An Assemblage of Animals, Angels, and Wise Men: Reflections on Tomoaki Suzuki's Nativity Scene

Three figures from Tomoaki Suzuki's Crib (2006)

Photos by Stephen Alexander and Maria Thanassa (2023)

   

 

Everyone loves a good nativity scene - and what's not to love in this strange assemblage of animals, angels, and wisemen at the centre of which is a comely virgin and a baby believed to be the veritable Son of God ...? One might argue that such a scene is more out there than anything ever imagined by Jake and Dinos Chapman.   

And whilst I miss the crib by Josefina de Vasconcellos - which had stood in Trafalgar Square for many years each Christmas [1], before being damaged by idiots celebrating England's win in the Rugby World Cup in 2003 - I have to say that I do like the work that replaced it in 2006 by the Japanese artist Tomoaki Suzuki.   

 

Best known for creating urban scenes with small painted figures carved from lime wood, Suzuki's Crib is, in its simplicity, really rather delightful and betrays the fact that it was made by someone who comes from a non-Christian culture and had, in fact, to have the nativity story explained to him. 

 

The dozen wooden figures, about two-feet tall and housed within a clear (and protective) Perspex box rather than a traditional wooden stable, have an innocence and a lightness to them; they don't seemed to be weighed down by thousands of years of religious history and symbolism [2].

 

Working from live models, Suzuki initially created clay figures; these were followed by plaster versions, before the final wooden sculptures were made and painted. Interestingly, they are all well-dressed, which is explained by the fact that Suzuki collaborated with the fashion designer Jessica Ogden, who made the costumes worn by the models posing for the figures within the nativity scene.

 

Not that the human figures much captured my attention; the kneeling Mary, the chilled-out Joseph lying stretched out, and the three Maji are all perfectly fine, but I was more taken by the domestic animals, the golden-haired angel, and le divin Enfant born of heavenly order and earthly chaos (even though the latter is swaddled so tightly in his blanket that he looked as if he were an insect emerging from a cocoon).    

 

 

Notes

[1] In 1959 sculptor Josefina de Vasconcellos was commissioned by the vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields church in London to create a Nativity scene featuring life-sized figures. It became a much-loved part of the Trafalgar Square Christmas display until wrecked by England rugby fans. 

 

[2] That said, Suzuki's work reminded me of Piero della Francesca's unfinished Nativity (1470-75) and so I was pleased to discover in an article by Pamela Tudor-Craig that he was influenced by this painting when thinking about his own piece. As she notes: "It is not surprising that it should have appealed to Suzuki: the sparse shed and the empty spaces of the unfinished landscape would find an immediate echo in a Japanese mind." 

      Tudor-Craig also recognises the revitalising innocence (and purity) of Suzuki's work: "Not for the first time, Japanese art has come to the rescue of Western art when it threatened to congeal." See 'Piero via Japan - the new St. Martin's crib', in the Church Times (18 Dec 2006): click here.

 

 

Winter Solstice with D. H. Lawrence

Winter Solstice by the Sea (SA/2023)

 

"Now in December nearer comes the sun

down the abandoned heaven ..."

 

I. 

 

I am always happy when the shortest day and longest night of the year have come and gone.  

 

Several cold months may still lie ahead, but it triggers a genuine transformation of mood to know that the sun has reached its lowest point in the sky and, having stood still for the briefest of moments, thereafter begins its slow ascent; that, no matter what happens, it can't get any darker. 

 

I know the birth of baby Jesus around this time of year excites the imagination of many, but it means nothing compared to the symbolic rebirth of the invincible sun and I understand why the winter solstice has been marked by ritual celebrations within many cultures for millennnia. 

 

The prehistoric pagans who erected Stonehenge - and even the modern day Druids who still meet there now - aren't idiots and Yule means more to me than the Nativity.     

 

 

II. 

 

As one might guess, D. H. Lawrence was another fan of the winter solstice, as he was of all events on the solar calendar that chart the movements of the sun and the wheeling of the year. In a poem written in November 1928, he speaks of how "As the dark closes round him" the sun "draws nearer as if for our company".

