval beauty and the manner in which they combine natural, supernatural, and even unnatural elements - just ask the Roman soldiers as they entered the German forests:

 

"Brave as they were, the veterans were filled with mysterious fear when they found themselves in the dark, cold gloom of [...] the northern, savage land." [2]     

 

The ancient Germans practised Baumanbetung and would nail the skulls of their enemies to sacred trees. For tree-worship always entails human sacrifice and even the Tree of Life is dark and terrible and its roots, thrust deep into the soil where dead men rot in darkness, feed on blood.      

 

Again, this naturally enough horrified the Romans, despite the fact that they were no shrinking violets themselves when it came to acts of atrocious violence:

 

"And the soldiers shrank: shrank before the trees that had no faces [...] A vast array of non-human life, darkly self-sufficient, and bristling with indomitable energy. [...]

      No wonder the soldiers were terrified. No wonder they thrilled with horror when, deep in the woods, they found the skulls and trophies of their dead comrades upon the trees. The trees had devoured them: silently, in mouthfuls, and left the white bones." [3]  

 

Happy Halloween!  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Bare Almond Trees', The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 253  The poem can be read on allpoetry.com by clicking here.

      See also the related verse, 'Almond Blossom', in which Lawrence develops his gothic-industrial dendrophilia, asserting that "Even iron can put forth, / Even iron." Poems, pp. 259-262. It can be found on the Poetry Foundation website: click here. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 44.  

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 87. 

Holocaust Impiety: Notes on Belsen Was a Gas

Sex Pistols Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten on stage at the 

Longhorn Ballroom, Dallas, Texas (Jan 10, 1978)

 

Belsen was a gas I heard the other day / In the open graves where the Jews all lay

Life is fun and I wish you were here / They wrote on postcards to those held dear. [1]

 

 

I. 

 

The term Holocaust piety - coined by British philosopher Gillian Rose [2] - is now commonly used to describe sentimental and/or sanctimonious approaches to the Nazi genocide. 

 

For Rose, films such as Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), provide a straightforward narrative that enables (and encourages) the audience to identify solely with the victims, thereby making them feel virtuous and protecting them from the thought that they might actually have more in common with the perpetrators. 

 

This allows for moral complacency even amongst those who are genuinely horrified by the extermination of the Jews. Our tears help to wash away our complicity in the crimes carried out by the Nazis and ultimately leave us emotionally and politically intact; we fail to discover and confront the micro-fascism within our own hearts [3].

 

Rose calls for works in which the representation of Fascism engages with the fascism of representation: 

 

"A film, shall we say, which follows the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathise with him, identify with his hopes and fears, disappointments and rage, so that when it comes to killing, we put our hands on the trigger with him, wanting him to get what he wants." [4]        

 

Or a book, such as Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1967), which Rose compares favourably with the work of Primo Levi [5]. 

 

Or a song, such as 'Belsen Was a Gas', by the Sex Pistols ...

 

 

II. 

 

'Belsen Was a Gas' - which seems to be Sid's one and only contribution to the Sex Pistols' repertoire [6] - is, arguably, more disturbing than any of their other songs and goes beyond being darkly humorous just as it transcends bad taste [7].

 

As the American music critic Lester Bangs wrote: 

 

"It's one of the most frightening things I've ever heard. You wonder exactly what you might be affirming by listening to this over and over again. On one level Johnny Rotten [...] is an insect buzzing atop the massed ruins of a civilization leveled by itself [...] on another level he's just another trafficker in cheap nihilism with all that it includes [...]" [8]

 

Someone else who fully appreciates the power and significance of the song is Matthew Boswell, who examines the complex relationship between punk nihilism and Nazi genocide in his essay 'Holocaust Impiety in Punk and Post-punk' (2009). 

