Baby You're So Overweight, Baby You're the One (Some Thoughts on Fat Acceptance, etc.)

Lucien Freud: Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) [1]

I. 

 

According to the 15th-century English monk and poet John Lydgate: 'You can please some of the people all of the time; you can please all of the people some of the time; but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.' 

 

And so it is that emails from disgruntled readers are sometimes sent my way, such as the following:

 

Dear Stephen Alexander,

 

Whilst pleased to see in your latest post - Reflections on Venus Emerging Slowly from an Old Bathtub - that you at least considered the possibility of extending the notion of what constitutes beauty, as a fat activist I was disappointed to see you include in your list of so-called vile bodies - a truly deplorable phrase, for which you should apologise - all the usual body types, including obese bodies, that have traditionally been discriminated against and classed as ugly. 

 

The fat acceptance movement - also known as fat pride - campaigns to eliminate the social stigma, stereotypes, and prejudice surrounding obesity and empower the big-bodied to feel good about themselves. Being overweight - whatever that means - is not a crime; being fat is not a sin; and obesity is not a disease (anymore than a diet is a cure). Nor do I feel that obese people should be classified as disabled.    

 

Please make an effort to better educate yourself on this issue, so that maybe one day you'll write something positive about Big Beautiful Women such as myself.

 

 

 

II. 

 

In reply, I wrote:

 

Dear Big Beautiful Woman [2],

 

You're right, of course, one should always look to increase and deepen one's knowledge of various subjects. But it might interest you to learn that one of the earliest posts published on Torpedo the Ark concerned fat as a transpolitical issue [click here]. 

 

Further, as someone who has read quite a lot of radical theory, I'm well aware of how issues concerning not just weight, but race, class, and sexuality, for example, all traverse the (often female) body. And so I have no problem accepting fat activism and, indeed, fat studies as a valid field of interdisciplinary research. I would therefore like to think I'm not particularly sizeist or fat phobic (though accept the possibility of my habouring unconscious bias towards plus-size individuals). 

 

As for the phrase vile bodies, this may be deplorable, as you say, but it is not one I coined and nor, if I'm honest, do I feel inclined to apologise for it [3]. Sometimes we need terms that can make us weep. And arguably, the term that you use to describe yourself - BBW - is just as problematic, as it lends itself to a porno-fetishisation of body size and shape [4].

 

Having said that, I can see how it might be preferable to be thought sexy - even if in a kinky manner - rather than ugly, unhealthy, or disabled and perhaps an affirmation of one's body type is better than self-loathing (though personally, I'm as wary of taking pride in one's size as I am of taking pride in one's sexuality or race, and certainly don't support the building of an identity politics on the basis of what is often simply shame on the recoil).               

 

Notes

 

[1] This famous work by Lucien Freud is a portrait of 280lb Sue Tilley, whom Freud painted several times during the period 1994-96, fascinated as he was by the texture of her flesh. It was bought by Roman Abramovich for $33.6 million (£17.2 million), at Christie's New York, in 2008.

 

[2] I'm using this term - Big Beautiful Woman - to address my correspondent as it was how she referred to herself. Commonly abbreviated to BBW, it was coined by Carole Shaw who, in 1979, launched a fashion and lifestyle magazine for plus-size women. Since then, the term has spread widely and can be found in online dating profiles and on porn sites, for example, replacing other euphemisms for fat, such as full-figured, curvy, or voluptuous. 

      The male equivalent - Big Handsome Man (BHM) - is often used in the gay community, where those attracted to and seeking out such men are known as chubby chasers.    

 

[3] The term vile bodies is of course associated with Evelyn Waugh and his 1930 novel of that title. Obviously, I was using it in a very different context from the latter, who, if I remember correctly, was referring to the bright young things who shamelessly flaunted their flesh at endless parties.

[4] Fat fetishism - or the sexual desire for the obese other primarily because of their weight and size - often involves feeding so that the beloved object intentionally increases their body fat. Some devotees also enjoy squashing (i.e., the feeling of being crushed beneath mounds of warm flesh). Fat fetishism is usually termed fat appreciation (or fat admiration) - FA - by those in the know. 

      Whilst I'm happy for those involved in this kinky subculture to find pleasure wherever (and however) they like, it's worth noting that the politics of the relationships often mirror, reinforce, or perversely exaggerate existing dynamics of power. There is nothing inherently radical, therefore, in FA or any other form of paraphilia.     

Music bonus: Adam and the Ants, Fat Fun - recorded as an unused b-side at Rockfield Studios in 1980 - click here.

      This song, from Adam's early punk days, was originally written in collabration with guitarist Lester Square (later of the Monochrome Set). It has remained one he often performs live with the Ants to this day. The track was included in the Adam and the Ants box set, Antbox (Columbia Records, 2000). 

Reflections on Venus Emerging Slowly From an Old Bathtub

The Venus of Willendorf [1]

Image: Naturhistorisches Museum Wien

nhm-wien.ac.at

 

 

I.

 

I recently reflected on how the figure of a woman emerging from the sea allows us to glimpse something of the goddess Aphrodite in her flesh; and how, in turn, this invites us to consider the relationship we have with our own bodies and the bodies of others (as well as the nature of the divine) [2]. 

 

Of course, such meditations are made easier when that woman is, for example, Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder, or Ana de Macedo skipping among the fishes and rock pools, like a Portuguese Venus; one could spend all day happily musing on lithe and lovely limbs and firm young breasts, etc. 

