Reflections on Andy Warhol's Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980)

Andy Warhol: Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980) 

Top row: Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein and Louis Brandeis

Bottom row: George Gershwin, the Marx Bros, Golda Meir, Sarah Bernhardt and Sigmund Freud

 

 

Warhol, one of my favourite 20th-century artists, was not Jewish and yet, for some reason, I often think of him as Jewish - or Jew-ish, to use a complex and at times controversial term [1].

 

I suppose it's partly because as the child of East European migrants, he would likely have been subject to the same kind of othering within American society during the 1930s, where, as one commentator notes, "cultural and social interactions were built around ethnic identities and tensions" [2]. 

 

This same commentator also claims that despite being Capatho-Rusyn and an orthodox Catholic, Warhol's "closest childhood friends were Jewish, and you can imagine him sharing their sense of being permanent outsiders within the American mix" [3].

 

And indeed, throughout his life and career, Warhol continued to form important relationships with Jews and was clearly sympathetic to anyone who is marked out as queer, different, or alien; "Warhol knew and cared more about alterity, and the difficult quest for cultural inclusion, than most other artists you could name" [4].   

 

So, it should be no surprise that in 1980 Warhol produced a series of ten silk-screened canvases (each 40" x 40") which celebrated some of the most important Jewish figures of the twentieth century.

 

What is surprising, perhaps, is the fact that this work was dismissed or condemned by the critics at the time [5] and remains still, in my view, undervalued - although there has, admittedly, been something of a critical reappraisal in recent years and Jewish art lovers continue to view the work with enthusiasm and pride. 

 

In sum: whilst it would be wrong to claim Warhol was an ardent philosemite - and it should be noted that the idea for the above work was not his, nor did he select the ten figures chosen (or even know who Martin Buber was) [6] - Warhol was certainly not guilty of Jewsploitation, nor jokey antisemitism (hang your head in shame for this last remark, Ken Johnson) [7].

 

I like the series: although if I were asked to compile a list of ten dead Jewish figures that I would like to see portraits of, it would certainly have to include Serge Gainsbourg, Malcolm McLaren and Jacques Derrida ...    

 

Notes

 

[1] See Aviya Kushner, 'What does it mean to be "Jew-ish"? How the term went from warm inside joke to national flashpoint', Forward, (28 December, 2022): click here.

 

[2-4] Blake Gopnik, 'Andy Warhol's Jewish Question', Artnet, (22 November, 2016): click here. 

 

[5] Writing in the New York Times, Hilton Kramer accused Warhol of exploiting his Jewish subjects "without showing the slightest grasp of their significance". The critical consensus was that the work was produced in the cynical knowledge it would fetch a high price from a wealthy Jewish collector.    

 

[6] The series was suggested to him by art dealer Ronald Feldman and the subjects of the portraits were subsequently chosen by Feldman after consultation with Susan Morgenstein, director of the art gallery of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington, where the work was first exhibited in March 1980. 

      The series was later exhibited at the Jewish Museum of New York (September 1980 to January 1981) and was first displayed in the UK at the National Portrait Gallery, London, between January and June 2006, where they were described thus by curator Paul Moorhouse in the booklet that accompanied the NPG exhibition:

 

"Magisterial in conception, they advance a new subtlety and sophistication in technical terms. One of their most compelling aspects is the way surface and image are held in a satisfying and fascinating dialogue, generating new depths of meaning and implication. [...] 

      The disjunction between sitter and surface is a visual device that unites the portraits, but the series has a conceptual unity also. Warhol's insistence that the subjects be deceased invests the series with an inescapable character of mortality. The faces of the dead appear as if behind a veneer of modernity. The tension sustained between photograph and abstraction focuses the issue of their celebrity. Probing the faultlines between the person and their manufactured, surface image, Warhol presents these individuals' fame as a complex metamorphosis. The real has been transformed into a glorious, poignant, other-worldly abstraction."

 

[7] See Ken Johnson's piece in The New York Times entitled 'Funny, You Don't Look Like a Subject for Warhol' (28 March 2008), in which he wrote: "What is remarkable about the paintings now, however, is how uninteresting they are. What once made them controversial - the hint of a jokey, unconscious anti-Semitism - has evaporated, leaving little more than bland, posterlike representations."  

 

 

On the Art and Necessity of Coffin Sleeping

Sarah Bernhardt (1880) and Toyah Willcox (1979)

demonstrate the art of coffin sleeping

I.