 

Developing a reading of the song first put forward by Jon Stratton [9], Boswell concedes that whilst there's a level of sarcastic (and even callous) indifference contained in the lyrics - Oh dear - suggesting that Rotten, as vocalist, is not too bothered by the events that he's describing, it should also be noted that "the first line of the song actually opens a critical distance separating the speaker from the sentiment expressed in the title, through the fact that the line 'Belsen was a gas' is a reported statement" [10]. 

 

Thus, importantly, there's a distinction between the singer of the song on the one hand and the person whose speech is being reported on the other. Boswell continues: 

 

"And much as the sentence 'Belsen was a gas' is something the speaker has heard from a third party, the equally ironic line 'life is fun and I wish you were here' explicitly refers to words written on the postcards sent by the Jews to their families, referencing the historical fact that for the purposes of Nazi propaganda, concentration camp prisoners were compelled to write letters that portrayed their conditions in an unfeasibly favourable light. The song seems to satirise the acceptance of these falsehoods by Jewish families who were only too ready to believe that conditions in the camp were not as bad as they had heard. It is unclear whether the speaker understands or condones the element of coercion; it is equally unclear whether it is the cruelty of the Nazis that the caustic humour of the song exposes to ridicule, or the victimhood of the Jews. This song is high-risk, employing deliberate and potentially offensive ambiguities in the representation of charged subject matter; much therefore rests on the tone taken in performance." [11] 

 

That's true, which is why watching Rotten sing the song live on stage during the ill-fated US tour is so crucial: click  here for a performance at the Longhorn Ballroom, Dallas, Texas, (10 Jan 1978), or here, for a performance at the Winterland, San Francisco (14 Jan 1978) - the band's final show.  

 

Boswell writes:

 

"In this live version, Rotten enunciates the words clearly; but as the song draws to an end he stops singing and gives a sarcastic, demonic laugh that transforms into a horrific choking sound, before launching into a manic riff on the phrases 'be a man, kill someone, kill yourself'." [12] 

 

The song closes abruptly with a final repetition of the line 'kill yourself', which Boswell thinks could be directed at the Jews from a Nazi perspective, or could be an attack on this casually self-exculpating Nazi point of view: "Taking issue with the homicidal bravado of the Nazis, Rotten's sentiment seems to be: if killing makes you such a man, then be a real man and kill yourself." [13]    

 

Such moral and lyrical ambiguity is, of course, what gives the song its brilliance.

 

Notes

 

[1] Sex Pistols, 'Belsen Was a Gas' (Jones, Cook, Rotten, Vicious). Lyrics © Warner Chappell Music, Inc., / Universal Music Publishing Group. Although this song was never recorded for release by the band, a demo recorded at their Denmark Steet rehearsal room in 1977 was included on the 35th anniversary box set edition of Never Mind the Bollocks in 2012: click here. Rotten's very faint, reverbed vocals give it a slightly chilling effect.

 

[2] Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, (Cambridge University Press, 1996). See chapter two, 'Beginnings of the Day: Fascism and Representation', pp. 41-62.

      Rose provocatively challenges thinkers from Adorno to Habermas who would have us view the Holocaust as ineffable (i.e., as an extreme event of such uniqueness that it can never adequately or legitimately be given expression). She writes: "To argue for silence, prayer, the banishment equally of poetry and knowledge [...] is to mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are - human, all too human." [43]

 

[3] In an article in The Guardian entitled 'The dry eyes of deep grief' (9 April 2004), Giles Fraser writes:

 

"The desire to inhabit a cultural space that is unblemished is a dangerous fantasy that cooperates with the desire to avoid facing one's own capacity for brutality. Dr Jekyll's fundamental flaw is his refusal to acknowledge the existence of Mr Hyde. Hyde can only operate in the dark, in the unexamined spaces brought about by Jekyll's pious avoidance of his own darker motivations. Rose's attack upon those narratives which place us tearfully alongside the victim is an attack upon the refusal of Jekyll to admit to Hyde. For Jekyll and Hyde are not two people but one. Tenderness, intelligence and brutality easily co-exist in the same person. Our own cruelties and prejudices are given ideal conditions to grow when we refuse to admit to them. This is not simply a meditation for the religious. For the cultural space that often has little sense of its own complicity in the horrors of the world is that of secular modernity." 

