Chase Me - Catch Me - Kill Me - Eat Me!

 

The leopard will never lie down with the antelope. 

Whilst the leopard is leopard, he must fall on the antelope, to devour her. 

This is his being and his peace, in so far as he has any peace. 

And the peace of the antelope is to be devourable.

 

 

I. 

 

Those readers familiar with Luc Besson's sci-fi thriller Lucy (2014), starring Scarlett Johansson as a woman who gains superhuman powers - including massively enhanced cognitive abilities - thanks to a (fictional) nootropic (CPH4), will doubtless recall the terrifying opening scene at the hotel when she delivers a metal briefcase to Mr. Jang (a South Korean crime boss played by Choi Min-sik) containing bags of the designer drug in blue-powdered form.

 

As she waits nervously in the lobby, scenes of a cheetah stalking an antelope flash on the screen, indicating the mortal danger she is in. When she is brought before Jang by his henchmen, she desperately pleads for her life as images of the cheetah having caught its tender young prey, carries it away to be eaten [1]. 

As a visual metaphor, it's hardly subtle and is perhaps something of a cliché, combining elements of the lurid and the banal that remind one of the kind of pornography that appeals to those men who enjoy the thought of commiting acts of savage sexual violence against vulnerable-looking doe-eyed girls, or to those who desire to swallow others, or fantasise about being devoured by a large predator, red in tooth and claw. 

 

 

II. 

 

The scene also reminds me, however, of a memorable passage in D. H. Lawrence's essay 'The Reality of Peace', that I'd like to share with readers:

 

"Look at the doe of the fallow deer as she turns back her eyes in apprehension. What does she ask for, what is her helpless passion? Some unutterable thrill in her waits with unbearable acuteness for the leap of the mottled leopard. Not of the conjunction with the hart is she consummated, but of the exquisite laceration of fear, as the leopard springs upon her loins, and his claws strike in, and he dips his mouth in her. This is the white-hot pitch of her helpless desire. She cannot save herself. Her moment of frenzied fulfilment is the moment when she is torn and scattered beneath the paws of the leopard, like a quenched fire scattered into the darkness. Nothing can alter it. This is the extremity of her desire, this desire for the fearful fury of the brand upon her. She is balanced over at the extreme edge of submission, balanced against the bright beam of the leopard like a shadow against him." [2]  

 

For Lawrence, these two types of animal - predator and prey - exist by virtue of juxtaposition; to negate the being of one would be to negate the being of the other. Similarly, any ideal attempt to reconcile the cat and the rat, the wolf and the lamb, or the leopard and the antelope, "is only to bring about their nullification" [3].

 

That's arguably true, but what's interesting is how Lawrence eroticises his philosophy - and does so in a manner that many commentators also find porno-lurid and clichéd. 

 

Michael Black, for example, notes how, in the above passage, the deer is female and the leopard male and he wonders what this tells us about Lawrence's sexual politics. It is one thing, writes Black, "to contemplate predation as a fact of nature; it is another to elevate it to a mystic principle" [4] which eroticises violent death and being devoured. 

 

He has a point, but I suspect Black fails to appreciate just how perverse Lawrence's writing is. 

 

For despite Lawrence's sexual politics mostly oscillating between the romantic and the reactionary, his work also provides us with an explicit A-Z of paraphilias and fetishistic behaviours, obliging readers to think about subjects including: adultery, anal sex, autogynephilia, cross-dressing, dendrophilia, female orgasm, floraphilia, gang rape, garment fetishism, homosexuality, lesbianism, masturbation, naked wrestling, objectum-sexuality, podophilia, pornography, psychosexual infantalism, sadomasochism, and zoophilia. [5] 

 

It's neither shocking nor suprising, therefore, that Lawrence should also allow an element of vorarephilia to enter his text ...    

   

 

Notes

 

[1] This scene can be watched on YouTube thanks to Universal Pictures All-Access: click here. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 50. 

 

[3] Ibid. 

      I discussed Lawrence's philosophy of anatgonistic opposition - or what he likes to call polarity - at greater length with reference to 'The Reality of Peace' in an earlier (related) post: click here.

 

[4] Michael Black, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Philosophical Works, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 440. 

      

[5] I'm quoting from my post on Torpedo the Ark entitled 'D. H. Lawrence: Priest of Kink' (19 July 2018): click here. 

When the Cat Lies Down With the Rat

And they shall make a covenant of peace ...

 

I. 

 

Last night, I had a horrible dream: my cat was lying in the garden on a bright frosty morning, much like this morning, and from under her body I could see a long, hairless tail poking out. Upon investigation, I discovered that a large rat had snuggled beneath her in order to keep warm. 

 

Although aware of the rodent's presence, my cat - normally a serial rat-killer - remained unconcerned. Indeed, she seemed content to rest in harmony with her fellow creature and fulfil Isiah's messianic prophecy [11:6] of a time to come, when there will be universal peace and love and the wolf shall dwell with the lamb; the leopard lie down with the kid, etc. 

 

 

II. 

 

Now, whilst there are many who share this vision, I remain with D. H. Lawrence on this and regard it as an expression of moral nihilism, in as much as it involves the negation not merely of otherness and opposition, but of existence as founded upon these principles of antagonism and one form of life eternally devouring another (for it's death that makes the world go round).  

 

In 'The Reality of Peace', Lawrence writes: 

 

"Shall I expect the lion to lie down with the lamb? Shall I expect such a thing? I might as well hope for the earth to cast no shadow, or for burning fire to give no heat. [...] When the lion lies down with the lamb he is no lion, and the lamb, lying down with him, is no lamb. They are merely a neutralisation, a nothingness. If I mix fire and water, I get quenched ash. And so if I mix the lion and the lamb. They are both quenched into nothingness." [1]   

 

He continues:

 

"The lion will never lie down with the lamb; in all reverence let it be spoken. Whilst the lion is lion, he must fall on the lamb, to devour her. This is his lionhood and his peace, in so far as he has any peace. And the peace of the lamb is to be devourable. 

      Where, then, is there peace? There is no peace of reconciliation. Let that be accepted for ever." [2]   

 

Concluding on a thanatological note: 

 

"It is peace for the lion when when he carries the crushed lamb in his jaws. It is peace for the lamb when she quivers light and irresponsible within the strong, supporting apprehension of the lion. Where is the skipping joyfulness of the lamb when the magnificent, strong responsibility of the lion is removed? The lamb need take no thought; the lion is responsible for death in her world." [3]

 

Of course, some critics have sneeringly suggested that this is not how an articulate lamb might put it [4]. 

