Auðumbla: The Primeval Cow of Norse Mythology

Nicolai Abildgaard: Ymer dier koen Ødhumbla (c. 1777)

National Gallery of Denmark [Statens Museum for Kunst]

 

Readers might be interested to know that it's not just bear cubs and sinful human beings that require licking into shape [1]. 

 

According to Norse mythology, even the forefather of the gods was given form by the tongue of a primeval cow, Auðumbla, who, over a three day period, licked away at a salty-tasting block of ice until the figure of Búri came forth; fair of feature and mighty of build [2]. 

As if that weren't enough, Auðumbla also suckled the primordial frost giant Ymir with her milk, which flowed like four rivers from her udders (the first part of her name is thought to attest to the richness of this milk). 

 

Auðumbla is thus the mother of all; licking the Æsir into being and nourishing the jötnar. In her cowy mystery, antagonists are united and all contradictions contained. 

 

In the beginning, we might say, wasn't the Word, but a Moo ...

 

Notes

 

[1] See my recent post on being licked into shape by bears, cats, and virtuous women - click here. 

[2] The existence of Auðumbla is attested in the 13th century text composed by Icelander Snorri Sturluson known as the Prose Edda. Modern scholars have shown how her story probably derives from an earlier body of Germanic mythology and can ultimately be placed within a wider context of religious mythology concerning sacred cows, such as Kamadhenu, who is worshipped by Hindus. Readers interested in this topic might like to see a post published back in December 2017: click here.

 

On Being Licked into Shape by Bears, Cats, and Virtuous Women

 

'Bears couple in the beginning of winter, and not after the fashion of other quadrupeds; for both animals lie down and embrace each other. The female then retires by herself to a separate den, and there brings forth on the thirtieth day, mostly five young ones. When first born, they are shapeless masses of white flesh, a little larger than mice; their claws alone being prominent. 

The mother then licks them gradually into proper shape.' 

 

- Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, 8. 54

 

I.

 

Because cats have psychic ablities, they know when we are feeling out of sorts and will sometimes seek to comfort their human companions. Thus it is that my cat has recently taken to not just sitting or lying on me and touching my nose with hers, but incorporating me into her grooming cycle. 

 

Sensing that I'm physically and mentally at a low ebb after more than 2,300 days of caring for my mother without a break or any assistance, I feel she is literally attempting to lick me back into shape and not merely demonstrating her affection or attempting to strengthen the bond between us.

 

II. 

 

Interestingly, this idiomatic expression arose from the endearing belief held in medieval Europe that bear cubs were born as formless lumps of flesh and had to be licked by their mothers into their kyndely ursine shape. 

 

Whilst such an idea can be traced back to the writings of the great Roman author Pliny the Elder (who cheerfully discussed it as fact in his Naturalis historia), the first mention of this belief in English is in The Pylgremage of the Sowle, a 15th-century (part prose) translation of the 14th-century French verse composition Le Pèlerinage de l’Âme, by Guillaume de Deguileville.     

 

In this text, the narrator asks his guardian angel why a devout woman is licking a deformed pilgrim. The angel replies that, just like baby bears, human beings - thanks to original sin - are also born imperfect and so need to be licked into shape by the tongue of one who knows the Word of God; otherwise they remain, as the French say, ours mal léché. 

 

But I think I'd rather that - i.e., rather retain something of the Old Adam with all his flaws and failings - than be licked into moral perfection - and submission - by a virtuous woman.        

 

 

Nietzsche Popped My Cherry: Reflections on Heidegger's Hymen

Artwork by Wesley Johnson

 

The hymen is neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiling, 

neither the inside nor the outside. It is that which stands between; 

the intimate binding middle that brings together two bodies whilst holding them apart.

 

 

Someone from Wisconsin - America's dairyland - who, when not making cheese, likes to read European philosophy and listen to old school punk rock, suggests with reference to a recent post that perhaps what Heidegger means by the phrase Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht is that Nietzsche was the one who took his philosophical innocence or purity - his virginity, if you will - and that the phrase might productively be read in relation to Derrida's thinking on the hymen [1].      