 

[4] Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 50. 

 

[5] Rose finds Levi's writings too humane and too restrained in comparison to Borowski's account of being a prisoner in Auschwitz: "Above all," she notes, "Borowski represents himself, a deputy Kapo, as both executioner and victim [...] While Browski never denies his ethical presupposition [...] he makes you witness brutality in the most distubing way, for it is not clear - Levi always is - from what position, as whom, you are reading. You emerge shaking in horror at yourself, with yourself in question, not in admiration for the author's Olympian serenity (Levi)." [50]   

 

[6] Although all band members of the Sex Pistols are credited as the songwriters, Vicious is generally accepted to have written the original version of the track - in collaboration with guitarist Keith Levene - whilst in his earlier punk band the Flowers of Romance. 

 

[7] Somewhat disappointingly, even Jon Savage and Greil Marcus fail to see the importance of 'Belsen Was a Gas', or accept the challenge it throws down. In England's Dreaming (1991) the former dismisses the song as a "one-line, very sick joke" (p. 458) and in Lipstick Traces (1989) the latter describes it as "a crude, cheesy, stupid number" (p. 116).

 

[8] Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, ed. Greil Marcus, (Anchor Books, 1988). See 'Notes on PIL's Metal Box', (1980). 

      Rotten himself disavowed the track in a 1996 interview with Q magazine, describing it as a 'very nasty, silly little thing [...] that should've ended up on the cutting room floor'. Of course, that didn't stop the Sex Pistols from continuing to perform the song in later years.

  

[9] See Jon Stratton, 'Punk, Jews, and the Holocaust - The English Story', Shofar Vol. 25, No. 4 (Summer 2007), pp. 124-149. Click here to access on JSTOR.  

      This is an interesting essay, though one with several factual errors: for example, 'God Save the Queen' was not the Sex Pistols' first single (it was their second); and The Flowers of Romance was not the first album by Public Image Ltd., it was the fourth (released April 1981). 

      In brief, Stratton argues that punk in England was driven by two Jewish managers, Malcolm McLaren and Bernie Rhodes, but, more important, punk's general politics of nihilism express in a cultural context the shock and trauma of the Holocaust: 

      "After almost three decades of near-silence, by the late 1970s the Holocaust was beginning to be named and talked about. The horror of this event on not just Jews but Western society more generally, as the acknowledgment of the genocide began to undermine the historical acceptance of Enlightenment assumptions about progress, science, and the moral righteousness of Western civilization, led to an existential crisis best expressed in punk."  

  

[10] M. J. Boswell, 'Holocaust Impiety in Punk and Post-punk', (2009), p. 8. This paper was presented at the Imperial War Museum and can be accessed at http://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/23153/ 

      Boswell expands upon his theme in the book Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 

 

[11] Ibid. 

 

[12] Ibid., p. 10.

 

[13] Ibid. 

 

 

Always Be Kind to Cats!

Φοῖβος [Phoîbos] the Cat

 

 

When the Little Greek found a kitten trapped in the engine of an old car abandoned on the streets of Athens, she had no choice but to rescue him, take him home, clean him up, feed him, and generally provide him with care. 

I say she had no choice, but, of course, she could have just walked on by, ignored his cries, and left him to perish. But that wouldn't have been very kind. Nor would it have been the Christian thing to do - one is reminded of this teaching from St. Francis:

 

All things of creation are children of the Father and thus brothers of man. God wants us to help animals if they need help. Every creature in distress has the same right to be protected. 

 

Not that the patron saint of animals is much cared for in the Orthodox tradition in which the Little Greek was raised as a child [1]; in fact, some within this tradition view Francesco as a rather suspect character, given to a model of spirituality that veers towards a form of humanistic paganism. 