 

Interestingly, Lawrence also claims that there exists a tiny sun within him - situated at "the base of the lower brain" - that communes with the great star above, exchanging "a few gold rays" [1]. 

 

III.

 

It would appear, reading this verse, that for Lawrence - as for many others who share his predilection for philosophical vitalism - the sun is more than a material object that can be adequately described and understood by physicists and astronomers. 

 

And if, primarily, Lawrence is concerned with the relationships between men and women, he nevertheless insists on the crucial importance of the relation between humanity and the sun. Perhaps the term that best describes this relation is correlation. For there is clearly a notion of mutual interdependence between the sun and humankind in Lawrence's work; i.e., we can't think one without thinking the other. 

 

And yet, correlation doesn't sound a very Lawrentian term and I think he would be happier speaking about correspondence. For correspondence implies a far closer level of intimate proximity between terms; they become not merely interdependent, but analogous at a certain level:

 

"There certainly does exist a subtle and complex sympathy, correspondence, between the plasm of the human body, which is identical with the primary human psyche, and the material elements outside. The primary human psyche is a complex plasm, which quivers, sense-conscious, in contact with the circumambient cosmos." [2] 

 

What Lawrence really wishes to do is reverse the idea that life evolves from matter and argue instead that the material universe results from the breakdown of primary organic tissue. Unfortunately, as much as I love Lawrence's work, I cannot share his anti-scientific thinking. Thus, I don't believe, for example, that: "If it be the supreme will of the living that the sun should stand still in heaven, then the sun will stand still." [3] 

 

This is simply an occult conceit; the frankly preposterous fantasy that there can be a magical suspension of the laws of physics at the behest of human will power. It's one thing wishing to project oneself into the "the great sky with its meaningful stars and its profoundly meaningful motions" [4] in order to release the poetic imagination, but it's something else believing the astrological heavens revolve around the figure of Man.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, 'November by the sea', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 394-95. This poem can be found also in the LiederNet Archive: click here.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Two Principles', (First Version, 1918-19), Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 260.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance' (1920-1), Appendix IV: Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 395. 

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to The Dragon of the Apocalypse, by Frederick Carter', in Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 46. 

 

 

Some of the material in section III of this post is revised from the essay 'Sun-Struck: On the Question of Solar Sexuality and Speculative Realism in D. H. Lawrence', which can be found on James Walker's Digital Pilgrimage website: click here. 

 

Is it True That When You Leave the Haunted Forest You Discover the Blue of the Greater Day?

 Intoxication (SA/2023)

 

Is it true that when you leave the haunted forest you discover the blue of the greater day?

Not quite. 

 

What you discover, in fact, is that the haunted forest in all its grey stillness, and the greater day in all its vivid blueness, coexist and that the only piece of fakery in the above image is the thick black line of division which creates the illusion these are separate worlds.   

 

As Nietzsche's Zarathustra reminds us, all things are entwined, including joy and sorrow; in affirming one thing, we therefore say yes to everything. 

 

On Curbing One's Enthusiasm for Kafka's Drawings

 

"One of these days I’ll send you a few of my old drawings, to give you something to laugh at. 

These drawings gave me greater satisfaction [...] than anything else." [1]  

I.

 

What constitutes a doodle? 

 

I have to agree with Larry on this one: the beauty of a doodle is that it invites interpretation [2]. If more than merely a scribble, a doodle is not a detailed drawing possessing clear representational meaning. 

 

Sometimes, even the person producing the doodle has no idea what it is they've drawn. For a doodle is often composed of simple abstract lines and shapes, produced randomly without any conscious effort. 

 

A doodle is often made, in fact, while one's attention is elsewhere; such as speaking on the phone, for example, or bored out of one's mind sitting in a business meeting.  

 

Personally, I don't think there's anything foolish about these drawings and that they may very well warrent investigation by those interested in the workings of the brain. But, having said that, I'm not sure they always deserve to be framed and put on the wall, or published in a book - even when the doodler is a famous author, for example.