 

That seems to me to be a clever and helpful insight. And I do like the idea of Heidegger being broken by Nietzsche in the sense of being fucked and fucked hard (or fucked up and fucked over). One can't help recalling Deleuze's interpretation of the history of philosophy in terms of penetrating (and being penetrated by) those authors who move us most (something that ultimately results in monstrous offspring) [2].

 

The key thing is that inspiration comes not from above, but from behind and below and that there is no immaculate conception; there is, rather, pain, violence, bloodshed ... Philosophy is not an ideal love of wisdom, but a perverse form of libidinal materialism. 

 

Heidegger isn't merely stimulated by Nietzsche's ideas, he's ravished and broken by the insistence with which Nietzsche imposes himself; Nietzsche infiltrates, inseminates, and impregnates. Which is why Zarathustra's instruction to his followers to lose him and find themselves, isn't so easy. Once the hymen has been torn - and one's virginity is lost in the very act that proves its existence - there's no going back; one is fatally wedded to Nietzsche for life.      

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Unfortunately, my knowledge of Derrida is very limited; as far as I understand it, hymen indicates both proximity and separation; i.e., the relation and the difference between two bodies. But what this tells us - or how we are supposed to think la logique de l'hymen in relation to the Nietzsche/Heidegger relationship - I'm not quite sure. 

      For Derrida's description of the hymen as a kind of mediating space, see 'The Double Session', in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 210-215 

 

[2] See Deleuze, 'Letter to a Harsh Critic', in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 6. 

D. H. Lawrence and the Ache for Being

DHL Ultimate Hunger Support 

(SA/2022)

 

 

D. H. Lawrence is particularly scornful of Walt Whitman's claim to be he who aches with amorous love for everyone and everything. Better, he says, to have an actual belly-ache, which is at least localised and easily relieved via a visit to the lavatory [1].   

 

So imagine my suprise when I recently came across a verse in which Lawrence writes of an ache for being, which he describes as the ultimate hunger [2]. Written several years prior to the essay on Whitman, one might have thought Lawrence would have remembered this line about ontological craving and perhaps cut poor old Whitman a bit of slack.

 

For whilst there is certainly something ridiculous in the thought of the good gray poet having blue balls (epididymal hypertension) as the result of his amorous idealism, so too is there something equally ridiculous in Lawrence's feeling starved of being and longing to eat his full, as it were, in the fourth dimension, going beyond the bounds of daily existence and surpassing himself [3].  

 

Better he hungered for a hot dog or hamburger, which is at least something specific and which you can get your teeth into ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman', Studies in Classic American Literature (Final Version, 1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 148-61. I discuss this essay in a post published on 27 March 2019: click here.

      See also Lawrence's essay 'The Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 177-190, where he writes: 

 

"If, in Plato's Dialogues, somebody had suddenly stood on his head and given smooth Plato a kick in the wind, and set the whole school in an uproar, then Plato would have been put into a much truer relation to the universe. Or if, in the midst of the Timaeus, Plato had only paused to say: 'And now, my dear Cleon - (or whoever it was) - I have a belly-ache, and must retreat to the privy: this too is part of the Eternal Idea of man,' then we would never need have fallen so low as Freud." [181]

     

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Manifesto', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 218.

 

[3] Aware that readers might have some trouble understanding what he means by this, Lawrence attempts to explain: 

      

"It is the major part of being, this having surpassed oneself,

this having touched the edge of the beyond, and perished, yet not perished."

 

After that, says Lawrence, we become unique and move in even greater freedom than the angels; "conditioned only by our own pure single being" and looking neither to the past nor future, but living in the nowness of the moment. See 'Manifesto', in The Poems, sections VI-VII, pp. 218-220.

 

 

For a related post to this one - on the verb to be - click here.   

Nietzsche Broke Me

maierfiles.myspreadshop.at

 

 

Heidegger's intriguing late confession, as reported by his student Hans-Georg Gadamer, that Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht is usually translated into English as Nietzsche broke me. 

 

It's a straightforward if not entirely satisfactory translation. And still the meaning of the sentence remains unclear; what does it signify to be broken by someone? More precisely, what does Heidegger mean when he says he's been broken by Nietzsche?