 

And even an animal-loving Quaker friend of mine found something objectionable in the above quotation, suggesting that this, from the American writer and naturalist Henry Beston, is preferable, as it recognises and respects the otherness of the animal:

"For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not bretheren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth." [2]

Ultimately, with or without scripture or other textual support, we need to rethink our relation to animals - and always be kind to cats! 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] As far as I know, the only Orthodox church which venerates St. Francis of Assisi is the monastery at New Skete (Cambridge, NY).   

[2] Henry Beston, The Outermost House, (Doubleday/Doran, 1928).  

Auschwitz-Geschichten 3: All Caught Up in Barbed Wire Love

Helena Citrónová 💘 Franz Wunsch

 

 

I. 

 

In the early spring of 1942, 19-year-old Helena Citrónová was one of a thousand women and girls from Slovakia deported by rail to Auschwitz.  

 

One day, she was chosen to sing at the birthday party for a young good-looking (but low-ranking) SS officer from Austria called Franz Wunsch, who was working as a guard at the camp. He was immeditely smitten with Helena and had her transferred to work in the section he oversaw; the storage facilities known as Kanada [1]. 

 

Over time, Franz and Helena grew increasingly fond of one another - depite the fact that she was Jewish and he was a Nazi and thus, one would have imagined, committed to upholding the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans. 

 

Initially, the idea of loving an SS officer was inconceivable to Helena. But, gradually, romantic feelings grew as they exchanged glances, spoke a few words, and furtively slipped billets-doux to each other. The fact that Franz managed to save Helena's older sister (Rožinka) from the gas chamber, also helped him to win her heart.     

After the War, Franz spent several years searching for Helena, but to no avail [2]. However, they were reunited in 1972 when he was arrested and put on trial for war crimes. Helena came forward to speak on his behalf and Franz was cleared of all charges against him (despite evidence of his brutality and role in sending innocent people to their deaths) [3].

 

II. 

 

So, what does this tale - recently made into a film by Maya Sarfaty [4] - tell us: that love conquers all ...? Not quite. 

 

For we would do well to remember that above the gates of Auschwitz was a sign reading Geschaffen von ewigen Liebe [5] and that the Nazis committed their atrocities out of love for their Fatherland, their Führer, and their Volk. 

 

What it tells us, rather, is why the Thousand Year Reich and all similar idealistic fantasies of stability, purity, and perfect order are doomed to fail. For all it takes is a serpent's whisper or a smile on the face of a pretty Jewish girl and chaos ensues.  

 

We owe our freedom - and, indeed, what is best in us - not to love, but to the fact that we can resist everything except temptation and possess an inherent will to disobedience; sin is the paradoxical secret of salvation.           

Notes 

 

[1] The Effektenlager - usually referred to as Kanada - were the warehouses where the belongings of prisoners who had been sent to the gas chamber on arrival were sorted and stored. Prisoners who worked there were known as the Aufräumungskommando. It was viewed as one of the best jobs in Auschwitz, because prisoners could procure goods for themselves and other inmates.

 

[2] After her liberation from Auschwitz, Helena returned with her sister to Slovakia, before eventually emigrating to Israel. Wunsch had been dispatched to the front when the camp was evacuated in 1945.

 

[3] Wunsch may have fallen in love Helena, but he was still an SS officer who sometimes served on the Judenrampe selecting new arrivals at Auschwitz into those who would live and those to be sent directly to their deaths. At his war crimes trial in Vienna in 1972, witnesses spoke about his often violent behavior.

 

[4] See Love It Was Not (2020), a documentary dir. by Maya Sarfaty: click here to view the official trailer. And click here for a panel discussion of the film, ft. Sarfaty, and co-presented by the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the Austrian Cultural Forum, and the Israel Office of Cultural Affairs at the Consulate General of Israel in New York. 