 

An anonymous reader writes with reference to a recent post which can be read here:

 

 

'I know you sometimes like to present yourself as a "thanatologist", but, really, to celebrate someone such as Sarah Bernhardt - the world's original ham actress - due to the fact they sleep in a coffin is a little pathetic. 

      There's nothing in the least amusing about her morbid behaviour and hysterical exhibitionism and one suspects that Shaw was quite right to identify Bernhardt as ultimately nothing more than an attention-seeking egotist who never explored or revealed anything of the characters she played on stage and film, but simply turned them all into manifestations of her self.'   

 

I have to say, I suspect that's a little unfair on Miss Bernhardt - and it also gives a false impression of the post I wrote in her memory. For whilst I do mention the coffin sleeping - alongside her love for a pet lizard whilst a child - what I actually celebrate is her stoicism, courage, and endurance; for the fact that she dared to live dangerously and love fate, as famously advocated by Nietzsche.     

 

And, whilst we're on the subject, let me further add that I admire Bernhardt for her defiant Jewishness in the face of violent antisemitism. For although she was raised as a Catholic (receiving her first communion in 1856), Bernhardt never denied her Jewish heritage; even when crowds threw stones at her whilst on tour in Russia, or when the right-wing French press attacked her for her passionate defence of Alfred Dreyfus.  

But, to return, briefly, to the subject of coffin sleeping ... 

 

When, in 1880, she allowed herself to be photographed stretched out in a coffin with her eyes closed and covered in flowers - a coffin in which she would also relax when learning her lines (perhaps fearful that she might one day die on stage) - Bernhardt undoubtedly knew this would add to her reputation [1]. 

 

And one suspects that - almost a hundred years later - the English singer and actress Toyah Willcox was also very aware that she'd be able to grab some headlines by claiming to sleep in a coffin, although, in her case, one suspects she genuinely did so in order to keep warm at a time when her restricted financial means meant she had no bed to sleep in at the South London warehouse she was squatting [2]. 

 

For sleeping in a coffin is certainly preferable to sleeping on a cold concrete floor and poverty, rather than a desire for publicity, is more often the reason why people resort to this practice. Indeed, one is reminded of the fact that the first homeless shelters which opened in 19th-century London were known as coffin houses ... 

 

 

II. 

 

Operated by the Salvation Army, these institutions were established primarily to provide food and assistance. But, uniquely, the poor and destitute would also be allowed to sleep in a coffin-shaped wooden box and generously provided with a tarpaulin with which to cover themselves. 

 

Although such places sound grim and, indeed, were grim - they proved to be very popular and remained in operation into the early 20th-century. Supporters of coffin houses argued that not only were the homeless able to find rest, but they were also afforded the chance to find God - provided they had the fourpence admission fee ...    

 

 

 Men preparing for another night's kip 

in a coffin house (c. 1900)

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Having said that, however, Bernhardt did seem to have a taste for the morbid and macabre, even once visiting the Paris morgue in order to learn how better to feign the signs of death.  

 

[2] See the interview with Titbits (Nov 1981) in which Miss Willcox discusses why she slept in a coffin: click here.  

 

 

In Memory of Sarah Bernhardt (1844 - 1923)

Sarah Bernhardt (aged 21) 

Photo by Félix Nadar (1865)

 

"Mon vrai pays est le plein air et ma vocation est l'art sans contraintes."

 

 

I. 

 

It's strange, but there are some figures who, in theory, should hold a special interest to me, but about whom I know embarrassingly very little. And the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who died on this day 100 years ago, is one such figure ...

Famously described by Oscar Wilde as divine, a 63-year-old Bernhardt even managed to capture the heart of a young D. H. Lawrence in 1908, when appearing on the English stage as part of a twenty day, sixteen city tour of Great Britain and Ireland:

 

"Sarah Bernhardt was wonderful and terrible. [...] Oh, to see her, and to hear her, a wild creature, a gazelle with a beautiful panther's fascination and fury, laughing in musical French, screaming with true panther cry, sobbing and sighing like a deer sobs, wounded to death, and all the time with the sheen of silk, the glitter of diamonds, the moving of men's handsomely groomed figures about her! She is not pretty - her voice is not sweet - but there she is, the incarnation of wild emotion which we share with all live things, but which is gathered in us in all complexity and inscrutable fury. She represents the primeval passions of woman, and she is fascinating to an extraordinary degree. I could love such a woman myself, love her to madness; all for the pure, wild passion of it." [1]

 

 

II. 

 

Clearly, then, Bernhardt - the illegitimate daughter of a Jewish courtesan who had numerous lovers amongst the wealthy Parisian elite - was one of those wonder-women who seem to seduce, bewitch, or scandalise everyone they encounter. 