 

Does he mean, for example, that reading and thinking with and against Nietzsche in an intense and prolonged manner has left him feeling exhausted, even shattered? That's possible. Nietzsche, of course, even drove himself into a state of mental and physical collapse by pursuing his own philosophy and attemping to revalue all values. 

 

Or does he mean he's ultimately been unable to overcome or surpass Nietzsche; is this Heidegger submitting or quietly conceding defeat? Again, that's possible. As one commentator says: "Heidegger never loses Nietzsche, never 'locates' him, never shakes free of him, because Nietzsche never releases his grip on Heidegger." [1]

 

But, on the other hand, maybe Heidegger means that it was Nietzsche who enabled him to find his own voice and to shine with his own light (for the silence is also broken and so is the new day) - i.e., that it was his confrontation with Nietzsche in the mid-late 1930s which helped him make a shift in his thinking away from Being and Time (and National Socialism).

 

Interestingly, the German word kaputt - which we use in English (though spell with just the one 't')  - derives from the French term être capot, which figuratively means to lose, or to be ruined, but which, more literally, means to have a bonnet pulled over your eyes, leaving you confused and unable to see. 

 

So perhaps that's what Heidegger meant when he said that Nietzsche left him feeling kaputt - not broken, or beaten, exhausted or destroyed, but hoodwinked (blinded, deceived, misled ...).   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] David Farrell Krell, 'Heidegger's Reading of Nietzsche: Confrontation and Encounter', Journal for the British Society of Phenomenology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Oct 1983), pp. 271-282. Line quoted is on p. 271.       

      As Krell goes on to say: "That is fortunate. The tempestuous encounter with Nietzsche prevents Heidegger from becoming what so many interpreters have taken him to be, namely, a bloodless shade of Hegel." [271]

Thanks to Maria Thanassa and Sophie Stas for their help with this post. 

 

For a follow up post - Nietzsche Popped My Cherry - click here.

Reflections on the Verb to Be

To stamp Becoming with the character of Being - 

that is the supreme will to power ... Nietzsche

 

 

I've seen it said that fascism begins with the verb to be. And, in fact, I may even have used the phrase myself in order to conclude a past post with a polemical punch line [1]. Whether it's true or not is, of course, debatable.  

 

However, it's certainly the case that false (and often pernicious) beliefs derive from mistaken values that are rooted in language rather than any underlying reality; something that Nietzsche demonstrates in his writings on metaphor and grammar (the latter defined as the presence of God within language) [2].   

 

Thus it is that I'm extremely wary of anyone who in wishing to declare their existence or express their identity asserts: I am (X,Y, or Z) in an ontologically sincere manner (i.e., unaware of the game they're playing). 

 

And I really loathe that Broadway musical number composed by Jerry Herman and famously recorded by Gloria Gaynor - I Am What I Am [3] - and which has since become a global gay anthem, regrettably reinforcing (the paradox and irony of) queer essentialism and the even more regrettable consequences that follow from the belief that sexual identities are innate and come with certain immutable characteristics or necessary attributes.

 

I can't help thinking that such idealism gives rise to all kinds of reductive, reified, discriminatory, and extremist ideologies - which returns us to where we began: fascism begins with the verb to be. Which is unfortunate, particularly if D. H. Lawrence is right and Hamlet's question is still the one that preoccupies us and the ache for being remains the ultimate hunger [4].  

 

Still, as every good ascetic will tell you, there's no need to heed every ache and pain and surrender to every yearning; I seem to recall that Aleister Crowley once adopted the admirable practice of cutting his arm with a razor every time he said 'I' and took false pride in this word [5]. 

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] Actually, it was the recently published post of 1 August 2022 - 'Dead Dreams Fly Flags' - click here. 

 

[2] See Twilight of the Idols, where Nietzsche writes: "I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar." Walter Kaufmann's translation of this text can be found in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Penguin, 1982), p. 483. 

 

[3] 'I Am What I Am' was a song featured in Jerry Herman's Broadway musical La Cage aux Folles (1983). It was recorded by disco queen Gloria Gaynor and released as single in the same year, quickly becoming one of her biggest hits. The song also appears on the 1984 album I Am Gloria Gaynor (Silver Blue Records). Click here to watch Ms Gaynor perform a live version of the song at an awards ceremony in Germany in December 1984.