 

[5] This phrase - created by eternal Love - is actually part of an inscription on a sign hanging not above Auschwitz, but above the gates of Hell, according to Dante. See Inferno, III, 5-6. 

      Note that Nietzsche famously describes this as a naive error on Dante's part, however, and says that it would have been more telling if he'd placed a sign above the Christian Paradise reading: 'Eternal hate created me as well'. See On the Genealogy of Morality, I. 15.  

 

 

Musical bonus: the song that Helena sang on Franz's birthday was a popular German Lied with music by Fred Markush and lyrics by Fritz Rotter, called Liebe war es nie (released 1932): click here to listen to a version performed by the Lewis Ruth Band. The title of the song, borrowed for Sarfaty's film, is more usually translated in English as 'It was never love'.    

To read other tales from Auschwitz, click here and here. 

Auschwitz-Geschichten 2: Block 24 (The Dolls House)

Block 24 - just go through the big iron gates that read Arbeit Macht Frei and it's the first building on your left - was the Auschwitz brothel, commonly referred to as a Dolls House. 

 

It was one of several such institutions established by the Nazis within their network of camps in order to reward and incentivise prisoners and, Himmler hoped, reorientate the sexuality of those wearing pink triangles [1].

 

The (non-Jewish) women obliged to work in these brothels came mainly from Ravensbrück, although Auschwitz recruited sex slaves from among its own inmate population [2]. Usually aged in their 20s, the women had sex with an average of six or seven men every evening between 8 and 10pm. They also had to work on Sunday afternoons. Some of the women underwent forced sterilization; those who didn't and became pregnant were forced to have abortions.  

 

The (non-Jewish) male prisoners had to pay two Reichsmarks for a fifteen-minute session with a girl who was chosen for them. They were first examined to ensure they were (relatively) clean and healthy and were instructed that only vaginal intercourse in the missionary position was permitted (the doors of the girls' rooms had peepholes so that SS guards could keep an eye on proceedings and ensure there were no perverse or violent acts committed).  

 

As might be imagined, there was a fairly high turnover of women, who were fucked until either too exhausted or too ill to continue, at which point their services - and sometimes their lives - were terminated [3].

 

Despite this, there were other women desperate to take their place, as they at least got to have a small room of their own within the brothel, wear clean clothes, and be given additional food from the SS kitchen. They were even given rudimentary medical care. Naturally, this caused anger and resentment amongst other female inmates, but it did make surviving the camp significantly easier - and survival was ultimately the name of the game. 

After the War, the women rarely spoke of their experiences and they were not awarded any compensation - indeed, their existence was scarcely even acknowledged [4].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Himmler conceived the idea of establishing concentration camp brothels in October 1941. The first Dolls House was set up a year later, at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Ultimately, the Lagerbordell did not produce any noticeable increase in prisoner productivity levels and I very much doubt they provided an effective form of gay conversion therapy. What they did do was further demonstrate the depth of Nazi corruption and depravity.   

[2] It is worth noting that some of the women had previously worked as prostitutes; indeed, it was this anti-social activity that had got them arrested and put in the camps in the first place. The SS reasoned that it would help with the establishment of their own brothels if they recruited professionals at least to begin with. Of course, the fact that some of the women had already been involved in the sex industry doesn't in any way mitigate the cynical cruelty of Nazi sexual exploitation. 

[3] After finishing their time in the brothels, some of the women were made camp functionaries and, according to recent research, those who withstood the hardship of brothel life did have an increased chance of escaping death in the camps. Indeed, almost all the women in forced prostitution survived. 

      Those interested in knowing more on this topic (and who read German) should see Robert Sommer, Das KZ-Bordell: Sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern (Schöningh Verlag, 2009). A review of the book, by Thomas Kühne, can be found in Central European History Vol. 45, No. 3 (September 2012), pp. 593-595. Click here to read on JSTOR.  

[4] There are some notable exceptions to this silence, first and foremost among them the French documentary Nuit et brouillard (dir. Alain Resnais, 1956), which acknowledged the existence of concentration camp brothels based on interviews with survivors. 