 

But then, as Nietzsche points out in the Genealogy [1:13], whilst there is nothing strange about lambs harbouring resentment towards those beasts and large birds of prey that carry them off, that's no reason for us to come over all sheepish and blame the predators for being true to their nature, or to describe that nature in moral terms as evil [5].

  

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', in Refections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 49.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., p. 50. 

[4] See, for example, Michael Black who discusses these passages from 'The Reality of Peace' in D. H. Lawrence: The Early Philosophical Works, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 439-441.         

      Black argues that whilst it is "one thing to contemplate predation as a fact of nature; it is another to elevate it to a mystic principle which turns immolation into a vocation." [440] It is precisely such mystification - which Lawrence often eroticises in a manner that reinforces gender stereotypes - that introduces deeply troubling elements in Lawrence's later work to do with sexual politics and human sacrifice.   

[5] Nietzsche goes on to point out that it is as absurd to expect the powerful not to delight in their strength, as it is for the weak to construe their impotence as a form of freedom and their self-restraint as a moral accomplishment, when they simply lack claws. See On the Genealogy of Morality, first essay, §13. 

 

 

For a related post to this one, click here.

      

Byromania: The Malcolm McLaren Birthday Post (2022)

Neon Lord Byron (2020)

sophiespostcard.com

 

"I am such a strange mélange of good and evil 

that it would be difficult to describe me."

 

 

Despite the fact they shared a birthday [1], had several mad, bad, and dangerous character traits in common, and that punk was, in many respects, a continuation of the English Romantic tradition, there's only a single reference to Lord Byron in Paul Gorman's monumental biography of Malcolm McLaren [2].

 

But whilst it's true that Malcolm spoke more often - and more affectionately - about Oscar Wilde than he did Byron, I'm sure the latter as a sexy, stylish rebel against conventional morality who is often described as the first rock star poet, also figured strongly in McLaren's imagination. 

 

Indeed, thinking of those character traits that they had in common, one might even describe McLaren as a Byronic hero: i.e., a flawed genius whose attributes include great talent and passion; a distaste for society and social institutions; a lack of respect for those in authority; a reckless disregard for consequences; and, ultimately, a self-destructive streak founded upon the Romantic belief that it is better to be a flamboyant failure than any kind of benign success.               

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Byron was born on 22 January, 1788. Malcolm McLaren was born on 22 January, 1946. Other famous Aquarians who share this birthdate include Sir Walter Raleigh (1552), Francis Bacon (1561), and John Donne (1573).   

[2] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, (Constable, 2020), p. 50. 

This post is written in memory of Malcolm, but is dedicated to all those who knew and loved him.  

The Covid Nightmare (After D. H. Lawrence)

The Scream of Covid-19 

by Dee Tyndall (after Edvard Munch)

redbubble.com

 

  

I. 

 

He had never known fear. But in England, during the coronavirus pandemic, he experienced an increasing sense of terror; not of catching the disease, but of being bullied by the malevolent spirit which arose amongst the mask-wearing, socially-distanced, lockdown-loving vaccine fanatics. 

 

From 2020 onwards, a form of criminal insanity seemed to possess authorities around the world, including the UK government led by a pathological liar and other bottom-dog members of a Cabinet prepared to terrorise and coerce the general public in the name of health and safety. 

 

The psychological pressure and daily propaganda - spread by a compliant media - was steadily applied in order to break the independent spirit of anyone who wouldn't toe the line and identify with the will of the majority; surrendering their reason and their rights as an individual. 

 

Clap for the NHS and get triple jabbed: this he steadfastly refused to do. His love of freedom (and an essentially contrarian nature) made him abide by his own feelings, come what may. It was not selfishness. Or libertarian sentimentality. It was a question of integrity: would he give in to mass hysteria or not?                

 

To be clear: he belonged to no group or cause and was not an anti-vaxxer. That is to say, he had no moral, political, or medical objection to vaccination. It was the bullying of those who exercised their right to withhold consent and defend bodily autonomy in the face of biopolitical pressure that he disliked and would never acquiesce in. But his feeling was something private and he didn't want to force his views on any other person.  

 

A potentially lethal respiratory virus rapidly spreading around the world is horrible enough. But what made the pandemic so intolerable was that in every country almost everyone lost their heads and any sense of perspective. 

 

The English usually pride themselves on the fact that during a crisis they keep calm and carry on with life as usual: but not this time. This time practically everyone was caught up in the hysteria and swept along, disinclined to think or feel for themselves, frightened to speak up or speak out, and - it has to be admitted - perversely enjoying the experience. 

 

Some people fell ill. Some fell very ill. And some died. But the vast majority, their inner pride gone, just virtue signalled their way through the pandemic by demanding ever tighter restrictions on freedom, boasting of their vaccine status, and finger-wagging at those who showed the least trace of scepticism in the face of what we were being told about the virus. 

 

And now, as we begin to face up to a post-pandemic world and learn to live with Covid, there is a tremendous price to pay because we collectively lost our heads and, worse, lost too our inward, individual integrity. We should not have lost our heads: in a time of crisis, we need to act with greater care and greater courage, but also with a greater sense of calm. And perhaps too, greater kindness.      

 

Of course, superficially, people were kind: not least the nurses and voluntary staff at the vaccination centre where he had queued up in a mask and felt dejected and humiliated when told to stand here, go there, keep his distance, follow the markings on the floor, etc. Why was it nobody else seemed to mind?

 

Having had the jab, he went back home. When the time came for his second shot he would go again, but he would not allow himself to be made a fool of or infantalised; he would not, for example, wear the little badge that they gave him as if he were a six-year-old child which read: I'm a vaccine hero. 'Once,' he said to the Little Greek, 'I'm fully vaccinated, I will never obey another mandate.'

 

 

II.

 

Three weeks later, and he sat in A&E with a blood clot in his lower-right leg; no one wanted to say it was a side-effect of the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine - correlation is not causation - but everyone suspected as much. This led to a six-week period in which he had to inject an anticoagulant into his stomach on a daily basis. The clot eventually dissolved and the bruising faded, but the phlebitis in his leg has flared up several times since. 

 

But inflammed veins don't hurt as much as the pain caused by the unspeakable baseness of the press and public calling for mandatory vaccination and the social exclusion of those who refuse to be jabbed or fail to provide proof of such. No one who has seen what is happening in Europe, or Australia, or been threatened with arrest by the police for sitting on a park bench or refusing to reveal the contents of their shopping trolley, can ever believe again in the benevolence of the State. 