 

And, the more I read about her - or the more I look at beautiful old photos of Miss Bernhardt, particularly those taken when she was still very young and with a mass of curly black hair  - the more I start to understand and appreciate why that would be. 

 

I love the fact, for example, that as a child being educated at a convent, she outraged the nuns by performing a Christian burial, with full procession and ceremony, for her pet lizard. And I love the fact also that a century before the world had ever heard of Toyah Willcox, Miss Bernhardt chose to sometimes sleep in a satin-lined coffin.   

 

Arguably, Bernhardt even has something free spirited about her that Nietzsche (who was born in the same month and year) would admire, as this quotation demonstrates:

 

'I passionately love this life of adventures. I detest knowing in advance what they are going to serve at dinner, and I detest a hundred thousand times more knowing what will happen to me, for better or worse. I adore the unexpected.' [2]

 

That's pretty much the philosophy of amor fati and living dangerously in a nutshell, is it not? 

 

She also had that most Nietzschean of virtues: endurance ... For here was an actress who didn't just break a leg, she actually lost a leg due to gangrene in 1915 (when aged 70), but still returned to the stage at the first opportunity and performed for French soldiers fighting on the Western Front.

 

Right until the very end, she also continued to entertain guests at home, - including Colette, who described being served coffee by a living legend:

 

"'The delicate and withered hand offering the brimming cup, the flowery azure of the eyes, so young still in their network of fine lines, the questioning and mocking coquetry of the tilted head, and that indescribable desire to charm, to charm still, to charm right up to the gates of death itself.'" [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Blanche Jennings (25 June 1908), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 59. 

      It is interesting to note that Lawrence was forty-years younger than Sarah Bernhardt when he wrote this letter. Later, he issues a warning to his new friend Miss Jennings: 

      "Take care about going to see Bernhardt. Unless you are very sound, do not go. When I think of her now I can still feel the weight hanging in my chest as it hung there for days after I saw her. Her winsome, sweet, playful ways; her sad, plaintive little murmurs; her terrible panther cries; and then the awful, inarticulate sounds, the little sobs that fairly sear one, and the despair of death; it is too much in one evening." 

      It is also interesting to note that a 28-year-old Sigmund Freud was also smitten by Sarah. After seeing her perform the title role in Victorien Sardou's melodrama Théodora (1884), he sent his long-suffering fiancée, Martha Bernays, a scene-by-scene account of Bernhardt's performance, concluding that she was a remarkable creature: "Her caressing and pleading, the postures she assumes, the way she wraps herself around a man, the way she acts with every limb, every joint - it's incredible!" 

      See the Letters of Sigmund Freud 1873-1939, ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans. Tania and James Stern, (Hogarth Press, 1961), pp. 178-82.  

      But of course, Bernhardt also had her critics, including Shaw, Turgenev, and Chekov - but I'm writing here to praise Sarah, not to bury her. 

[2] Quoted in Hélène Tierchant, Sarah Bernhardt: Madame 'quand même', (Éditions Télémaque, 2009), pp. 210-211. Unknown translator.

 

[3] Quoted by Cornelia Otis Skinner in Madame Sarah, (Houghton, 1967), p. 330. 

 

 

Special (from beyond the grave) bonus - Sarah Bernhardt reciting a poem by Victor Hugo (Paris, 1903): click here. 

 

For a follow up post to this one on the art and necessity of coffin sleeping, click here.

 

Merci à Sophie pour la suggestion de cet article.

How the Metaverse Reduces Us All in Stature

As Paul Murray's waist chopped avatar soon discovers:

 "The greatest poverty is not to live

In a physical world ..." [1]

 

 

I. 

 

My friend Catherine, who has an academic interest in the topic of torture and capital punishment, will doubtless know that one of the favoured methods of execution in ancient China involved the condemned being cut in two at the waist by someone wielding a very large blade.

 

Thankfully, in the modern world this practice has been abolished - unless performed by a surgeon as a life-saving last resort [2].  

However, if you ever decide to enter the so-called metaverse - an immersive virtual environment - you may be shocked to find yourself (or, more precisely, your avatar) without legs, genitals, buttocks, or anything else below the waist, having effectively been given a digital hemicorporectomy the moment you don your VR headset. 

 

That's certainly the case in Mark Zuckerberg's derisible first attempt to establish a techno-utopia, despite his investing huge - HUGE - sums of money [3] in a project which the Facebook founder sincerely believes to be the future for human interaction and digital socialization.    