      Mention might also be made of The House of Dolls (1953), a novella by the Jewish writer (and former Auschwitz inmate) Ka-Tsetnik 135633 (Yehiel De-Nur), which concerns the women who were kept for the sexual pleasure of German soldiers during World War II and known as the 'Joy Division' [Freudenabteilung]. 

    Written in Hebrew, De-Nur's work tends to blur the line between fact and fiction and has been described as pornographic by some critics, who see it as paving the way for later Nazi-themed sexploitation movies such as Love Camp 7 (dir. Lee Frost, 1969) and Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, (dir. Don Edmonds, 1975). 

 

 

To read other tales from Auschwitz, click here and here.   

 

 

Auschwitz-Geschichten 1: In Memory of Prisoner 26947 (Czesława Kwoka)

Czesława Kwoka (1942/43)

Photo by Wilhelm Brasse 

Auschwitz-Birkenhau State Museum

 

 

I. 

 

Most people find it extremely difficult to look at the heaps of emaciated bodies left to rot in the Nazi death camps once the system of extermination began to break down.      

 

And, of course, such unparalleled scenes of atrocity are horrific; no one likes to think of human beings reduced to base matter or witness mounds of anonymous corpses showing signs of advanced decomposition or still marked by traces of suffering [1].   

 

But is it any easier to look at this photo of a young Polish girl taken shortly before her death in Auschwitz ...?

 

 

II.

 

Czesława Kwoka was born in a small village in Poland, on 15 August, 1928. 

 

Along with her mother, Katarzyna Kwoka, she was deported shortly before Christmas 1942 and then sent to Auschwitz. She died on 12 March, 1943, aged fourteen, less than a month after her mother; just one of many Polish children murdered by the Nazis [2]. 

 

Czesia is among those memorialized in the permanent Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum exhibition The Life of the Prisoners. Her picture was taken by Wilhelm Brasse, a talented Polish inmate whom the Nazis pressed into service upon discovering that he had trained as a professional photographer prior to the German invasion of his homeland [3].       

 

Along with Anne Frank, Czesława Kwoka has become representative of all child victims of the Nazi killing machine.    

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Having said this, it's worth recalling Nick Land's argument that it's the corpse that wasn't cleanly and efficiently incinerated which functions as a sign of impersonal resistance to the final solution and that the real horror of the death camp comes when the system is in full operation and producing lamp-shades made from human skin and bars of soap from the body fat of the exterminated. See The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992), p. 139.

 

[2] Although details of her death are not known for certain, it's likely that Czesława was killed with a lethal injection of phenol - a favoured method amongst SS physicians. However she died, Czesia was just one of approximately 230,000 children and young people aged under 18 deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1940 and 1945. As might be expected, the vast majority - over 90% - were of Jewish descent; the others had ethnic backgrounds including Polish, Russian, Ukranian, and Romani. Most arrived as part of families and were not listed in camp records. Less than 1000 survived to be liberated by the Red Army in January 1945. 

 

[3] Although he survived the War and still owned a camera, Brasse was was unable to return to his profession because, as he confessed, when he looked through the lens all he could see were the faces of the dead. A 50-minute television documentary about his life and work, The Portraitist [Portrecista], was made in 2005, dir. Irek Dobrowolski. A trailer, with English subtitles, can be viewed on YouTube: click here. 

 

 

To read other tales from Auschwitz, click here and here.         

 

 

On Following the Science

Follow The Science Art Print 

Designed and sold by halibutgoatramb

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When politicians says they will follow the science it means they are abdicating their duty to think and their responsibility to lead; they are hiding behind experts in order to justify their decisions and excuse their inevitable mistakes; Chris Whitty is basically a human shield employed to protect Boris Johnson. 

We repeatedly heard this phrase from UK government ministers during the Covid-19 pandemic - and I'm sure we'll hear it again this winter, if and when they decide to bring back social distancing, reintroduce mandatory mask wearing, and impose a new lockdown.