 

In 2020-21, the old world ended. And it wasn't coronavirus to blame, or the Chinese Communist Party; it was our own leaders who shirked their duty (in the name of following the science and perhaps secretly fantasising of a Great Reset). 

 

If only enough individuals had kept their heads and their integrity, the pandemic would never have unfolded in the way it did. If only, in the beginning, there had been enough voices raised in opposition to lockdowns in the UK, then we wouldn't be in the mess we are in today. But the British - particularly the Welsh and the Scots - wobbled and lost their minds and the tide of horror accumulated. 

 

And now things will never be the same again ... (Although the snowdrops will soon be out.) 

 

 

Note: this post is written after (and in the manner of) D. H. Lawrence; see Chapter XII of his novel Kangaroo (1923), entitled 'The Nightmare', which details the unpleasant wartime experiences of the protagonist - Richard Lovatt Somers - who was subject to bullying authority, police harassment, and intimate medical inspection (much as Lawrence was himself). 

      As I have not indicated where I paraphrase, where I quote - or, if you prefer, where I borrow, where I steal - from Lawrence's text, I would encourage readers who are interested to go to the novel directly. The Cambridge Edition, ed. Bruce Steele, established from the original sources and first published in 1994, is the one I relied upon when writing this post; see pp. 212-259. 

      Finally, note that this post is not intended to be either a homage to or parody of Lawrence. And if I say things here which you don't agree with, well, don't allow yourself to be offended, or howl for me to be arrested or thrown out of Essex. I've not done anything to hurt you and there's really no need for personal enmity.       

 

 

Richard Lovatt Somers: Notes Towards a Character Study (Part 2)

 

Garry Shead: Flaming Kangaroo (1992) 

From the D. H. Lawrence Series  

etchinghouse.com.au

 

 

I. 

 

So, as we have seen in part one of this study, R. L. Somers is a queer fish, who desires (at times at least) to actually become-fish and leave cloying humanity behind. At other times, however, as we shall discuss here, he pledges his allegiance to dark gods and prides himself on the daimonic aspects of his nature. 

 

It might be argued, therefore, that in as much as he has a politics, the latter rests upon a philosophy of inhuman otherness and an opening up of self to alien forces; not something that is shared with Ben Cooley, who acts in the name of Love and remains human, all too humanistic (even when, physically, he resembles a kangaroo). 

 

Anyway, let's pick up from where we left off in Lawrence's Australian novel: I remind readers that page numbers given below refer to the Cambridge Edition of Kangaroo (1994), ed. Bruce Steele.

 

 

II.

 

Somers is a man who wants to be convinced by Kangaroo, so that he might submit to him. But he isn't convinced, so he can't and won't submit. Not to Ben Cooley, not to anybody. Nor will he allow himself to be carried away: "He had a bitter mistrust of seventh heavens and all heavens in general." [132] Like Larry David, Somers has learnt to curb his enthusiasm and come to the end of transports. 

 

"'I don't quite believe that love is the one and only, exclusive force or mystery of living inspiration. [...] There is something else'" [134], Somers tells an exasperated Kangaroo. And this something else is that which enters us not from above via the spirit, but from behind and below, marking the end of all that we are (or, rather, all that we think we are). 

 

With his devilish blue-eyes sparkling, Somers says: "'What you call my demon is what I identify myself with. It's the best me, and I stick to it.'" [136-37] As a reader of Nietzsche, I know precisely what he means and I sympathise with this position [a]. Many of us have grown tired of being moral-ideal automatons and long to escape our humanity as founded upon the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

 

Whether this means flirting with one's next door neighbour's wife, however, is another matter; not that Somers follows through with his illicit desire for Victoria, despite having "stroked her hot cheek very delicately with the tips of his fingers" [142] and justified the possibility of an adulterous affair in his own mind by giving reference to the gods. 

 

For in his heart of hearts, Somers remained stubbornly puritanical and "his innermost soul was dark and sullen, black with a sort of scorn" [143] even for extramarital shenanigans. Better to collect differently coloured sea-shells on the beach, or to take off one's clothes and run naked in the rain, or to go for a swim in the sea and delight in the fresh cold wetness. 

 

Indeed, better even to chase rainbows than to get mixed up with the world: "The rainbow was always a symbol to [Somers ...] of unbroken faith, between the universe and the innermost" [155]. The problem is, even when feeling relatively peaceful Somers found himself in a "seethe of steady fury" [163] - a kind of general rage aimed at no one and everyone: 

 

"He didn't hate anybody in particular, nor even any class or body of men. He loathed politicians, and the well-bred darling young men of the well-to-do middle classes made his bile stir. [...] But as a rule the particulars were not in evidence [...] and his bile just swirled diabolically for no particular reason at all." [163]

 

At times, Somers feels himself to be a sort of human bomb ready to explode and cause the maximum amount of havoc. Again, one is reminded of Nietzsche, who declared: "I am not a man - I am dynamite!" [b] Is this longing for chaos a resentful expression of anarcho-nihilism? Perhaps. But more likely, it's related to the abuse Somers suffered at the hands of the authorities during the War years whilst in Cornwall (a period he refers to as the Nightmare and which inflicted lasting psychological damage upon him) [c].

 

But, thankfully, Somers manages to refrain from exploding and resist the urge to involve himself in bloody revolution; for he realises that this simply leaves behind "'the same people  after it as before'" [161-62]. His pessimism and his inability to summon up sufficient enthusiasm for any form of militancy or direct action is, of course, his saving grace. When, inevitably, there's a row in town (Chapter XVI), it's not Somers who breaks heads with an iron bar. 

 

Ultimately, Somers simply doesn't care: "How profoundly, darkly he didn't care." [178] What does the modern world of men and politics matter compared to the ancient fern-world, "before conscious responsibility was born" [178] and men too were shadowy like trees, "with numb brains and slow limbs and a great indifference" [179]? 

Later, Somers confesses his indifference: "'I try to kid myself that I care about mankind and its destiny. [...] But at the bottom I'm as hard as a mango nut. [...] I don't really care about anything [...]" [203] For Kangaroo, this - combined with his obsession with the magic of the dark world - makes Somers a traitor to his own human intelligence; a remark that causes Richard to smile and recall Nietzsche once more [d].

 

Thus, no surprises then that Richard Somers leaves Australia shortly after his falling out with Kangaroo - and shortly after the latter dies from a gun shot wound that resulted from a political meeting turning violent (Chapter XVI). 