 

Known as Horizon Worlds, it's been described as a desperately sad and lonely space; like an abandoned shopping mall or theme park. Certainly not the kind of 3D cartoon world anyone would willingly choose to hang out in for very long - even if they are eventually promised legs! [4] 

 

 

II. 

 

"It's hard", writes Paul Murray, "not to read the fact that half of you disappears when you enter Horizon Worlds as symbolic somehow ..." [5]. 

 

That's true: and what it's symbolic of is (i) once you enter the metaverse there's no running away and (ii) Zuckerberg wants us to exchange the sheer intensity of lived experience - the full-life of the body, it's forces, flows and desires - for the mere simulation of such. 

 

D. H. Lawrence was alert to the danger of this almost a century ago: 

 

"The body feels real hunger, real thirst, real joy in the sun or the snow, real pleasure in the smell of roses or the look of a lilac bush; real anger, real sorrow, real love, real tenderness, real warmth, real passion, real hate, real grief. All the emotions belong to the body, and are only recognised by the mind." [6] 

 

Today, to paraphrase Lawrence, many people live and die without having had any real thoughts, feelings or experiences, even if they've spent many long hours chatting on social media or hanging out in a virtual reality. 

 

For they've effectively been cut off at the waist and become creatures for whom everything is in the head and "whose active emotional self has no real existence, but is all reflected downward from the mind" [7].   

 

Mark Zuckerberg likes to present himself as a liberator, but really he's just another executioner ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Wallace Stevens, 'Esthétique du Mal', in Collected Poems and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson, (The Library of America, 1997), p. 286.  

 

[2] Hemicorporectomy - or trans-lumbar amputation as it is also known - is an extremely rare (and extremely radical) procedure, used, for example, to stop the spread of aggressive cancers in the spine and pelvic region, or other uncontainable conditions. Apparently, the key to surving such surgery is having sufficient emotional and psychological maturity to cope - as well as the physical resources to undergo intensive rehab. So not for everyone then - and certainly not for me (even having eyestrain or a toothache makes me ponder if it wouldn't be better to be dead).      

 

[2] In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Farhad Manjoo reports that Zuckerberg has invested staggering sums in his metaverse project; tens of billions of dollars in just a couple of years. See 'My Sad, Lonely, Expensive Adventures in Zuckerberg's V. R.' (4 Nov 2022): click here.     

 

[3] Meta promises that its Horizon avatars will be getting legs sometime this year, so you'll not just have to float around with half your body missing. (Apparently, legs that move in concert with the user are very hard to get right in virtual reality systems, but the technical engineers are working on the problem.)

[4] Paul Murray, 'Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland', New York Magazine (13 Mar 2023): click here for the online version in Intelligencer.

 

[5-6] D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 311. 

 

On Natural Evil

What fresh hell is this that befalls us?

 

 

I. 

 

A reader writes:

"I enjoyed your recent short post on flowers and the question of evil [1], though I'm not sure I share your conclusions regarding the natural world, which, surely, is neither moral nor immoral and cannot therefore be branded either benevolent or malevolent, lacking as it does any purpose or intent." 

 

Now, it is of course correct to say that evil - when considered from a moral perspective - always results from the intentions or wilful negligence of an agent (be it a man, god, or demon). 

 

However, evil as understood within the concept of natural evil is a state of affairs that occurs without the need for agency; this might be a relatively minor thing such as toothache, or a cataclysmic cosmic event such as the asteroid strike that led to the extinction of most plant and animal life on Earth sixty-six million years ago.

Even if one prefers not use the term evil in relation to natural processes and events, nevertheless the phrase natural evil is well-established within theological and philosophical circles and many of those who suffer from the appalling consequences of such processes and events almost invariably describe them as evil (even if there is no one to blame) - just ask the dinosaurs.   

 

 

II.

 

I suppose if I have a penchant for the term evil, it's mostly due to some of the authors I privilege; Sade, Nietzsche, Bataille, Baudrillard, et al. 

 

And if natural evil particularly interests, it's because it reveals the absurd - as well as the tragic and material - nature of existence; i.e., the fact that life bleeds and is only a rare and unusual way of being dead. 

 

Natural evil, we might conclude, is really just another term for inhuman otherness - or, if you prefer, the postmodern sublime (i.e., that which indicates the limits of reason and representation) [2].

 

And I suppose it might be argued that one's love of those writers who stage an aesthetico-conceptual encounter with such in their books, is evidence of the seductive nature of that which induces fear and trembling (i.e., sheer terror) ...   

 

Notes

 

[1] The post referred to is 'All Flowers are Evil' (23 March 2023): click here.  