 

It is, as I indicate, a form of political cowardice and dishonesty, as well as a (perhaps wilful) misunderstanding of how science works; one that relies upon a rather slippery notion of consensus, when, in fact, there is no scientific agreement about how best to deal with a viral pandemic. 

 

Epidemiological models, based on what we have so far discovered about Covid-19, can vary greatly depending on the assumptions made by the modellers and how the data produced is interpreted and then implemented as actual policy. As one commentator has noted, government ministers "can trawl for evidence that suits their purposes or invest selectively in the types of research that are likely to show them in a favourable light" [1].  

 

Ultimately, the public are being misled whenever a politician claims to be simply following the science, even if political choices are (to a greater or lesser degree) informed by scientific findings. This is not because all politicians are liars or inherently corrupt; they may well be sincere in their belief that they are following the best scientific advice. Unfortunately, however, that doesn't guarantee "that this advice reflects an unbiased, unambiguous picture of how different policy options will work out in practice" [2].       

 

It's a shame that members of the mainstream media haven't done more in pointing this out. Too often during the pandemic, journalists simply followed the government's line in the naive belief that they were thereby also following the science. How refreshing it would have been if Laura Kuennsberg, for example, had stood up at a press briefing and reminded the PM that science does not think ... [3]

 

     

Notes

 

[1] Alex Stevens,  'Governments cannot just "follow the science" on COVID-19', Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 4, (June 2020), p. 560.  Click here to read online.  

 

[2] Ibid.  

[3] I'm borrowing the provocative claim made by Heidegger in Was Heisst Denken? (1954): "Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht." See the English translation - What Is Called Thinking? - by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, (Harper & Row, 1968), p. 8.

 

 

An Untimely Meditation on How to Write an Effective Blog (The Nietzsche Birthday Post 2021)

 

"It seems to me more and more that the philosopher, being necessarily a man of tomorrow 

and the day after tomorrow, 

has always found himself and had to find himself in contradiction to his today ..." [1]  

 

 

Adam, who wishes to start a blog, writes to ask what makes a really effective post: 'Is it the personality of the writer alone that determines this?'

 

No: the effectiveness of a post has nothing to do with the personalty, the biography, or the psychology of the one who is said to have authored it - any more than it consists in allowing the reader to recognise themselves in the text. 

 

It's how untimely the post is in itself that counts and, ultimately, the strength of a text "is measured by the extent to which it refutes its creator - i.e., grounds something altogether different than that on which its creator himself stood and had to stand" [2]. 

 

That's why D. H. Lawrence was right to advise that we trust the tale and not the teller of the tale, although he's mistaken to say that the text merely tells us the truth of the present [3]. For at its best - which is to say at its most Unzeitgemässe - great writing of all description occupies an anomalous and ambivalent position in time, often speaking of and to a readership to come [4]. 

 

Haunted by the past, perturbed by the present, the untimely blogger projects their work into the future like an arrow, affirming that Greater Day which is not simply our tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow [übermorgen] which belongs to the distant stranger [5].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §212, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 2003).

 

[2] Martin Heidegger, 'Ponderings VI', 34, in Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 318.  

[3] See D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Final Version 1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 14.  

[4] Nietzsche famously makes an appeal to posterity and often likes to describe himself (and his philosophy) as untimely; i.e., "acting counter to our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come". See the Foreword to 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life', in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 60.  

      Readers who are interested in this topic might also like to see Duncan Large's excellent essay, 'On "Untimeliness": Temporal Structures in Nietzsche, Or "The Day After Tomorrow Belongs To Me"', Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 8, Autumn 1994, (Penn State University Press), pp. 33-53. Click here to read on JSTOR.

      As Large rightly points out, affirmation of the future - in all its openness and possibility - is, for Nietzsche, the mark of a true philosopher; whilst, on the other hand, insistence on a perpetual present with no sense of futurity (only progress) is a sign of cultural decadence.