 

It is not so easy, or so pleasurable, however, to consider what we might collectively term vile bodies - i.e., old bodies, ugly bodies, obese bodies, deformed bodies, mutilated bodies, and, at the extreme, dead bodies (there is surely nothing more repulsive than a decomposing corpse, which is why necrophilia remains such a rare phenomenon).

 

The problem, as Nietzsche pointed out, is that everything ugly weakens and saddens the spectator [3]. Thus, reflecting upon vile bodies has a dangerous psycho-physiological effect; it actually depresses and deprives one of strength. 

 

Ugliness, like sickness, is therefore not only a sign and symptom of degeneration, but a cause of such; which is why healthy happy souls prefer to be surrounded by beauty and turn to art when such is lacking in reality; for art, as Nietzsche says, is the great stimulant of life - a counterforce to all denial of wellbeing [4]. 

 

However, having said all this, the philosopher, as Nietzsche understands them, is one who lives dangerously and who can not only embrace more of human history (in its entirety) as their own, but, like the artist or great poet, find beauty in those individuals, things, and events where most people would see only horror and look away in disgust. 

 

 

II. 

 

And so we come to Rimbaud's poem, Venus Anadyomène (1870); one that I think important, but which critics often overlook, or dismiss as less serious than his later (more mature) verses. 

 

For one thing, the poem - written when Rimbaud was just sixteen - challenges static and traditional ideals of feminine beauty [5] and dares readers to glimpse some aspect of the divine even in an ulcerated anus (which, admittedly, isn't easy). 

 

Wherever the poet might be taking us, we're a long way from Botticelli and moving towards Bataille territory; this hideously beautiful Venus in an old bathtub serves as the vehicle of love in much the same manner that a drunken woman vomiting - or a dog devouring the stomach of a goose - perform the role [6].   

 

Ultimately, not being a scholar of French literature or a Rimbaud expert, I'm unsure what he intended with this verse; is it a serious (slightly disturbing) attempt to revalue beauty, or simply an adolescent parody of the Venus myth - who knows? 

Anyway, readers can decide for themselves by clicking here to access Venus Anadyomène as found in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, a bilingual edition trans. Wallace Fowlie and revised by Seth Whidden, (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The Venus of Willendorf is a small figurine, carved from limestone tinted with red ochre, and believed to have been made almost 30,000 years ago in the Paleolithic period (i.e., the Old Stone Age). It was found in 1908, during archaeological excavations at a site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria. Anyone wishing to see it should get along to the Natural History Museum in Vienna. 

 

[2] See the post entitled 'And Venus Among the Fishes Skips' (18 Feb 2022): click here. 

 

[3] See Nietzsche, 'Expeditions [or Skirmishes] of an Untimely Man', §20, in Twilight of the Idols.  

 

[4] See Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1968), §853 (II), p. 452.    

[5] For more on the challenge to these ideals presented by Rimbaud's poem, see the essay by Seth Whidden, 'Rimbaud Writing on the Body: Anti-Parnassian Movement and Æsthetics in "Vénus Anadyomène"', in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 27, no. 3/4, (University of Nebraska Press, 1999), pp. 333–45. This essay can also be accessed online via JSTOR: click here.

 

[6] See Georges Bataille, 'The Solar Anus', in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Alan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 5-9. The lines I refer to are on p. 6. 

 

 

And Venus Among the Fishes Skips

Ana de Macedo: the Venus of Alentejo

Photo used with permission from her Instagram account 

@ana_macedo

 

 

 I. 

 

Venus rising from the sea - or, as the Little Greek would say, αναδυομένη Αφροδίτη - is, of course, one of the iconic figures within the cultural (and pornographic) imagination of the West.  

 

According to Athenaeus, the idea was inspired by the ancient Greek courtesan Phryne [1], who liked to let down her hair and step naked into the sea, particularly during the time when the Eleusinian Mysteries were being celebrated, or festivals held in honour of Poseidon . 

The renowned painter Apelles created a much-admired picture of this event [2], whilst the equally renowned scuptor Praxiteles - who was one of Phryne's many lovers - is believed to have used her as the model for his statue of Aphrodite (the first life-sized nude female form ever sculpted in ancient Greece). 

 

Although some historians have pooh-poohed the story of Phryne's skinny dipping in the sea as sensationalised fabrication [3], I can happily believe it, and see how it might inspire artists. For as D. H. Lawrence writes, we glimpse the gods in the bodies of men and women [4] ... 

 

 

II. 

 

In his poem 'The Man of Tyre', for example, Lawrence describes a man watching as a woman who had waded into the pale green sea of evening in order to wash herself, now turns, and comes slowly back to shore:

 

 

Oh lovely, lovely, with the dark hair piled up, as she went deeper,

      deeper down the channel, then rose shallower, shallower,

with the full thighs slowly lifting of the wader wading shorewards

and the shoulders pallid with light from the silent sky behind

both breasts dim and mysterious, with the glamorous kindness

      of twilight between them

and the dim blotch of black maidenhair like an indicator,

giving a message to the man. 

 

So in the cane-brake he clasped his hands in delight

that could only be god-given, and murmured:

Lo! God is one god! but here in the twilight

godly and lovely comes Aphrodite out of the sea

towards me! [5]

 

 

However, Lawrence also catches sight of the gods in the bodies of animals too. Thus, in the poem 'Whales weep not!', he informs us that Aphrodite is a happy hot-blooded she-whale:

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin

she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea

she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males

and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.