 

[2] Although this term is primarily associated with the work of Jean-François Lyotard, several other thinkers - including Julia Kristeva and Gilles Deleuze - also took up the philosophical question of the sublime in their work during the late-20th century. Essentially, this was a fundamental engagement with Kant and his idea of Darstellung (i.e., the process through which the imagination confronts rational thought with intuition). 

      Whilst I don't have time to go into detail here, as a reader of Baudrillard more than Lyotard, I tend to find Edmund Burke's understanding of the sublime more interesting than Kant's. For as one commentator notes:

      "Burke makes no [...] grandiose claims for the sublime. He does not stray so far from the alienating terror of the initial encounter with excessive natural violence or vastness. He concentrates on the more troubling physiological and psychological impact of sublimity [...] Put crudely, if for Kant the sublime is ultimately a moral experience, for Burke it remains fundamentally [...] a negotiation with brute power." 

      - See David McCallam, 'The terrorist Earth? Some thoughts on Sade and Baudrillard', in French Cultural Studies, Vol. 23, Isssue 3, (July, 2012), pp. 215-224. Lines quoted above are on p. 218. To read this essay online click here, or go to: DOI:10.1177/0957155812443202   

 

All Flowers are Evil (Even Lilies of the Valley)

Lily of the valley (Convallaria majalis)

Photo by Ivar Leidus on Wikimedia Commons

 

 

A reader writes:

 

"I was shocked to discover from a recent post on Torpedo the Ark that even innocent-looking daffodils are highly toxic, containing as they do the alkaloid poison lycorine [1]. Does this suggest, do you think, that Nature is not only inherently dangerous, but evil?"   

 

That's an interesting question; one that has exercised theologians for millennia. 

 

And I have to admit, I rather like the (Gnostic) idea of a material universe that is fundamentally imperfect; the creation of a malevolent demiurge, rather than a Supreme Being who is wholly Loving and Good. 

 

For it seems to me that it is solely in such a universe that colourful, perfumed and, yes, sometimes poisonous flowers blossom, only then to fade and pass away with transient loveliness. 

 

For whilst in an Ideal Heaven, flowers are colourless, odourless and everlasting [2], it is only in a world that knows death - or on the winding path to Hell - that scarlet poppies grow ... [3]      

     

 

Notes

 

[1] The post referred to is the one of 16 March 2023 entitled 'Continuous as the Stars That Shine': click here. 

      Without wishing to shock my anonymous correspondent still further, it may interest them to know that many flowering plants commonly found in UK gardens - not just daffodils - are in fact poisonous; this includes my mother's favourite, lily of the valley, which, whilst loved for its delicate scent, is extremely toxic due to a high concentration of cardiac glycosides. Even the ever-popular hydrangea contains small amounts of cyanide.   

 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 144. 

      Commenting on the Heaven dreamed of by those who long for the end of the actual world, Lawrence writes: "How beastly their New Jerusalem, where the flowers never fade, but stand in everlasting sameness."     

 

[3] See the earlier post 'Little Hell Flames: On D. H. Lawrence's Poppy Philosophy' (29 May 2021): click here.  And see also the even earlier post, 'Fleurs du Mal' (25 April 2015): click here. 

Arborcide in the U. K.

Jamie Reid: Anarchy in the U. K. flag design 

for the Sex Pistols first single on EMI (1976) 

Reimagined by Stephen Alexander (2023)

 

 

I.

 

An anonymous reader writes:

"I was disappointed to see you buying into lazy eco-propaganda in a recent post [1] concerning the multi-million redevelopment of Plymouth city centre. As a resident, I can assure you that this revamp is not only necessary to ensure the future of the city, but long overdue. 

      It's unfortunate that a number of trees have had to be removed. But, as you mention in the post, the council have pledged to replace these and consider a wider planting scheme in the future, thereby addressing the concerns of people like yourself who seem to think that protecting trees and the needs of wildlife matters more than growing the economy and providing people with the urban infrastructure that enables them to lead pleasant, prosperous and productive lives."              

 

 

Obviously, I don't want to disappoint anyone. Nor do I wish to buy into lazy eco-propaganda. However, as dendrophile, I think it more than unfortunate whenever a healthy mature tree is cut down. 

 

And, further, I don't believe a word that's spoken by any elected official of any political stripe, be they a humble town councillor or a prominent MP, so any promise to protect the natural environment or plant more trees is one that I view with scepticism to say the very least. 