 

Although Somers visits Kangaroo in hospital, there's no reconciliation and although Cooley pleads with Somers to concede that love is the greatest thing of all, the latter cannot make this concession - even to comfort a dying man. In fact, he tells Cooley: "'I don't want to love anybody. Truly. It simply makes me frantic and murderous to have to feel loving any more.'" [326]      

 

Jack Callcott thinks Somer's was a bit hard on Cooley as the latter lay on his death bed. But Kangaroo surely shouldn't have been surprised, as Somers has already made it perfectly clear that he wants an understanding between them that is deeper than love and allows each to retain their integrity: "'Let's be hard, separate men.'" [209] [e]      

Again, I find this diamond-like Somers who loves nobody and likes nobody, rather amusing (my middle name, as Katxu once said, is Hate). But so too do I like the Somers who walks round the Zoo and feels tenderness for the animals (to whom he feeds extra-strong peppermints). But then, tenderness isn't the same as love; it's deeper, darker and, as Lawence will later conclude, more phallic in origin than the latter. 

 

The Australian bush and the wildlife - the (mostly) unique flora and fauna - are what, ultimately, cause Somers (despite all that we say above) to declare his love for the country: "'I don't love the people. But this place - it goes into my marrow, and makes me feel drunk.'" [347]

But still he leaves: waving his orange silk handkerchief in the air as he sets sail for America; arguably one of the most fascinating characters ever to have found himself upside down at the bottom of the world (to borrow David Allen's phrase) [f]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] See the section entitled 'The Convalescent' in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which he asserts that man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him. I am following Walter Kaufmann's translation in The Portable Nietzsche (Penguin Books, 1976), p. 330.

      It's clear that Richard Somers has read Zarathustra - later in the novel he quotes from the book re the idea of great events (and the need to unlearn our belief in them when they consist only of a lot of noise and smoke). See Kangaroo, p. 161 and see the section entitled 'Of Great Events' in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  

 

[b] See Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1988), p. 126. 

      One wonders if, in making this startling declaration, Nietzsche forgets what he wrote in The Gay Science: "I do not love people who have to explode like bombs in order to have any effect at all." Perhaps it betrays a certain self-contempt; or perhaps it demonstrates how Nietzsche's position (and temperament) becomes more violent (more desperate) over the years. See The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), III. 218, p. 210.

      Finally, readers might like to note that an actual bomb is thrown at the violent climax of Chapter XVI, just as a bomb explodes at the end of Lawrence's previous novel, Aaron's Rod. See p. 282 of the Cambridge Edition (1988), ed. Mara Kalnins. 

 

[c] See Chapter XII, pp. 212-259. Somers, we are informed, has an "accumulation of black fury and fear" [260] submerged like a horrible pool of lava ready to erupt deep in his unconscious. And when he does remember his time in Cornwall and what he experienced, it leaves him "trembling with shock and bitterness" [260] and a feeling not only of intense humiliation, but desecration.  

 

[d] Somers recalls, with a smile, the title of Nietzsche's third book, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1878-80). When Cooley goes on to call him a perverse child, this makes Somers laugh and reply: "'Even perversity has its points'". See Kangaroo pp. 206 and 208. 

      Ultimately, what Somers wants is to get clear of humanity: "That was now all he wanted: to get clear. Not to save humanity or to help humanity or to have anything to do with humanity. [...] Now, all he wanted was [...] to be alone." [265] This, for Richard, is the true starting (and finishing) point: "a man alone with his own soul: and the dark God beyond him" [281].     

[e] Again, this is Somers at his most Nietzschean. See the section entitled 'Of Old and New Law Tables' (29), in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which the diamond instructs the charcoal on the need for creators to become hard. 

 

[f] Upside Down at the Bottom of the World is the title of a drama, written by David Allen, about the Lawrence's in Australia. It was published by Heinemann Educational Australia, in 1981. 

 

 

Surprise musical bonus: click here. 

Richard Lovatt Somers: Notes Towards a Character Study (Part 1)

Detail from 'The Struggle' (1992) 

Garry Shead: D. H. Lawrence Series

etchinghouse.com.au

 

I. 

 

In his Introduction to the Cambridge Edition of Kangaroo, Bruce Steele argues that whilst the novel is "in many respects thinly disguised autobiography", uncritical emphasis on this pervasive element has led to the mistaken assumption that the character Richard Lovatt Somers is identical with Lawrence as narrator, even though "Lawrence as narrator [...] is often sharply distinct from his character Somers and frequently critical of him and his views" [a].  

And that's true - but doesn't go far enough. For I would not only challenge the ridiculous idea that Somers is identical with the narrator, but interrogate also the belief that the narrator can be identified with an Author who resides outside (and above) the text and in whose person is found the very origin of the work and its ultimate truth.       

      

In this post, therefore, I'm concerned only with Richard Somers and not interested in making any attempt to tie Kangaroo as a work of fiction to Lawrence's own memories, foreign travels, political views, or sexual fantasies. As Deleuze says, creative writing that is overly reliant upon autobiography is not only often bad writing, but dead writing; for literature dies from an excess of authorial input just as it does from an overdose of reality.

 

 

II.

 

Richard Somers is a queer fish: a small, foreign-looking, slightly comical figure, with a pale face, dark beard, and an absent air of self-possession that spoke not only of his (in)difference, but innate superiority and sensitivity (as indicated by his Italian suit and brown shoes).

 

His middle name, Lovatt, suggests either something wolfish about his nature, or something rotten; either way, he doesn't like to be cheated by taxi drivers - but then, who does? Nor does he find humorous house names very amusing - but then ...

 

To be fair, Somers could be charming - when he wanted - but mostly he liked to keep himself to himself and not to "speak one single word to any single body" [19] - except Harriett, his wife, "whom he snapped at hard enough" [19]. The thing he hates most of all is "promiscuous mixing in" [36] and informality. 

 

Unfortunately, Somers can't help feeling himself in touch with (and responsive to) others due to the fact he possessed "the power of intuitive communication" [37]. However, despite this, Somers "would never be pals with any man" [38].    

 

Somers was a writer of poems and essays, with an income of £400 a year (i.e., about twice the average wage in 1922). So, whilst not rich, he was able to globe-trot, admiring the local flora whilst despising the natives and forever asking himsef why he had ever bothered to leave England: Somers "wandered disconsolate through the streets of Sydney" [20], longing to be back in London.