 

 

These are surely some of the loveliest lines in Lawrence's poetry and, crucially, they encourage us to reconsider (i) the relation we have to ourselves and our own flesh; (ii) the relation we have to others and their bodies; (iii) the relation we have to animals; and (iv) the relation we have to the gods.

 

And, surely, that's the purpose of art, isn't it?    

 

 

Fresco from Pompei, Casa di Venus, 1st century AD 

A classic example of Venus Anadyomene

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Phryne, whose real name (somewhat ironically) was Mnesarete, was born c. 371 BC and became a notorious member of that highly educated class of companion women known as hetaerae [ἑταῖραι]. She is perhaps best remembered for her beauty and for her trial for impiety (a capital offence), where she was defended by the orator Hypereides (another of her lovers). 

      When it seemed as if his arguments might be falling on deaf ears, Hypereides removed Phryne's robe and bared her breasts before the judges in order to arouse their pity. This seemed to do the trick; the judges decided they could not condemn a priestess of Aphrodite to death. And so Phyrne was acquitted. Little wonder that modern poets and artists have continued to find her irresistable.     

 

[2] Sadly, this picture is now lost. It is mentioned, however, in Pliny's Natural History [XXXV, 86-87] According to the Roman author, Apelles employed Pancaspe (aka Campaspe) - mistress to Alexander the Great - as his model. 

 

[3] See for example Christine Mitchell Havelock, The Aphrodite of Knidos and Her Successors: A Historical Review of the Female Nude in Greek Art, (The University of Michigan Press, 1995). 

 

[4] See the post 'I Shall Speak of Geist, of Flame, and of Glimpses' (29 Sept 2021), where I speak of Lawrence's idea of glimpsing something divine in mortal being with reference to his poetry. 

      And see also 'The Southend Venus' (26 Aug 2016) and 'The Southend Venus (Alternative Version)' (27 Aug, 2016), where I write of glimpsing the goddess in the girl on a beach in Essex. 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Man of Tyre', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 606-607.

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'Whales weep not!', in The Poems, Vol. I, ibid., pp. 607-608. Lines quoted p. 608.

 

 

For a related post to this one, discussing Rimbaud's poetic take on the idea of Venus anadyomene, click here. 

The Tragic Tale of Two Dead Sea Eagles (and a Tory MP)

This eagle is no more. He has ceased to be ...

(Image: Dorset Police)

 

 

It was bad enough when a pioneering project to reintroduce (over a ten year period) sixty white-tailed eagles - once Britain's largest bird of prey - into Norfolk was suddenly cancelled last year, following the usual complaints from local farmers and estate owners concerned about the impact on their precious sheep and game birds (i.e., the animals they slaughter and shoot for profit). 

 

But now, two of the twenty-five eagles released on the Isle of Wight in 2019, but known to have spent time in East Anglia and other areas of southern England, have been found dead - and one very much doubts they died from natural causes (which is why toxicological examinations are being conducted).   

 

Well done to those cunts responsible - you've performed a real public service by poisoning these rare and beautiful birds, extinct in the UK since the eary 20th-century, following extensive habitat destruction combined with many years of deadly persecution. 

 

And congratulations also to the Conservative MP for West Dorset, Chris Loder, who has said eagles are not welcome in his constituency and that police should not be wasting time and money investigating how these two birds died. Of course, it might be noted that Mr. Loder had his 2019 election campaign funded to the tune of £14,000 by Ilchester Estates, which organises shoots in his constituency ... 

 

However, speaking to The Guardian, Loder insisted that he was not influenced by the donation from the estate and his opposition to the presence of eagles in his constituency was based on fears for the impact this would have on farming: 

 

"My views on sea eagles come from me being a farmer's son and my continued best efforts to represent the needs of West Dorset's farming community. I am not convinced that sea eagles being here are in their best interests. No briefing or consultation has taken place with me or others that I know of by Natural England, campaigners, nor the RSPB to explain how these risks are managed, nor to inform the farming community that indeed these birds are in Dorset.

      My policy views are formed in the best interests of the rural community I represent, which is also my home and where I was brought up. Any suggestion that I have been unduly influenced in this view is completely wrong." [1]

 

Readers can decide for themselves what they think of this. Personally, I wish there were fewer farmers, landowners, gamekeepers, hunters, and members of parliament and far more birds of every variety and species, including raptors, in British skies. 

 

And what D. H. Lawrence once wrote with reference to a mountain lion, we can say also of a white-tailed eagle; what a gap in the world it makes when one is killed, whereas how little missed would a couple of million human beings be [2].     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The article by Helena Horton in The Guardian (15 Feb 2022) from which I quote can be read in full by clicking here. 

 

[2] See Lawrence's poem 'Mounain Lion', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 351-52.  

In Defence of Jeff Koons's Easyfun-Ethereal

Cover of the exhibition catalogue 

published by Harry N. Abrams (2001) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Clearly, Jeff Koons features as a very special kind of hate figure in the work of Byung-Chul Han. 

 

Not only does he have an intense dislike for the ultra-smoothness of Koons's sculptural works - including his stainless steel Rabbit (1986), which, for Han, reflects a social imperative lacking in all negativity [2] - but he doesn't much care for Koons's paintings either. 