 

Which brings us to Kafka ...

 

 

II. 

 

In 2019, hundreds of drawings by Kafka were discovered in a private collection that had been locked away for decades. And three years later, they were published in a big book by Yale University Press, with an introductory essay by Judith Butler, in which she describes the drawings as "images that have broken free of writing" [3].

 

Kafka himself had instructed his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, to destroy the drawings. But, as is so often the case, his wishes were ignored, proving yet again that if you are a writer and you really don't want your juvenilia, marginalia, and unpublished (often unfinished) works to see the light of the day after your death, then you had better make sure you destroy this material personally before it's too late to do so.   

 

Still, it is as it is and we are where we are; the drawings survived and have now been placed within the public arena, so we can all pass judgement upon them ...    

 

 

III.

 

I suppose the first thing to say is that  these images - by the criteria outlined above - are not naive doodles, even if Kafka himself dismissed them as such and did, in fact, consign many of them to the rubbish bin. They betray just a little too much skill and attention to detail and it should be remembered that Kafka had, whilst a student (1901-06), taken drawing classes and attended lectures on art history. 

 

Max Brod could certainly see the ingenuity (and the humour) of the images and rightly recognised that they would one day have great fascination for lovers of Kafka's work (although whether that justifies his preserving them against Kafka's wishes remains debatable).

 

But, whilst I do like many of the pictures, I'm not sure they quite merit the praise that has been poured over them by various commentators who, whilst unanimously agreeing that Kafka possessed genius with a capital G, disagree about whether he understood words and pictures as entirely independent of one another, or existing on a single plane and walking arm-in-arm, as one reviewer put it [4].      

 

For me, they're good and have a certain dynamism. I also love the fact that, as Andreas Kilcher points out, most of the figures are not fully elaborated bodies:

 

"They are not fleshed out and situated in three-dimensional space, they do not have fully devel­oped physiques. On the contrary, they are generally free-floating, lacking any sur­roundings, and in themselves they are disproportional, flat, fragile, caricatured, grotesque, carnivalesque." [5]

 

But they're not that good and I'm not sure how seriously we should take them as artistic statements in their own right. Nor do I think them vital for an understanding of his written work. 

 

And so, as ever, one might do well to curb one's enthusiasm before forking out £35 for a copy of the book (particularly when, with Christmas just around the corner, you can probably persuade a loved one it would make a lovely gift).  

 

 

(Yale University Press, 2022)

 

      

Notes

 

[1] Kafka writing in a letter to his fiancée, Felice Bauer, in February, 1913. See Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born, trans. James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth (Schocken Books, 1973), p. 189. 

      In this same letter, Kafka rather amusingly claims: "I was once a great draftsman, you know, but then I started to take academic drawing lessons with a bad woman painter and ruined my talent."

 

[2] See the third episode of season ten of Curb Your Enthusiasm, 'Artificial Fruit', (dir. Cheryl Hines, 2020): click here and here for scenes discussing what does and does not constitute a doodle.

 

[3] See Butler's introduction to Franz Kafka: The Drawings, ed. Andreas Kilcher with Pavel Schmidt, trans. Kurt Beals, (Yale University Press, 2022). 

[4] Benjamin Balint, 'Graven Images' in the Jewish Review of Books (Spring, 2022): click here. 

 

[5] Andreas Kilcher, 'Discovering Franz Kafka's Nearly-Lost Drawings', trans. Kurt Beals, Literary Hub (1 June, 2022): click here.  

 

 

Odradek

 

"At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colours. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs. "

 

"One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished. In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of."

 

- Kafka, description of Odradek in 'The Cares of a Family Man'

 

 

I. 

 

Many critics and philosophers rank Kafka alongside the greats of modernist literature. But, whilst I wouldn't wish to echo Joseph Epstein's dismissal of him as overrated [1], I have nevertheless often found some of Kafka's short stories a little ... not boring exactly - but disappointing.  