 

Still, if the city disappoints, the Australian bush makes a tremendous impression upon him: "Richard L. had never quite got over that glimpse of terror in the Westralian bush" [15]. He was sure a menacing spirit of place had been watching him as he walked amongst the ghostly pale trees. Watching - and waiting to grab him. For as a poet, Somers felt himself "entitled to all kinds of emotions and sensations which an ordinary man would have repudiated" [14].

 

But of course, as the narrator of Kangaroo notes: "It is always a question, whether there is any sense in taking notice of a poet's fine feelings." [15] Or indeed, his prejudices - of which Somers has many; mostly rooted in his snobbishness, such as his dismissal of Australians "with their aggressive familiarity" [21] as barbarians, lacking in class and culture. For Somers, there has to be rule - otherwise there's just a form of irresponsible anarchy and bullying.    

 

"Poor Richard Lovatt wearied himself to death struggling with the problem of himself, and calling it Australia." [28] That's an interesting remark. But what is Somers's problem? I'm not sure - perhaps we'll find out by the end of this character study ... And maybe we'll find out too what lesson it is that Somers thinks the world has got to learn [31] - or why it is he seems so fascinated by the legs of young men in bathing suits on the beach [27]. 

 

But maybe not: maybe Somers will always remain something of an enigma: for it was "difficult to locate any definite Somers, any one individual [...] The man himself seemed lost in the bright aura of his rapid consciousness" [38]. Somers, we might say, is mercurial and light-footed. He's also a reckless chess player; "very careless of his defence" [39], which is odd for someone so guarded in other respects.

 

For a man who, by his own admission, never takes any part in politics, Somers does seem to hold a number of very definite political views; as might be expected of a writer of essays on social and political topics, such as the future of democracy or the fate of capitalism. And his views might best be described as national socialist in character (all that talk of blood and soil), or as a kind of demonic radicalism (all that talk of dark everlasting gods).    

 

Somers also fancies that it's his "own high destiny" [92] to be a leader of men one day and to make some kind of opening in the world. Though, push comes to shove, he can't commit to any cause, party, or movement. Nor even to Benjamin ('Kangaroo') Cooley. Something always stops him; "as if an invisible hand were upon him" [106]. 

 

Thus, whilst Somers might crave living fellowship with others, he does not want affection, love, nor comradeship. For living fellowship, it turns out, is a synonym for the mystery of lordship. That is to say, the thing which the dark races still know:

 

"The mystery of innate, natural, sacred priority [...] which democracy and equality try to deny and obliterate [...] the mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority" [107] [b].

 

At other times, however, Somers rejects the human world entirely - and I think I like him best at such moments; when he is filled with cold fury and contempt for mankind and cares only for the dark cold sea, dreaming (in what is perhaps my favourite section of the novel) of becoming-fish: 

 

"To have oneself exultingly ice-cold, not one spark of this wretched warm flesh left, and to have all the terrific, ice energy of a fish. To surge with that cold exultance and passion of a sea thing! [...] No more cloying warmth. No more of this horrible stuffy heat of human beings. To be an isolated swift fish in the big seas, that are bigger than the earth; fierce with cold, cold life, in the watery twilight before sympathy was created to clog us.

      They were his feelings now. Mankind? Ha, he turned his face to the centre of the seas, away from any land. The noise of waters, and dumbness like a fish. The cold, lovely silence, before crying and calling were invented. His tongue felt heavy in his mouth, as if it had relapsed away from speech altogether.

      He did not care a straw what [...] anybody said or felt, even himself. He had no feelings, and speech had gone out of him. He wanted to be cold, cold, and alone like a single fish, with no feeling in his heart at all except a certain icy exultance and wild, fish-like rapacity. [...] Who sets a limit to what a man is. Man is also a fierce and fish-cold devil, in his hour, filled with cold fury of desire to get away from the cloy of human life altogether, not into death, but into that icily self-sufficient vigour of a fish." [125]  

 

As Zarathustra might say: Man needs what is most piscean in him for what is best in him ... [c]  

 

 

This series of notes for a character study of R. L. Somers is continued in part two of this post: click here.  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Bruce Steele, Introduction to D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. xxiii. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the post.  

[b] This is, of course, a fantasy of the reactionary imagination and one which I have discussed recently on Torpedo the Ark in terms of natural aristocracy: click here. I also discuss the politics of this passage in chapter 5 of Outside the Gate, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), see pp. 100-126, and will comment further on Somers's politico-theological speculations in part two of this post. 

[c] I'm paraphrasing a famous line written by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra - see the section entitled 'The Convalescent'. 

Advance Australia (into Darkness)

The original 1912 drawing for the Australian coat of arms

 

 

Covid mania has sent the entire world crazy in the last two years and many governments have reacted in a senseless and shameful manner. But nowhere is this fascist hysteria in the face of a virus that has killed less than 2,500 of its citizens - the average age of whom is 83 - more astonishing than in Australia ... [a]

 

Astonishing - and depressing - but not surprising to readers familiar with D. H. Lawrence's novel Kangaroo (1923) [b], which offers a brilliant meditation not only on the queer spirit of place Down Under, but the political psychology of the typical Aussie in times of crisis (be it post-War or mid-pandemic).

 

According to Lawrence, whilst the Australian bush is beautiful and endlessly fascinating, so too does it possess something threatening about it [c]. Likewise, whilst Australians seem to be some of the friendliest, most easy-going people on earth - free from much of the formality and uptightness that is said to characterise the British - there's a unique mix of resentment and aggressive familiarity behind their superficial charm.

 

Their fraternal idealism or mateyness is, therefore, something about which one should remain profoundly cautious and in Kangaroo Lawrence "creates and magnifies a sense of subterranean violence ready to burst through the carefree surface of Australian life" [d] that still resonates today as we watch the authorities in God's own country indulge in draconian stupidity with excessive enthusiasm (and popular support).     

 

Who would have thought that a coat of arms bearing a red kangaroo and an emu would one day seem as menacing as one with a lion and a unicorn, or an imperial eagle? 

 

Welcome to 2022 ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Readers who are interested in the official Coronavirus case numbers and statistics for Australia can visit their Department of Health website for daily information: click here.

 

[b] D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994). All page references are to this edition of the work that Lawrence wrote (in six weeks) during his hundred day stay in Australia (4 May - 11 August 1922). 