 

Writing with reference to the Easyfun-Ethereal series in which a wide variety of things, including food items and human body parts, are assembled, Han says:

 

"His pictures mirror our society, which has become a department store. It is stuffed full of short-lived objects and advertisements. It has lost all otherness, all foreignness; thus it is no longer possible to marvel at anything. Jeff Koons's art, which merges seamessly with consumer culture, elevates consumerism to a figure of salvation." [3] 

 

Well, maybe: but then, on the other hand, it could be that Koons's work is actually a critique of consumerism, exposing the false hopes, empty dreams, and the banality of the mass produced goods that the latter trades in. 

 

If you don't want to buy that, then try this: maybe what Koons is attempting to do is give back to things their strangeness and inviting us to delight in the culture we inhabit - as is, and free from shame and snobbery. To assist in the overcoming of bad conscience - i.e., to allow people to take pleasure in the things they like without feeling guilty, or having to justify their tastes - would be a good thing, no?   

 

 

II. 

 

In the Easyfun-Ethereal series, Koons has cut and pasted (seemingly at random) pictues found in glossy magazines and old ads, as well as photographs of his own, creating digital collages that appear to be as chaotic as they are colourful. 

 

Although initially this work is performed on a computer using Photoshop softwear, the electronic images are then transformed into traditional oil on canvas paintings, with painstaking photo-realist attention to detail; Koons and his team of assistants spend months meticulously applying computer-calibrated colours by hand. 

 

The word traditional may seem an odd one to use with reference to Koons's paintings. But, as a matter of fact, that's exactly what his work is. Far from emerging out of nowhere, his paintings are rich in many elements that recall art history (and not just Pop art history). Unlike Han, I think there's much to marvel at in the windows of our great department stores - and much to marvel at in Koons's pictures too. 

 

His canvases don't merely mirror our society, they also - more importantly - speak of what Levi Bryant termed the democracy of objects, i.e., a flat ontological realm wherein objects of all sorts - from hot dogs, elephants, and rollercoasters, to lips, wigs, and bikini bottoms - equally exist without being reducible to other objects and can dynamically interact outside of any transcendent system of meaning [4].        

 

This, for me at least, gives Koons's work not only cultural and aesthetic interest, but philosophical import too. But readers can make up their own mind by visiting his website and viewing the twenty-four pictures - from Auto to Venus - that make up the Easyfun-Ethereal series: click here.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This catalogue was published on the occasion of an exhibition that ran from 27 Oct 2000 - 14 Jan 2001, featuring seven new works by Jeff Koons commissioned for the Deutsche Guggenheim (Berlin). Illustrated with full-colour reproductions, the catalogue also includes an interview with the artist by David Sylvester, as well as an essay by Robert Rosenblum analysing Koons's technique and imagery.

 

[2] See the post entitled 'On Smoothness' (5 Dec 2021): click here.  

 

[3] Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other, trans. Wieland Hoban, (Polity Press, 2018), p. 59.  

[4] See: Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects, (Open Humanities Press, 2011). 

 

    

Love (A Post for Valentine's Day)

Love is the flower of life: it blossoms unexpectedly and without law

and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.

 

 

Although a self-declared priest of love, D. H. Lawrence was always ambivalent about the latter and quick to qualify his own remarks in praise of love. Thus, for example, he declares: "Love is the happiness of the world." But then immediately points out that "happiness is not the whole of fulfilment".

 

In the same essay, he writes: "Love is a coming together. But there can be no coming together without an equivalent going asunder." Indeed, according to Lawrence, "the coming together depends on the going apart; the systole depends on the diastole; the flow depends upon the ebb".

Thus it is that: "There can never be love universal and unbroken [...] The undisputed reign of love can never be."  

 

Which is one in the eye for Jesus and all the other love-idealists, including St. Valentine who was martyred on this day in 269, and whom lovebirds the world over commemorate by buying flowers, boxes of chocolates, heart-shaped balloons, etc. 

 

Lawrence's central message seems to be that love is a process, or journey, of some kind. But that it is fatal to push this process into a goal or mistakenly believe, like the much-loved Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, that it is better to travel than to arrive. 

 

This, says, Lawrence is the nihilistic belief of those who are "in love with love" and fail to understand that to arrive is "the supreme joy after all travelling". For in arriving, "one passes beyond love, or, rather, one encompasses love in a new transcendence". 

 

To insist on love as something that knows no consummation - an interminable journey stretching on to infinity like an endless straight road - is an abysmal thought; one which demonsrates a will to arrest the spring. 

In the novel Aaron's Rod (1922), Lawrence puts it this way:

 

"The aim of any process is not the perpetuation of that process, but the completion thereof. Love is a process of the incomprehensible human soul: love also incomprehensible, but still only a process. The process should work to a completion, not to some horror of intensification and extremity wherein the soul and the body ultimately perish. The completion of the process of love is the arrival at a state of simple, pure self-possession, for man and woman. Only that. Which isn't exciting enough for us sensationalists. We prefer abysses and maudlin self-abandon and self-sacrifice, the degeneration into a sort of slime and merge.

      Perhaps, truly, the process of love is never accomplished. But it moves in great stages, and at the end of each stage a true goal, where the soul possesses itself in simple and generous singleness. Without this, love is a disease."

 

 

Note: Apart from the final passage from Aaron's Rod, which can be found on p. 166 of the Cambridge Edition (1988), ed. Mara Kalnins, all lines quoted are from Lawrence's essay 'Love', which was first published in the English Review in January 1918, but which can also be found in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 5-12.

 

 

On Transitioning

Ralph Bates and Martine Beswick in Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde 

(dir. Roy Ward Baker, 1971)

 

 

I always smile when I hear someone claim they were born in the wrong body ...