 

[4] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Manifesto', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 218. 

[5] In 1920, Crowley and followers moved to Sicily and founded a community that would operate on the principles set out in The Book of the Law. The Abbey of Thelema, as it was known, was basically a restored farmhouse, not far from the beach and next to the ruins of an ancient Roman temple. Here, daily rituals were performed and all social conventions abandoned. Any one who used the word 'I' was obliged, like the Great Beast himself, to self-administer a cut on their forearm with a razor blade. It's possible that this practice was inspired by Crowley's reading of Nietzsche and that his hope was that Thelemites might resurrect the greater intelligence of the body, which does not speak its selfhood, but, rather, physically enacts or performs it. 

      See 'Of the Despisers of the Body', in Part One of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  

Dead Dreams Fly Flags

 

Daniel Quasar's Progress Pride Flag juxtaposed to form a swastika 

and Jamie Reid's cover for the Bow Wow Wow single W.O.R.K.

(N.O. Nah, No No My Daddy Don't)

 

 

I have to admit, I'm rather ambivalent about posh English actor turned political activist and free speech campaigner Laurence Fox. For whilst I don't particularly wish to decolonise and diversify, pull down statues or take the knee, neither do I worry about reclaiming British history and culture, or care if certain idiots wish to declare their pronouns or virtue signal on social media.

 

Having said that, the provocative image he recently tweeted of a swastika made from four LGBTQ+ Progress Pride flags certainly captured my attention, reminding me as it did of Jamie Reid's final piece of work produced in collaboration with Malcolm McLaren; namely, the vividly coloured sleeve for Bow Wow Wow's 1981 single 'W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah, No No My Daddy Don't)'. 

 

As can be seen in the image above, Reid used lyrics from the song to form a swastika, a symbol he and McLaren often co-opted not just for shock value, but to also critique the zen fascism peddled by the record companies. It's a fantastic sleeve which stands alongside any of those produced during the Sex Pistols period. 

 

Obviously the image of a swastika made from Pride flags is going to be highly offensive to some (and misinterpreted by many). Flags of all description are magical objects and their denigration or misuse often causes outrage and sometimes leads to violence - although, as a vexiphobe, I find displays of love and loyalty to a coloured rag depressing. 

 

I've said it before and I'll doubtless say it again on this blog: the obsession with identity and identity politics is the problem today and just as I hate those who wrap themselves in a flag, so too do I despise those who take pride in new forms of essentialism. For fascism begins with the verb to be ... 

 

 

Note: for a related post to this one - on why I'm suspicious of Pride - click here. 

 

          

Insouciance Über Insecticide (Another Moth Post)

 

'I've always preferred moths to butterflies. They aren’t flashy or cocky; they mind their own business 

and just try to blend in with their surroundings and live their lives. 

They don't want to be seen, and that's something I can relate to.' 

- Kayla Krantz, The OCD Games (2020)

 

 

I. 

 

And so ends National Moth Week; an annual (and global) event designed to celebrate 'the beauty, life cycles, and habitats of moths' and to collect much needed data about these fascinating (mostly nocturnal) creatures, which are among the most diverse and successful of all organisms, ranging in size from as tiny as the head of a pin to as large as an adult human hand.

 

I have to admit that I didn't officially register to participate in the event. However, I did take some photos of the moths in my backgarden, including the one above (don't ask me what species it is, as I've no idea, but it was about an inch big and reminded me of the moths I used to regularly encounter as a child, but which now, sadly, are hardly ever to be seen). 

 

 

II. 

 

Readers familiar with this blog will know that I've written before in praise of moths and why they appeal to me more than butterflies, which, in evolutionary terms, they long predate (some moth fossils have been found that are thought to be 190 million years old); they just seem to me so much more punk rock in comparison to the latter. 

Readers might also recall that I recently published a post on the necessity of killing carpet moths, in which I adopted a Lawrentian argument to justify why it was the right thing to do to reach for the insecticide in order to safeguard one's clothes and home furnishings from the hungry mouths of moth larvae. 