      Interestingly, when Lawrence arrived Down Under: "It was a period when Sydney was again suffering from a bubonic plague scare: a very mild scare, some fifteen cases to a million people, according to the newspapers.* But the town was placarded with notices 'Keep your town clean', and there was a stall in Martin Place where you could write your name down and become a member of a cleaning league, or something to that effect." [48] 

      *The May 3rd edition of the Daily Telegraph, for example, reported twenty-seven cases of plague; seven of which were fatal. 

 

[c] Lawrence tells us that the "vast, uninhabited land" [13] frightened the book's protagonist Richard Somers: 

      "It seemed so hoary and lost, so unapproachable. The sky was pure, crystal pure and blue, of a lovely pale blue colour: the air was wonderful, new and unbreathed: and there were great distances. But the bush, the grey, charred bush. It scared him. As a poet, he felt himself entitled to all kinds of emotions and sensations which an ordinary man would have repudiated. Therefore he let himself feel all sorts of things about the bush. It was so phantom-like, so ghostly, with its tall pale trees and many dead trees, like corpses, partly charred by bush fires: and then the foliage so dark, like grey-green iron. And then it was so deathly still. Even the few birds seemed to be swamped in silence. Waiting, waiting - the bush seemed to be hoarily waiting. And he could not penetrate into its secret. He couldn't get at it. Nobody could get at it. What was it waiting for? 

      And then one night at the time of the full moon he walked alone into the bush. A huge electric moon, huge, and the tree-trunks like naked pale aborigines among the dark-soaked foliage, in the moonlight. And not a sign of life - not a vestige. 

      Yet something. Something big and aware and hidden! He walked on, had walked a mile or so into the bush, and had just come to a clump of tall, nude dead trees, shining almost phosphorescent with the moon, when the terror of the bush overcame him. He had looked so long at the vivid moon, without thinking. And now, there was something among the trees, and his began to stir with terror, on his head. There was a presence. He looked at the weird, white dead trees, and into the hollow distances of the bush. Nothing! Nothing at all. He turned to go home. And then immediately the hair on his scalp stirred and went icy cold with terror. What of? He knew quite well it was nothing. [...]

      But the horrid thing in the bush! He laboured as to what it could be. It must be the spirit of place. Something fully evoked tonight, perhaps provoked, by that unnatural West-Australian moon. Provoked by the moon, the roused spirit of the bush. He felt it was watching, and waiting. Following with certainty, just behind his back." [14]

      I quote this from chapter one at length as a treat for readers unfamiliar with Lawrence's work. Here, he writes in a manner that some might call Lovecraftian. In the final chapter of his novel (XVIII), Lawrence provides another beautiful description of the Australian bush, this time without the sense of horror underneath: see pp. 342 and 353-355.  

 

[d] Bruce Steele, Introduction to Kangaroo, p. xxxii. 

      This becomes clear when, for example, we witness the pleasure that Jack Callcott gets from breaking the heads of his political opponents with an iron bar and boasting of it afterwards to Somers, with "the strangest grin in the world" on his face and "indescribable gloating joy in his tones" [319]. 

 

 

This post is for Novak Djokovic.     

 

  

Invocation of Death

 

Evelyn De Morgan: The Angel of Death (1880)

demorgan.org.uk

 

Sweet, beautiful death, come to our aid. 

Give us a chance to escape this foul prison in which we suffocate. 

Sweet death, assert your power now, for it is time.   

 

 

Death is often personified: sometimes as a deity; sometimes as an angel; sometimes as a robed skeleton, pale horseman, or even as a type of lover who comes with a kiss. But whatever form death is thought to take, it holds out for many not merely the promise of a permanent and irreversible cessation of all biological functions, but the hope of an escape ... 

 

Thus, it's not surprising to discover people invoking death (either for themselves or for others) when life has become a mechanical round that makes it difficult "to know or admit the new creative desires that come upon us" [a], or even get up in the morning without a feeling of extreme weariness: 

 

"We cling tenaciously to the old states, we resist our own fulfilment with a perseverance that would almost stop the sun in its course. But in the end we are overborne." [27]. 

 

That's pretty much how I feel at the moment: overborne (i.e., overcome by emotional pressure and physical exhaustion) and at the point where I'm tempted to invoke death and destruction: "If we cannot cast off the old habitual life, then we bring it down over our heads in a blind frenzy." [27]

 

The hope - which may or may not be justified, may or may not be false - is that:

 

"When we have become very still, when there is an inner silence as complete as death, then, as in the grave, we hear the rare, superfine whispering of the new direction; the intelligence comes. After the pain [...] of our destruction in the old life comes the inward suggestion of fulfilment in the new." [28]

 

Of course, in order to become still in this manner it might be vital that others die first - and not in a poetic-metaphorical manner, but in a prosaic, all-too-literal fashion. It's all well and good giving oneself up to the river of peace that bears us and abiding by the incalculable impulse of creation, but if that river is blocked by those who can no longer fully live, but nevertheless refuse to die and pass into the unknown, then ... 

 

Well, then there's a problem. And although from a conventional moral perspective it seems wrong to wish for the death of others, it is sometimes necessary. Necessary also to acknowledge that "not all life belongs to life" [40], nor does all life progress towards a state of transcendent being; for many old people who live on and on, year after year, there is no possibility of coming to blossom. 

 

They live on the dead body of the past and on the blood of their children, seemingly lacking the strength (the courage, or the desire) for  the impulse of death that would transport them into darkness and absolution. 

 

Their life, says Lawrence, is "a slow lapsing out, a slow inward corruption" [41] and they have their being in dementia and decay. Their mouths may remember how to chew and their bowels may still (with the help of a little lactoluse) pass stools, but they lapse further and further into nullity, dragging those who provide care with them [b].

 

And so one invokes death ...

 

But it's more in desperation than anything else, as I don't actually have much faith in the power of prayer, etc. Indeed, I'm not even sure it does any good in writing posts like this one and thinking of the living dead. For as Lawrence notes: "The thought of them is almost as harmful as their presence." [45] 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press 1988), pp. 25-52. The line quoted from here is on p. 27. Future page references will be given directly in the text.  

[b] This isn't a rare occurrence: there are 1.6 million people in the UK aged 85 and over, many of whom have dementia and require full-time care; something that often falls on to family members. In one of the Pansies, Lawrence writes:

 

The old ones say to themselves: We are not going to be old,

we are not going to make way, we are not going to die,

we are going to stay on and on and on and on

and make the young look after us

till they are old.       

 

This sounds terrible. And it is terrible. But, unfortunately, it's also true. Of the 7 million people acting as carers in the UK, 1.3 million are themselves aged 65 or over.