 

For it has to be one of the most ridiculous things that anyone can say; not only does it presuppose a metaphysical subject in a Cartesian manner, but it hints also at the transmigration of souls.    

 

However, so powerful has the so-called trans lobby become, that we're all obliged to sit up and take notice whenever a man claims that he is really a woman, or a woman claims she's really a man. 

 

That is to say, not only born in the wrong body, but trapped in the wrongly sexed body as well and thus in need of medical and surgical assistance in order to reassign their sex and ensure that their physical appearance and sexual characteristics resemble those associated with their identified gender. 

 

This is termed transitioning - a process that can take many months or even several years [1]. Indeed, some non-binary or genderqueer individuals may spend their whole life transitioning; continually redefining and re-interpreting who and what they are, without ever arriving at a fixed identity. 

 

Unfortunately, whilst this sounds like fun, turning a process into a goal or an end in itself, can also be dangerous. For according to Deleuze and Guattari, prolonging a process indefinitely is what produces the unfortunate figure of the false schizophrenic, who invariably ends up in a mental institution [2]. 

 

Like D. H. Lawrence, whom they quote, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the aim of any process is the consummation thereof: "The process should work to a completion, not to some horror of intensification and extremity wherein the soul and body ultimately perish." [3]  

 

It's concerning that many who choose to experiment with gender identity and transitioning seem to fall into this trap of pushing a process into a goal, which might help explain why the rates for suicide, self-harm, and depression amongst the trans community in the UK make for grim reading [4].  

 

Ultimately, making a transition (or a becoming of any kind) involves crossing a threshold to the unknown. And if that promises a new life, or a completely different state of being, so too is it to flirt with death. 

 

In other words, there is a certain negativity inscribed within the process of transitioning. It's not simply fun and games; unlike gender bending, which involves dressing up and challenging norms and stereotypes by highlighting the performative character of gender and is usually free from any dysmorphia or concerns about which body one has been born into [5]. 

 

So, to those who are determined to transition, I would issue a gentle word of caution. But of course, who am I to advise anyone on anything; I'm not a trans individal, don't know any trans people, and my knowledge of this topic has mostly been shaped by my taste in films, pop music, and French philosophy ...    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] It should be pointed out that transitioning cannot simply be conflated with sex reassignment surgery. Many individuals with gender dysphoria who choose to transition, don't go under the knife and think of transitioning in more holistic terms, involving mental and social factors and not just physical changes.

 

[2] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 5.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 166.

[4] According to the Stonewall website, 48% of trans people in Britain have attempted suicide at least once and 84% have thought about it; more than half (55%) have been clinically diagnosed with depression at some point.

[5] Note that I'm not dismissing the importance of gender bending. In fact, I think crossdressers, drag queens, and androgynous looking pop stars play a vital role in helping us to better understand issues around the cultural construction of gender identity. 

      I discuss this in chapter four of Philosophy on the Catwalk (2011), where I write in praise of those who playfully separate the signs of sex from biological being and refuse any destiny that rests upon anatomical fact; i.e., those who enact the Wildean teaching that the first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. 

      See also my short post from December 2012 entitled 'Life's a Drag': click here.

 

 

Amethyst: Brief Reflections on My Birthstone and Dionysian Philosophy

All things at the end of time become amethyst ...

 

Amethyst is a violet-coloured variety of quartz; i.e., a hard crystalline mineral made from silica (SiO2). It owes its beauty - as do most things - to its imperfections; namely, impurities of iron and the presence of other trace elements, including, if Remy Belleau is to be believed, a few drops of sacred wine [1].

 

It's also, according to astrologers, my birthstone. Which is somewhat awkward for a Dionysian philosopher, as the English name derives from the Hellenistic Greek term amethystos [αμέθυστος], meaning unintoxicated (a reference to the belief that wearing the semi-precious stone protected its owner from drunkenness). 

 

However, it's important to remember that even Nietzsche - the major disciple of Dionynsus in the modern world - doesn't approve of piss-heads, placing alcohol alongside Christian morality as one of the two great European narcotics and who, for the most part, drank only water, preferring as he did to keep both a clear-head and a cool-head (as I do).

 

Ultimately, whilst Nietzsche admired the transfiguring power of intoxication, he strongly recommended that all spiritual natures abstain from alcohol and he didn't sacrifice human reason in the name of a wild irrationalism. Throughout his writings, cognitive activity is itself conceived as a drive of some kind, or even a form of passion; the will to make an intrinsically chaotic world intelligible and thus a world we might inhabit with a degree of security. 

 

And, for Nietzsche, whilst not denying the ecstatic element of the Dionysian experience, the god speaks differently to him: he speaks of this world (as the only world); of love as an earthly reality and of the eternal delight of existence in all of its aspects (even the most terrible) [2].

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] In his poem L'Amethyste, ou les Amours de Bacchus et d'Amethyste, 16th-century French poet Remy Belleau invents a myth in which Bacchus - the Roman version of Dionysus - was pursuing a maiden named Amethyste, who refused his affections and called on Diana to safeguard her chastity. This the goddess did by transforming Amethyste into a pure white gemstone. Impressed by the girl's determination to remain chaste, Bacchus pours wine over her new mineral form as an offering, thereby staining the crystal purple.  