 

[5] Or, as Duncan Large describes it in the above essay, "the radically other time of the Übermensch, situated beyond a hiatus of qualitative temporal difference" [p. 49].    

 

A Brief Note on the Queering of Superman

Superman: Son of Kal-El

Detail from a variant cover to #5 by Inhyuk Lee 

DC Comics (2021)

 

 

Let me say at the outset, if DC Comics are happy with writer Tom Taylor's decision to transform Superman into a cocksucking social justice warrior, then I have no problem with that. 

 

In other words, I really don't care if John Kent, the Son of Kal-El, enters into a same-sex relationship with his pink-haired boyfriend Jay Nakamura; he can even be bi now and gay later, it's all fine by me. 

However, what is troubling is the argument made by Taylor that everyone deserves to see themselves reflected in their fictional heroes and be able to say: Wow! They're just like me! And if that means the queering (and/or racially transforming) of a previously straight white cis male character, then so be it. 

 

The concern I have is this: doesn't this narcissistic need to self-seek and identify even with those from other worlds ironically erase the difference and diversity that is supposedly being celebrated? How do you learn to imaginatively engage with otherness if you insist that everyone is supposed to walk, talk, look and act like you, sharing your desires and your values? 

Ultimately, if you are only ever going to look for yourself in love and seeketh your own glory in art, then you are inevitably going to spend your life masturbating before a full-length mirror in solipsistic isolation.

 

 

See: Superman: Son of Kal-El, #5, (DC Comics) written by Tom Taylor, illustrated by John Timms. Available in all good comic book stores on 9 November, 2021.  

Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?

Adam Eget, Super Dave (Bob Einstein), and Norm Macdonald 

in the first episode of Norm Macdonald Live 

 (26 March, 2013): click here.   

 

 

I. 

 

Adam, who wishes to start a blog, writes to ask where I get my ideas for posts from. 

 

To be fair, although this is not an original question, it isn't as dumb as some people think and deserves an answer, rather than a snort of derision or a look of disdain. In fact, to enquire after the origin of ideas and the creative process is to ask something philosophically important.

 

And so, Adam, let me try to say something that might help ...

 

 

II. 

 

An idea - from the Greek term ἰδέα, meaning a visible pattern - is now more commonly defined as an abstract concept or (after Descartes) as a mental representation of an object. Many philosophers, being forever caught up in the realm of ideas, have considered them ontologically to be the fundamental category of being. Further, they consider the capacity to form, comprehend, and exchange ideas as an essential (and defining) feature of mankind [1].

 

Some people like to believe that ideas spontaneously generate from out of nowhere; that no real effort or serious thinking is required. Artists, for example, will often speak of inspiration. But whilst I don't wish to deny eureka moments or the divine influence of a muse, I think we all know that inspiration is usually born of hard work. 

 

Similarly, I'm sceptical of the idea of innate ideas believed to be universal, i.e., something which all people are born knowing (intuitively), rather than something they have learned through experience - what D. H. Lawrence, for example, terms blood knowledge. If you want to have ideas - particularly new ideas - then you need not only work hard, but get out into the world and encounter things. 

 

Having said that, I'm not advocating any and all forms of experience and by hard work, I do not mean mere toil. As Heidegger says, sometimes the most vital form of activity is waiting patiently and preparing for the future and allowing one's work to become an inner illumination of the heart [2]. 

 

Ultimately, good ideas cannot be compelled and, ironically, may often result from those times when work seems to go slowly or badly; i.e., those moments of failure.                      

 

 

Notes

[1] Plato, for example, argued that there is a mind-independent realm of unchanging and universal ideas or forms. Real knowledge is knowledge of these ideas; knowledge of the material world (which is subject to change) doesn't count for much in his view. 

 

[2] I take this phrase (and idea) from section 150 of Heidegger's 'Ponderings IV', in Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 186.