      See 'The grudge of the old', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 436. 

 

 

This post is for Heide Hatry with whom I discussed the idea.

 

   

Kiss Me Deadly: Thoughts Inspired by J. G. Ballard's 'Track 12'

Videodrome Lips Art Print designed by ep-pandality 

redbubble.com

 

 

Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth, for your love is deadlier than poison.

 

 

I. 

 

To press one's lips against those of another human being and then to insert your tongue into their mouth in an act of amorous exploration, has always seemed a rather queer thing to do. 

 

Of course, I'm no philematologist, and I don't know if kissing is an instinctual act of passion or an example of learned behaviour reinforced by poets and filmmakers. But I do think that Freud was right to identify it as a primary form of perversion [a].    

 

And I do think that D. H. Lawrence was right to describe the close-up kiss on screen in terms of obscenity (i.e., a loss of scenic distance) [b]. There's something profoundly unpleasant about an intimate and private act made visible and public - when it is literally in your face.

 

And the sound of smooching can also become disgusting and disorientating when it is recorded, amplified, or in some way mechanically processed - as we discover in J. G. Ballard's short story 'Track 12' [c]. The fact is, there are some sights that should always remain unseen and there are some sounds that should always remain unheard ...

 

 

II.     

 

Ballard's story rather reminds me of one of those written by Roald Dahl that originally formed the basis of the British TV series Tales of the Unexpected (ITV 1979-88); slightly sinister, darkly comic, and with an unexpected sting in the tail.

 

'Track 12' concerns a love triangle between a university professor, Sheringham, his wife, Susan, and her lover, Maxted. The latter, a former athlete, has been invited by Sheringham to his home on the pretext of discussing a potential business deal (although Maxted suspects he is about to be confronted over the affair).   

Throughout the evening, Sheringham insists on playing odd sound recordings of otherwise inaudible sounds amplified 100,000 times and challenging Maxted - fitted out with headphones that have made his ears feel bruised and numb - to guess what they are (one of them is the sound of a pin dropping). 

 

Maxted finds these games infantile and irritating; one man's obsession with microsonics is another man's boring waste of time:

 

"'Some of the records are interesting,' he admitted. 'They have a sort of crazy novelty value, like blown-up photographs of moths' faces and razor blades. Despite what you claim, though, I can't belive microsonics will ever become a scientific tool. It's just an elaborate laboratory toy.'" [91]  

 

Maxted - "a tall fleshy man with a coarse handsome face" [92] - also finds Sheringham a grotesque bore: 

 

"He surveyed Sheringham with as much detachment as he could muster, wondering whether this prim unattractive man, with his pedantry and in-bred academic humour, had any redeeming qualities whatever." [92]  

 

Sheringham insists on playing one last track. Maxted, however, is feeling cold and shivers as a low noise begins to crackle from multiple speakers placed around the patio. As he attempts to reach across the table to help himself to more whisky, he uncontrollably falls back into his chair:

 

"His stomach seemed to be full of mercury, ice-cold and enormously heavy. He pushed himself forward again, trying to reach the glass, and knocked it across the table. His brain began to fade, and he leaned his elbows helplessly on the lass edge of the table and felt his head fall onto his wrists." [93]  

 

This is never a good sign: in fact, it's often a sign one has - as in this case - been poisoned: "'Chromium cyanate. Inhibits the coenzyme system controlling the body's fluid balances, floods hydroxyl into the bloodstream. In brief, you drown'" [93], as Sheringham politely informs Maxted with a sympathetic smile. 

 

He then goes on to reveal his knowledge of the affair that's been going on behind his back and explains to Maxted how he's been secretly recording the illicit acts of intimacy with numerous hidden microphones. Meanwhile, track 12 continues to play:

 

"Being fed into the patio was a curiously muffled spongy noise, like elastic waves lapping in a latex sea. The rhythms were huge and ungainly, overlaid by the deep leaden wheezing of gigantic bellows. Barely audible at first, the sounds rose until they filled the patio and shut out the few traffic noises along the highway. 

      'Fantastic, isn't it?' Sheringham said. [...] 'These are 30-second repeats, 400 microsens, amplification one thousand. I admit I've edited the track a little, but it's still remarkable how repulsive a beautiful sound can become.'" [94]

 

Fearing that the drugged and dying Maxted will never guess what it is he's listening to, Sheringham gives him a clue: 

 

"'Last Saturday, just after midnight, you and Susan were lying back in this same chair. [...] The wind is your own breathing, fairly heavy at the time, if I remember; your interlocked pulses produced the thunder effect.'" [94]

 

But it's no good: Maxted is too far gone to answer. Watching as his rival "drifted in a wash of sound" [94], Sheringham pumps up the volume and bellows in his rival's ear: 

 

"'Maxted, can you hear the sea? Do you know where you're drowning?' [...] 

      'In a kiss!' Sheringham screamed. 'A kiss!'" [95]

  

 

Notes

 

[a] In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916-17), Freud reminds readers that the mouth is the entrance to the digestive tract and not a sex organ per se. Thus, even a kiss between the most respectable married couple who pride themselves on leading a normal love life might be described as a perverse act, since it consists in the bringing together of the oral erotogenic zones instead of the genitals.

 

[b] In his essay 'Pornography and Obscenity', Lawrence claims that "the most obscene painting on a Greek vase [...] is not as pornographical as the close-up kisses on the film". See Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 253. 

      See also Lawrence's poem 'When I went to the film', in The Complete Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 385, and Lawrence's 1928 painting Close-Up (Kiss), in D. H. Lawrence's Paintings, Introduction by Keith Sagar, (Chaucer Press, 2003), p. 58. Prints of this artwork are available to buy on pixels.com in a variety of formats: click here. 

 

[c] 'Track 12' first appeared in the April 1958 edition of the British science fiction magazine New Worlds (Vol. 24, No. 70). Readers can find it in several different collections of Ballard's short stories, including Passport to Eternity (1963), The Overloaded Man (1967), and The Venus Hunters (1986). It is also in The Complete Short Stories, Vol. I, (Fourth Estate, 2014), pp. 90-95, and it's this edition that page numbers given in the post refer to. 

      Interestingly, the story was adapted for screen by Harold Pinter and a short film (22 mins), directed by Joseph Losey, was made in 1967, featuring Stanley Baker (as Maxted), Dirk Bogarde (as Sheringham), and (an uncredited) Julie Christie (as Susan), whose puckered lips fill the screen at the film's deadly climax (a scene which, according to Mark Bould, had a profound influence on David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983)).  