 

[2] In a note from 1888, for example, Nietzsche writes: 

 

"Philosophy, as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary quest for even the most detested and notorious sides of existence. [...] Such an experimental philosophy [...] wants [...] a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, without subtraction, exception, or selection - it wants the eternal circulation: the same things, the same logic and illogic of entanglements. The highest state a philosopher can attain: to stand in a Dionysian relationship to existence - my formula for this is amor fati."

 

See The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1968), Book Four, Pt. II, §1041, p. 536. 

 

 

Rawdon Lilly: Notes Towards a Character Study

Adapted from the cover of Henry Miller's  

Notes on 'Aaron's Rod', ed. Seamus Cooney, 

(Black Sparrow Press, 1980)

 

 

I. 

 

"It is remarkable", writes D. H. Lawrence, "how many odd or extraordinary people there are in England." [a]

 

And I suppose we might number Rawdon Lilly amongst this queer set; Lilly being the character in Aaron's Rod (1922) who, like Rupert Birkin before him (in Women in Love) and Richard Somers after him (in Kangaroo), serves as a kind of avatar for the author, often expressing his philosophical views, although he is not the novel's protagonist and doesn't enter the story until chapter five when the action moves from Eastwood to London ...

 

 

II. 

 

Lilly is an artist of the literary variety who hangs around with posh bohemian types; dark and ugly of feature as well as (arguably) of character. He thinks he's terribly witty, but he's no Oscar Wilde; he thinks he's terribly clever, but he's no Nietzsche. A strange mix of sarcasm, snobbishness, and self-regard, it's no wonder he often provokes others to violence [b] and irritaes the hell out of Tanny, his blonde-haired, half-Norwegian wife.

That said, he seems to like Aaron Sisson, the flute playing ex-miner - and the latter seems to like him; they glance at one another "with a look of recognition" [61], which is always a good sign in Lawrence's world. Unlike the look of love, because love, says Lilly, is a vice. Like alcohol. Having met and been introduced (at the opera) - and having exchanged their look of recognition - Lilly invites Aaron to visit him and Tanny for lunch one day, at their house in Hampstead (an invitation that was never taken up, as far as I recall).     

 

Despite living in Hampstead - and also owning a "labourer's cottage in Hampshire" [73] - we are asked to accept that Rawdon and Tanny were poor [c]. Perhaps this adds to Lilly's self-image as a saviour. But it doesn't explain his (racist) dislike of the Japanese, whom he thinks demonic; a quality that one might have thought he'd find attractive, since he despises Christianity and moral humanism [d].

 

He also dislikes those who can't - or won't - stand upright on their own two feet; those, like Jim Bricknell, who stagger and stumble like a drunk; "or worse, like a man with locomotor ataxia" [81], as if lacking all power in their legs. According to Lilly, it's an obscene desire to be loved which makes the knees go all weak and rickety - that and a sloppy relaxation of will. 

 

For Deleuze, "the spinal column is nothing but a sword beneath the skin, slipped into the body of an innocent sleeper by an executioner" [e]. But for Lilly (as for Lawence), the backbone is crucial and should be stiffened from an early age, so that one can affirm oneself into singular being and kick one's way into the future [f].  

 

When Tanny goes off to visit her family in Norway, Lilly stays in London, on the grounds that it's "'better for married people to be separated sometimes'" [90] and that couples who are "'stuck together like two jujube lozenges'" [91] are hateful.

 

He takes a clean and pleasant room, with a piano, in Covent Garden; above the market place, looking down on the stalls and the carts, etc. Mostly he liked to watch the great draught-horses delivering produce: "Funny half-human creatures they seemed, so massive and fleshy, yet so cockney" [86]; an amusingly absurd description. 

But Lilly also has his eye on a "particular page-boy in buttons, with a round and perky behind, who nimbly carried a tea-tray from somewere to somewhere, under the arches beside the market" [86]. When reading Lawrence, one can pretty much take it as given that his leading male characters will be what we now term bi-curious (to say the least). 

 

So no big surprise to find that when he gets (a poorly) Aaron up to his room, he soon has the latter undressed and tucked up in bed: 

 

"Lilly pushed Aaron down in the bed, and covered him over. Then he thrust his hands under the bedclotes and felt his feet - still cold. He arranged the water bottle. Then he put another cover on the bed." [90] 

It's kind, of course, of Lilly to nurse the flu-ridden Aaron. But does a respiratory illness usually require an erotically-charged massage with oil - and we're not talking here of a quick chest rub with Vicks VapoRub:

"Quickly he uncovered the blond lower body of his patient, and began to rub the abdomen with oil, using a slow, rhythmic, circulating motion, a sort of massage. For a long time he rubbed finely and steadily, then went over the whole of the lower body, mindless, as if in a sort of incantation. He rubbed every speck of the man's lower body - the abdomen, the buttocks, the thighs and knees, down to the feet, rubbed it all warm and glowing with camphorated oil, every bit of it, chafing the toes swiftly, till he was almost exhausted." [96] 

 

Anyway, it seems to do the trick: "The spark had come back into the sick eyes, and the faint trace of a smile, faintly luminous, into the face" [96]. But afterwards Lilly wonders why he did it, worried that when Aaron is fully recovered and realises what was done to him it will result in another punch in the wind: "'This Aaron [...] I like him, and he ought to like me. [But] he'll be another Jim [...]'" [97] 

 

Poor Lilly! So full of resentment - including self-resentment. But he no sooner swears to stop caring for others and interfering in their lives, than he starts darning Aaron's black woollen socks, having washed them a few days previously.   