 

And a report by Tom Heap on the Sky News website this morning nicely illustrates why I am justified in such cynicism, exposing as it does the shocking fact that over half-a-million newly planted trees have been left to die next to a new 21-mile stretch of road between Cambridge and the market town of Huntingdon ...

 

 

II. 

 

As part of a £1.5 billion upgrade of the A14, completed in 2020, National Highways boasted of planting 850,000 saplings to replace the mature trees they destroyed during construction of the new carriageway. 

 

But they have now been forced to admit that almost three-quarters of these saplings have since perished; for it turns out that young trees need care in the early stages of their life if they are to survive and grow, not just sticking in a hole in the ground and then left to look after themselves.        

 

National Highways admit in an internal review that this is an unusually high fatality rate and blame it on poor soil and climate change resulting in extreme heat. 

 

But, actually, this low survival rate is mostly due to the fact that developers - like politicians and city councillors - are only ever concerned with numbers and not with ensuring that the right species of tree - at the right age of development - is planted in the right kind of soil, etc.  

Anyway, National Highways is planning to replant this autumn; at an estimated cost (to the tax payer) of £2.9 million - and they promise to take better care of the trees this time over a five year period: we'll see ...

 

Finally, here's something else that my correspondent might like to consider (or dismiss as simply more eco-propaganda if they so wish):

 

"Across the country, planting rates are [...] running at less than half the 30,000 hectares per year that was pledged by the Conservatives at the last election. So fewer saplings than hoped with troubling survival rates. Bad news for our nature and climate aims." [2]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The post to which they refer is entitled 'Murder! Murder! Murder! Someone Should Be Angry' (17 March 2023): click here. 

 

[2] Tom Heap, 'Half a million trees have died next to one 21-mile stretch of road, National Highways admits', on the Sky News website (18 March 2023): click here. 

 

 

Murder! Murder! Murder! Someone Should Be Angry

Jamie Reid: Anarchy in the U. K. flag design 

for the Sex Pistols first single on EMI (1976)

Reimagined by Stephen Alexander (2023)

 

I.

 

I've never been to Plymouth, a city on the south coast of Devon, famed for its maritime history, its shipyards and ports, etc. 

 

And I certainly don't want to go there now that the council have - in the face of widespread opposition from local people - needlessly cut down more than 100 healthy, mature trees in the city centre; a disgraceful act of state-sanctioned eco-terrorism carried out with chainsaws and heavy machinery under the cover of darkness, that now leaves just 15 trees still standing.      

 

Apparently, this was done as part of a £12.7 million pound revamp - known as the Armada Way project - which would transform the city, enabling pedestrians and cyclists to get around more easily. Other councils around the UK are, apparently, also planning to chop down and uproot their trees - often justifying their actions on the grounds that new houses and roads must be given priority.   

 

Plymouth council have said they plan to plant 169 new (semi-mature) trees and will consider a wider tree planting programme in the future ...  

 

 

II.

 

Meanwhile, on a remote Scottish island - South Uist, in the Outer Hebrides - residents are voting on whether they should not merely cull, but actually exterminate their red deer population, in order to safeguard against Lyme disease, which can be spread to humans from infected ticks living on the deer. 

 

At least, that's the cover story: and by making it a human health issue, they hope to disguise their real issue with the deer; namely, that they are a nuisance - causing road accidents, destroying crops and gardens, frightening the children, etc. 

 

It's thought that more than half of the island population (c.1,750 people) will vote on this, with hundreds having already signed a petition in support of the move. 

 

Thankfully, there are some people opposing the idea - including the Scottish Game Keepers Association who are tasked with managing the deer and who point out that density of deer on the island is significantly below the Scottish government's recommended figure (only 3 animals per sq km rather than 10).

 

But it still shocks me that anyone in their right mind would support eradication of such a magnificent animal, which has been native to the island for thousands of years - although, having said that, my own sister has recently expressed her wish that all foxes and deer in Essex also be eradicated as pests.      

 

 

III.

In sum: from one end of the UK to the other, the natural environment and the astonishing wildlife it supports is constantly under threat. 

 

There may (technically) be more trees now than a century ago, but native woodlands are isolated, in poor ecological condition, and depressingly silent due to the decline in wildlife. In the last fifty years, half of all species have faced a significant fall in numbers and Britain has lost more of its biodiversity than almost anywhere else in western Europe.   

I really don't like to throw around terms like ecocide, but how else is one to refer to the long-term, widespread and wilful destruction of the natural world? I suppose, one day, people will wake up and realise to their horror and shame and fury what's been done ... 

 

And with one big shout, they'll all cry out: Who killed Bambi?