     

 

Musical bonus: 'Kiss Me Deadly', written by Billy Idol and Tony James, from the album Generation X (Chrysalis, 1978): click here. Or, to see Generation X in action, click here. 

Manhole 69

 And above us all fluorescent tubes shall hang ...

  

I. 

 

'Manhole 69' is not, as far as I know, the name of gay sex club (though maybe it should be). 

 

It is, rather, the title of a short story by J. G. Ballard [a], concerning a medical experiment in which three volunteers have their brains tampered with so that they can exist without sleep and thus be able to live life 24/7, rather than spend a third of it as an invalid snoring their way through "'an eight-hour peepshow of infantile erotica'" [68], as the doctor in charge of the research puts it.

 

This same doctor - Dr. Neill - is convinced that his work marks a crucial evolutionary advance for man as a species [b]. As he tells his young colleague, John Morley:

 

"'None of you realize it yet, but this is as big an advance as the step the first ichthyoid took out of the protozoic sea 300 million years ago. At last we've freed the mind, raised it out of that archaic sump called sleep, its nightly retreat into the medulla. With virtually one cut of the scalpel, we've added twenty years to those men's lives.'" [67-68]

 

Unfortunately, total wakefulness soon proves to be a nightmare. Because sleep, of course, and the chance to dream, is more than "'an inconvenient symptom of cerebral anoxaemia" [69]. Nor is it merely a form of idleness - i.e., a vice or moral failing - as some neoliberals seem to believe; the sort of fanatics who pride themselves on being able to get by on as little as three or four hours sleep a night.

 

Sleep is vital to our health and wellbeing. For if nothing else, as Morley points out, sleep gives us the chance to switch off and escape: "'Maybe you need eight hours off a day just to get over the shock of being yourself'" [69] and to prevent you becoming like a waxwork dummy with open, unblinking eyes set in faces with "the empty, reflexless look of psychic zero" [87], which is what happens to Bobby Lang and his two fellow test subjects. 

 

As Morley concludes:

"'Continual consciousness is more than the brain can stand. Any signal repeated often enough eventually loses its meaning. Try saying the word 'sleep' fifty times. After a point the brain's self-awareness dulls. It's no longer able to grasp who or why it is, and it rides adrift. [...] 

      The central nervous system can't stand narcotomy.'" [87]

 

 

II. 

 

Interestingly, the negative consequences of sleep deprivation in the name of a life lived to the max have recently been explored by several cultural commentators and political theorists, including Byung-Chul Han in The Burnout Society (2015), a work I discussed on Torpedo the Ark a couple of months ago: click here. 

 

Readers might also be interested in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2014), a work in which Jonathan Crary also develops the argument that by expanding market values into every aspect of life and allowing consumer capitalism to operate around the clock, we have fatally submitted to a form of torture and compromised our own physical and mental wellbeing. 

 

As the author notes:

 

"Behind the vacuity of the catchphrase, 24/7 is a static redundancy that disavows its relation to the rhythmic and periodic textures of human life. It connotes an arbitrary, uninflected schema of a week, extracted from any unfolding of variegated or cumulative experience. [...] A 24/7 environment has the semblance of a social world, but it is actually a non-social model of machine performance and a suspension of living that does not disclose the human cost required to sustain its effectiveness. [...] An illuminated 24/7 world without shadows is the final capitalist mirage of post-history [...]" [c]  

 

Crary suggests that sleep - as a restorative withdrawl that is intrinsically incompatible with the 24/7 world of neoliberalism - might provide a possible form of resistance and a refusal of the fascist imperative to always be wide awake [d]. 

 

He writes:

 

"In its profound uselessness and intrinsic passivity, with the incalculable losses it causes in production time, circulation, and consumption, sleep will always collide with the demands of a 24/7 universe. The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism. [...] Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present [...] it frustrates and confounds any strategies to exploit or reshape it. The stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from it." [e]. 

 

Concluding:

 

"Sleep is an irrational and intolerable affirmation that there might be limits to the compatibility of living beings with the allegedly irresistable forces of modernization." [f] 

 

In other words - and as Heidegger might say - Nur ein langes Nickerchen kann uns retten ...           

 

Notes

 

[a] 'Manhole 69' was originally published in the British science fiction magazine New Worlds in 1957. It was then included in the collection Chronopolis and Other Stories, (Putnam Publishing, 1971). Page numbers given in this post refer to the tale as it appears in The Complete Short Stories, Vol. I, (Fourth Estate, 2014), pp. 56-89. 

      The title, by the way, refers to a small narrow room or cubicle, without windows, and with just a solitary bright light shining from behind a steel grille in the ceiling; a place where it's always 3 a.m. After a while, it's easy to imagine the walls closing in ever closer. 

      Readers might also note that prisoners subjected to sleep deprivation - a form of torture endured by many victims of extrajudicial rendition - are often confined in rooms lit by high-intensity lamps and so cramped in size that they make it impossible even to lie down.   

 

[b] One of the three test subjects, Robert Lang, buys into this line of thinking, even though, as Morley points out, leaving the seas behind in order to become air-breathing creatures, isn't analogous with eliminating the need for sleep. Interestingly, Lang also subscribes to the view that sleep is a form of pseudo-death that keeps the human psyche orientated towards its own mortality. Eliminate sleep, therefore, "'and you also eliminate all the fear and defence mechanisms erected around it'" [78].  

      Cf. D. H. Lawrence writing in Fantasia of the Unconscious on the relationship between ourselves and the death-realm which is "active every moment of our lives", but particularly whilst we sleep and the individual consciousness is suspended and we lie "completely within the circuit of the earth's magnetism". It is this circuit, according to Lawrence, which removes the deadness (i.e. tiredness) of the body: "For each time we lie down to sleep we have within us a body of death which dies with the day that is spent. And this body of death is removed, or laid in line by the activities of the earth-circuit, the great active death circuit, while we sleep." 

      See Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 177.    

[c] Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, (Verso, 2014), pp. 8-9.

 

[d] Readers will doubtless recall that Deutschland Erwache! was one of the Nazi Party's most successful and oft-repeated slogans (taken from a poem by Dietrich Eckart entitled Sturmlied). Contrary to what many people believe, fascism compels to speech and constant activity; it never lets its citizens enjoy a silent night in which they might sleep in heavenly peace and dream their own sweet dreams.

 

[e] Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, p. 10-11. 

 

[f] Ibid., p. 13.