 

When Aaron recovers enough to sit up in bed and eat some toast with his tea, Lilly explains his thoughts on marriage - "'a self-conscious egoistic state'" [99] - and having children: '"I think of them as a burden.'" [99] He fears being suffocated "'either with a baby's napkin or a woman's petticoat'" [101] and dreams of men rediscovering their independent manhood and gathering his own soul "'in patience and in peace'" [104]. 

 

But this isn't some kind of Buddhist desire for an end to all desire: 

 

"'It's what you get to after a lot of fighting and a lot of sensual fulfilment. And it never does away with the fighting and with the sensual passion. It flowers on top of them, and it would never flower save on top of them'" [105] 

 

In other words, it's what Oliver Mellors would term the peace that comes of fucking [g], or Nietzsche a warrior's peace. Whether Aaron understands this idea, is debatable: Lilly irritates him rather. But, having said that, he seems in no hurry to leave, even when well enough to do so: "They had been together alone for a fortnight only: but it was like a small eternity." [106]

 

Thus, the two men share the room in Covent Garden, bickering like Felix and Oscar in The Odd Couple [h] and drinking endless cups of tea. They have, we are told, "an almost uncanny understanding of one another - like brothers" [106], despite the mutual hostility. 

 

Lilly, of course, plays the traditionally feminine role: "He mashed the potatoes, he heated the plates, he warmed the red wine, he whisked eggs into the milk pudding, and served his visitor like a housemaid." [106] And when the food is ready, Lilly draws the curtains and dims the light so they can enjoy a rather romantic-sounding meal for two. Then he does the washing-up. 

 

Of course Lilly and Aaron part on rather bad terms: for the latter, the former is too demanding; he wants something of another man's soul, or so it seems to Aaron. Anyway, Lilly heads off; first to Malta, then to Italy (and out of the novel for several chapters). Eventually, Aaron follows, with no definite purpose but to join his rather peculiar friend ... 

 

 

III. 

 

The two men, Aaron and Lilly, Lilly and Aaron, finally reunite in Florence. 

 

Lilly doesn't seem particularly surprised to see Aaron again; or particularly fussed. For he's come to believe that there's a time to leave off loving and seeking friends; that each man has to learn how to possess himself in stillness and not care about anything or anyone. Essentially, decides Lilly, at his very core, he is alone: "'Eternally alone. And choosing to be alone. Not sentimental or lonely. Alone, choosing to be alone, because by one's nature one is alone.'" [246] 

 

He continues:

 

"'In so much as I am I, and only I am I, and I am only I, [...] I am inevitably and eternally alone, and it is my last blessedness to know it, and to accept it, and to live with this as the core of my self-knowledge.'" [247]

 

Thus, for Lilly, even the heart beats alone in its own silence - and anti-idealism. For above all else, it's anti-idealism that defines Lilly (philosophically and politically):

"'The ideal of love, the ideal that it is better to give than to receive, the ideal of liberty, the ideal of the brotherhood of man, the ideal of the sanctity of human life, the ideal of what we call goodness, charity, benevolence, public spiritedness, the ideal of sacrifice for a cause, the ideal of unity and unanimity - all the lot - all the whole beehive of ideals - has all got the modern bee-disease, and gone putrid, stinking.'" [280-81]

His alternative is - after sufficient extermination - a "'healthy and energetic slavery'" [281] in which there is "'a real commital of the life-issue of inferior beings to the responsibility of a superior being'" [281] and enforced with military power. At least that's what he tells his interlocutor. Until then admitting with a gay, whimsical smile that he would "'say the opposite with just as much fervour'" [282].

Finally, Lilly delivers that which he believes to be the real truth: "'I think every man is a sacred and holy individual, never to be violated." [282] Which is pretty close to Aleister Crowley's great teaching that: Every man and every woman is a star [i]. 

 

 

IV. 

 

So, in closing what then are we to make of Rawdon Lilly? 

 

Aaron comes to the following conclusion:

"He had started by thinking Lilly a peculiar little freak: gone on to think him a wonderful chap, and a bit pathetic: progressed, and found him generous, but overbearing: then cruel and intolerant, allowing no man to have a soul of his own: then terribly arrogant, throwing a fellow aside like an old glove which is in holes at the finger-ends. And all the time, which was most beastly, seeing through one. All the time, freak and outsider as he was, Lilly knew. He knew, and his soul was against the whole world." [289]

 

Still, if forced to choose, Aaron decides he'd choose Lilly over the entire world; if he has to submit and give himself to anyone, then "he would rather give himself to the little, individual man" [290] than to the quicksands of woman or the stinking bog of society. 

 

Personally, I'm not so sure. For whilst I agree with Lilly that we should finish for ever with words like God, and Love, and Humanity and "'have a shot at a new mode'" [291], I don't think I'd fancy placing my life in his hands. Nor do I share his to thine own self be true credo, which is ultimately just another form of idealism. 

 

As for his insistence on the "'great dark power-urge'" [297], I'd take that a little more seriously if in comparing this to Nietzsche's concept of will to power he didn't misunderstand the latter so completely (equating it, for example, with consciousness). Lazy and erroneous thinking like this causes me to doubt much else that Lilly says. 

 

And, finally, I don't want to submit to the positive power-soul within some hero, thank you very much: I don't have any heroes, they're all useless, as Johnny Rotten once memorably said [j].   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 26. All future page references to this novel will be given directly in the text. 