 

Some readers will be pleased to know, however, that, in the end - even though I bought a spray - I didn't have the hardness of soul needed to use it. Ultimately, it transpires that moths mean more to me than even a relatively expensive pure new wool carpet: I simply don't care if they eat holes in it.

 

Insouciance über insecticide!

 

 

Welcome to Essex (Notes on the Dagenham Idol)

Michael Landy: Welcome to Essex (2021)

Ink on paper

 

 

I. 

 

By referring to my stay in Essex as exile, I may, perhaps, have given the impression that this ancient county - once home to Anglo-Saxon kings and fields of bright yellow cowslip - is the kind of place that one is only ever banished to involuntarily.

 

But that's obviously not true and it would be grossly unfair to portray Essex in the same negative and stereotypical manner that it is often portrayed in popular culture. It may not be the garden of England, but it's far more than merely the dumping ground of London and I'd still rather spend the day in Southend than St. Ives.

 

One artist who has done more than most to explore and celebrate the history and culture of Essex - and to challenge the pernicious myths and snobbery that this county seems to inspire - is Michael Landy ...  

 

 

II.  

 

Born and raised in Essex, Landy rose to prominence as one of the Young British Artists in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But it was his performance piece Break Down (2001) which really brought him to the attention of a public more easily impressed by the showmanship of Damien Hirst and his pickled shark, or Tracy Emin's unmade bed.

 

In 2021, a new exhibition of work - Michael Landy's Welcome to Essex [1] - was born of his love for the county and featuring (amongst other things) his reimagining of the Dagenham Idol; a naked figure made of pine wood, unearthed in Dagenham in 1922, but thought to date to the Late Neolithic period or early Bronze Age [2].

 

Landy's idol is cast in bronze, but finished with gold leaf in order to give it a more ostentatious look, thereby challenging (or perhaps simply reinforcing and perpetuating) the stereotype which thinks brash and blingy is the only aesthetic appreciated by the good people of Essex, when they also like cheap and cheerful.     

 

 

Michael Landy: Essex Idol (2021)

bronze, with 24ct gold 

thomasdanegallery.com

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Michael Landy's Welcome to Essex was a free exhibition at the Firstsight (an art space and community hub in Colchester), which ran from 26 June until 5 September, 2021. Click here for further details. A short documentary film about the work and Landy's perspective on Essex can be found on YouTube: click here. See also the interview with Landy and another Essex-based artist, Elsa James, on artfund.org: click here.   

 

[2] The Dagenham Idol was found in marshland close to the north bank of the River Thames, during excavation for new sewer pipes. Eighteen inches in height, the armless figure of indeterminate sex, was buried in a layer of peat ten feet below ground level, next to the skeleton of a deer. Carbon dated to around 2250 BC, it is one of the earliest representations of the human form found anywhere in Europe.       

      Anyone interested in seeing (and paying homage) to the Idol, should visit Valance House Museum, in Dagenham, where it has been on indefinite loan (from Colchester Castle Museum) since 2010. Or, if more convenient, there's a copy of the work residing in the Museum of London. 

 

Last Clown Standing

Last Clown Standing (SA/2022)

 

 

There's a certain irony in the fact that the only soft toy to have survived from my childhood is the one I never really cared for and used to treat with astonishing violence: an 18" clown figure with a rubber painted face and a harlequin style outfit. 

 

It wasn't that I was scared of clowns, although coulrophobia is, apparently, a fairly common fear and many people - particularly young children - find clowns disturbing.*     

 

In fact, I was enchanted by the sad little clown (or pierrot), who turned the roller displaying captions and credits at the opening and closing of Camberwick Green and was a big fan of the Joker as played by Cesar Romero in Batman. 

 

But, for some reason, I was never very fond of my clown companion, although I now have a new-found respect for his endurance, outliving a much-loved Teddy Bear and even a hard-bodied Action Man.   

I suppose it's a case of he who laughs loudest lasts the longest.

 

 

* Note: if this phobia is mostly related to their bizarre - sometimes grotesque - appearance, the unpredictable behaviour of clowns can also be unsettling; no one likes to be invited to smell a flower only to have water squirted in their face.