     

 

 Illustration by ATAK (Georg Barber)

fcatak.de 

 

 

For a follow up post to this one on arborcide in the UK, click here.   

 

 

Update to post (23-03-23): Richard Bignley, the Tory council leader who oversaw the felling of more than 100 trees in Plymouth, has quit following an outcry over the operation (and before facing a vote of no confidence). 

Continuous as the Stars That Shine ...

Osterglocken (SA/2023)

 

"When all at once I saw a crowd / A host, of golden daffodils ..." 

 

I. 

 

Often known by its Latin name - Narcissus [1] - the daffodil was as highly regarded in the ancient world as it is within the modern era: Greek philosopher and floraphile Theophrastus, for example, often mentioned them in his botanical writings; as did the Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Elder. 

 

However, it was left to the 18th-century Swedish botanist Linnaeus to formally identify them as a genus in his Species Plantarum (1753), at which time there were only six known species, whereas now there are over fifty (although the exact number remains disputed) [2].   

 

And it was left to the British Romantic poets to really establish the cultural and symbolic importance of the narcissus in the modern imagination. For with the exception of the rose and the lily, no flower blossoms more within the pages of English literature than the daffodil; Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats all wrote of the eternal joy that these flowers can bring.  

 

 

II. 

 

But surely everyone - not just William Wordsworth and the Welsh - loves to see daffodils flowering in the spring, don't they? 

 

At any rate, I love them: I love their bright golden colour and the manner in which a trumpet-shaped corona is surrounded by a six-pointed star formed by the tepals; and I love the fact they come up every year, regardless of external conditions, nodding in defiant affirmation of life.    

But my love of daffoldils is also a class thing; the common daffodil growing by the roadside and at the bottom of the garden has none of the ornamental superiority or cultivated pretension of the tulip (a bulb that is in my mind forever associated with the nouveaux riches in 17th-century Europe). 

 

 

III.

 

When I was a child - and neighbours still had front gardens, not driveways - I used to love stealing daffodils every Easter to give to my mother and I was touched that MLG should remember this and placed a single yellow flower in my mother's coffin prior to her funeral; she would have liked that [3]. 

 

And, of course, even without the personal context, such a gesture would have been entirely appropriate. For whilst daffodils often symbolise rebirth and resurrection, so too are they closely associated with death ...

 

The ancient Egyptians, for example, used to make decorative use of narcissi in their tombs, whilst the ancient Greeks considered these flowers sacred to both Persephone and Hades. Indeed, the former was said to be picking daffodils when she was abducted by the latter and taken to the Underworld.

 

The fact is, like many beautiful-looking things, daffodils are highly toxic, containing as they do the alkaloid poison lycorine - mostly in the bulb, but also in the stem and leaves - and if you ingest enough lycorine then death will follow a series of very unpleasant symptoms including acute abdominal pains, vomiting, diarrhea, trembling, convulsions and paralysis.  

 

So do make sure, dear reader, that you know your onions and never confuse these with daffodil bulbs ... 

    

 

Notes

 

[1] According to Greek myth, the beautiful-looking young man of this name - Νάρκισσος - rejected the romantic advances of others, preferring instead to gaze fixedly at his own reflection in a pool of water. After his death, it is said that a flower sprouted in the spot at which he spent his life sitting. 

      Interestingly, although the exact origin of the name is unknown, it is often linked etymologically to the Greek term from which we derive the English word narcotic (Narcissus was essentially intoxicated by his own beauty). 

      As for the word daffodil, this seems to be a corruption of asphodel, a flowering bulb to which the former is often compared.

 

[2] In 2006, the Royal Horticultural Society's International Daffodil Register and Classified List identified 87 species. But according to the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families produced in 2014, there are only 52 species (along with at least 60 hybrids). Whatever the correct figure might be, the fact is that many wild species have already become extinct and many others are increasingly under threat due to over-collection and the destruction of natural habitats.

 

[3] When my mother died last month, aged 96, she had been living with dementia for almost a decade and it might be noted in relation to our topic here that daffodils produce a number of alkaloids that have been used in traditional forms of healing and one of which - gelantamine - is exploited in the production of a modern medicinal drug used to treat cognitive decline in those with Alzheimer's.     

 

 

This post is for Maria.

 

 

Rupert Birkin and the Ichthyosaur

French illustrator Édouard Riou 

gives us his take on the ichthyosaur in 1863 [1]

 

I. 

 

Rupert Birkin famously declares that he would like to see a pristine world empty of people: "I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away." [2] 

 

And that's fair enough; many of us share his vision of a posthuman future and find it an attractive and liberating thought to imagine a world in which new species arise and the unseen hosts move about freely. 