 

[b] I'm thinking here of the scene in Chapter VIII, when Jim Bricknell gives Lilly a punch in the wind. To be fair, although it's arguable that Lilly provoked the assault - as Tanny believes - there's really no justification for Bricknell giving him "two or three hard blows with his fists, upon the front of the body" [82]. But there you go; those who claim to act in the name of Love - and so desperately want to be loved - are often the most vicious and violent people on earth.  

 

[c] Perhaps the Lilly's were only renting the house in Hampstead - or that it belonged to a friend who had kindly allowed them to live there rent free. Later, Lilly tells Aaron that he only has "'thirty-five pounds in all the world'" [103] and so is far from being a millionaire. (£35 in 1922 would be equivalent to around £1700 today). 

 

[d] And, indeed, Lilly does later praise the Japanese for their ability to be quiet and aloof and indifferent to love: '"They keep themselves taut in their own selves - there, at the bottom of the spine - the devil's own power they've got there.'" [81] Although, shortly after this he dismisses "'folk who teem by the billion, like the Chinese and Japs and orientals altogether'" [97], a quality which makes them vermin in his eyes.

      Readers interested in knowing more about Lawrence's fascination with Japanese male bodies, are advised to see my post from June 2019 on the subject: click here. 

 

[e] Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, (Continuum, 2003), p. 23. 

      Like many of his ideas and phrases, Deleuze is borrowing this from a writer of fiction; in this case, Franz Kafka. See: 'The Sword', in Diaries 1914-1923, ed. Max Brod, trans. Martin Greenberg with Hannah Arendt (Schocken Books, 1949), pp. 109-10. 

 

[f] Readers who are interested in this topic might like to see my post from April last year on encouraging a straight back: click here. Alternatively, see Lawrence writing in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922).  

[g] See the Grange Farm letter that Mellors writes to Connie at the end of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) for an explanation of this phrase. And see the post from December 2021 on the Lawrentian notion of chastity: click here.

[h] The Odd Couple is a 1968 comedy directed by Gene Saks and written by Neil Simon (based on his 1965 play of the same title), starring Jack Lemmon (as fastidious Felix Ungar) and Walter Matthau (as easy-going Oscar Madison), two divorced men who decide to live together, despite being extremely different characters.   

 

[i] See Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law (1909), 1:3 

 

[j] Rotten said this in an interview with Janet Street Porter for The London Weekend Show, a punk rock special broadcast on London Weekend Television on 28 November 1976 (i.e., three days before the notorious Bill Grundy incident). Click here to watch in full on YouTube. The remark quoted is at 8:13 - 8:16.       

 

 

Sweet Sixteen (In Memory of Sid Vicious and My Own Punk Youth)

John Beverley, aged 16, in his pre-punk days 

prior to becoming Sid Vicious, Sex Pistol.

Me, aged 16, in my post-punk days, but still sporting 

a Sid Vicious badge on the left lapel of my jacket.

 

 

I recently came across a rather touching photo of a young John Beverley on his way to a David Bowie concert at Earl's Court, in 1973 ... 

 

This was the infamous opening show of Bowie's Aladdin Sane UK tour on May 12th, two days after Beverley turned sixteen. Whether the latter took part in - or, indeed, incited - the violence that ensued amongst the 18,000 strong audience, I don't know. But it's possible this is where he first developed a taste for rock 'n' roll mayhem. 

 

Around this same time, Beverley was kicked out of his home by his heroin-addicted mother, so quit school and began squatting along with his friend John Lydon, the soon-to-be Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten, who gave him the punk-sounding nickname of Sid Vicious by which he is best remembered today.

 

The two friends - like many other youngsters at the time interested in music and fashion - started to cruise up and down the Kings Road and eventually found themselves hanging out at the small and unusual boutique owned and managed by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, called SEX. 

 

When, in late-summer 1975, Rotten joined the Sex Pistols, Sid became their No. 1 fan and acted as an agent provocateur ensuring that every gig ended in an unpredictable bloody mess. He can be seen in photos taken at the Nashville Rooms in April 1976 on the night that the band physically attacked their audience.

 

Vicious is also credited with inventing the pogo, an aggressive form of anti-dance. In February '77, he replaced bass guitarist Glen Matlock in the Sex Pistols, even though he had no experience of playing the instrument. He would later (rather cruelly) be stylised by McLaren in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle as 'The Gimmick'. 

 

Tragically, post-Pistols, things did not turn out well for Sid - or his American girlfriend, Nancy Spungen; he died, from a drug overdose, on 2 February, 1979, aged 21, whilst on bail and awaiting trial for the murder of the latter, who died from a single stab wound to her abdomen, aged 20, on October 12th of the previous year.  

 

II.  

 

I vividly recall the time when Sid died. For one thing, it was less than a fortnight away from my own sixteenth birthday, on February 13th ...

 

I remember, for example, going out on a cold, foggy night and stealing that day's headline poster for the Evening Standard outside my local newsagent's which read: Sid Vicious Dead (I still have it today somewhere). 

I remember also the next morning, at school, being met with snide remarks from those who knew I was a fan of the Sex Pistols: Your hero's dead - that kind of thing, nothing very imaginative. 

 

Actually, Sid was never really my hero: I was more devoted to Rotten, as the Public Image Ltd. t-shirt worn in the above photo taken in 1979 indicates. However, I do retain a certain affection for him which, sadly, is no longer the case when it comes to the latter, who recently turned sixty-six, but died many, many years ago ...