 

And many of us are convinced that man is not exceptional or the measure of all things. Indeed, some of us are even tempted to promote a programme of voluntary human extinction - click here - or to adopt an object-oriented philosophy that challenges all forms of anthropocentrism - click here.      

 

However, I think Birkin is wrong to describe the poor old ichthyosaur as "one of the mistakes of creation" [3]. I mean, say what you like about mankind, but why take a pop at these large marine reptiles which thrived during the Mesozoic era and survived well into the Late Cretaceous period ...?

 

Modern humans have only been around for 200,000 years or so - and even if you can trace our ancestors belonging to the Homo genus back a couple of million years, that's nothing compared to the 160 million years that the ichthyosaurs clocked up.

 

And so I find it puzzling - as well as irritating - that Birkin insists on making a comparison between humanity and the ichthyosaurs: "The ichtyosauri were not proud: they crawled and floundered as we do." [4]  

 

But then, at heart, Birkin is more of a flora-dendrophile than a zoophile, believing that bluebells (more than butterflies) are the greatest example of pure creation and that there's nothing sexier than a young fir tree [5].      

 

 

II.

 

I suppose the question that might be asked is why does Birkin pick on the ichthyosaurs rather than the four-legged, land-dwelling dinosaurs? I don't really know the answer to this, but I suspect it might be due to the fact that throughout the mid-late nineteenth and early-twentieth century ichthyosaurs were very much in vogue ...

 

Although bones, teeth and fossilised remains of these beasts had been found prior to the early 19th-century, nobody really knew what they were looking at. Usually, remains were wrongly classified as belonging to fish, dolphins, or crocodiles, although in 1708, the Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, identified two ichthyosaur vertebrae as being human in origin. 

 

However, as more complete skeletons were unearthed, the suspicion grew that these were from a distinct species of animal, although many still argued they were merely the remains of giant lizards, or some transitional form, and uncertainty around classification continued. It wasn't until 1835 that the order Ichthyosauria was named by French zoologist Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville.    

 

The discovery of an extinct group of large marine reptiles generated huge publicity and captured both the scientific and popular imagination. People were fascinated by the strange anatomy of the creatures and astonished at the fact that they had lived so many millions of years before man. 

 

Some hoped that living specimens might yet be found; others, like the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell argued that since God's Earth was eternal, it was therefore inevitable that the ichthyosaurs would eventually return [6]. Meanwhile, crackpot fossil collector Thomas Hawkins believed that ichthyosaurs were the monstrous creations of the Devil and in 1840 he published a book denouncing the great sea-dragons. 

 

Fourteen year later, in 1854, when Crystal Palace was rebuilt in South London, the surrounding park was filled with life-sized, painted concrete statues of extinct creatures, including three ichthyosaurs, much loved by the public.

 

Finally, as the nineteenth century moved towards and into the twentieth, thousands of new finds - particularly in Germany - greatly improved the scientific understanding of these animals. In some cases, the quality of the finds was remarkable; not only were complete skeletons unearthed, but even preserved soft tissue.     

 

This, then, is the cultural background in which (and out of which) Birkin's thinking was formed. So not surprising, then, that he should refer to the ichthyosaurs - but still disappointing that he should dismiss them as evolutionary failures (or mistakes in creation, as he puts it) [7].     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Although it was known that ichthyosaurs lived in the open seas, they were often shown basking on the shore, or splashing about in the shallows; a convention followed by many nineteenth-century artists, which led to the belief that they had an amphibious lifestyle. Note how Birkin mistakenly says the ichthyosaurs 'crawled and floundered', whereas actually they happily swam about like modern marine mammals.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey amd John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 127.  

[3] Ibid., p. 128.

[4] Ibid. 

      Later in the novel, when reflecting upon the death of his friend Gerald, Birkin muses: "God can do without man. God could do without the ichthyosauri and the mastodon. These monsters failed creatively to develop, so God, the creative mystery, dispensed with them." [p. 478]

 

[5] For a discussion of Birkin's flora-dendrophilia, please click here.   

[6] The possibility of this was ridiculed in an 1830 caricature by Henry De la Beche. See the related post entitled 'On Posthumous Revenge and the Resilient Cretaceous' (6 Mar 2023), where this amusing illustration by can be found: click here.  

[7] Having said that, it is true that after 160 million years or so, the ichthyosaurs did become extinct. However, this was probably due to external events (i.e., environmental upheaval and sudden climatic changes), rather than a long decline, loss of pride, or lack of resilience on their part.