 

That's not the case, however, with 'The Cares of a Family Man' [2], in which the world is introduced to the fantastically strange character called Odradek ...

 

 

II. 

 

As the narrator of the tale confesses, Odradek is a name of uncertain origin; it might be Slavic; it could be German, but it's very possibly neither. Confusion over the etymology of Odradek's name, however, is really the least of it - for it's not even clear what Odradek is ... 

 

For whilst they - and I think it probably best we use the gender-neutral pronoun here in its singular sense - can stand up and speak and even laugh, they're also a non-human object who looks rather like a star-shaped cotton reel with bits of old coloured thread wound round in a tangled manner (see Kafka's own description above).  

 

Odradek, however, is nobody's spool and they have a vital presence in the family home; perhaps more vital even than the narrator's and the latter is concerned not only that Odradek undermines his position as husband and father - despite having no real purpose or role - but that Odradek will ultimately outlive him and thereby have the last laugh, extracting what Baudrillard terms the revenge of the object:   

 

"He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful." [3]

 

 

III.

'The Cares of a Family Man' has, as one might imagine, more interpretations than one can shake a stick at; certainly more than I can possibly discuss here - or would wish to, as all the usual readings - Marxist, Freudian, Existentialist - are predictable enough (often very clever and insightful, but unsurprising). 

I think, if anything, I favour a more occult (and object-oriented) musing on the story over and above a political, psychological, or lazy metaphorical attempt at interpretation; a musing that doesn't seek to identify Odradek in the full-light of day (or by the natural light of reason) and which acknowledges that objects are ultimately mysterious (and alluring) because of their withdrawl from human perception.

As Anya Meksin notes, we are asking the wrong questions if we ask what Odradek symbolises or represents: 

 

"The story stubbornly resists an adequate correlation between Odradek and any existing entities or concepts in our world. It is as if the little text has somehow transcended the very system in which symbolism is possible, just as Odradek has somehow transcended the logic of the physical world. Odradek is a metaphysical rupture in the reality of the family man, and the story is an epistemological rupture in the reality of the reader." [4]

 

Ultimately, Odradek is a messenger from the secret realm of objects; not so much a realm humans deny the existence of, but casually dismiss as less interesting than their own. Such anthropocentric arrogance has no place here, however. I maintain that objects not only exist independently of us upon a democratically flat ontology, but, despite our conceited claims of human exceptionalism, we too ultimately have our being upon this plane.   

 

That's what Odradek reminds us: material reality is essentially meaningless; consciousness is epiphenomenal; life is just a very rare and unusual way of being dead. 

 

 

IV. 

 

Readers of a certain age will doubtless recall the Unigate ads on TV in the 1970s which warned viewers to watch out in case there was a Humphrey about [5]. 

 

Well, an Odradek does more than steal your milk; they negate all the illusions, and lies, and convenient fictions upon which human life is built and once you discover, like Kafka's humble family man, that there's one living in your house there are, says Anya Meksin, only two options: "immediate suicide, or continuing along as best we can, given the circumstances" [6].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Epstein's article 'Is Franz Kafka Overrated?' in The Atlantic (July/August 2013): click here. 

      For those who might be interested, the critic David L Ulin responds to this piece by Epstein in 'Why Kafka Matters', Los Angeles Times (24 June 2013): click here. 

 

[2] Die Sorge des Hausvaters was written between 1914 and 1917 and published in a collection of Kafka's short stories published by Kurt Wolff entitled Ein Landarzt [A Country Doctor] (1919). 

      The English translation - 'The Cares of a Family Man' - can be found in Kafka's Collected Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, (Everyman, 1993), pp. 183-85. The story is also in The Complete Stories, (Schocken Books, 1971) - a book that can be found as a pdf online thanks to Vanderbilt University. The opening quotations at the top of this post are both taken from the latter edition, p. 468. 

 

[3] Kafka, 'The Cares of a Family Man', The Complete Stories, p. 469.

 

[4] Anya Meksin, 'Ragged Bits of Meaning, Wound on a Star-Shaped Spool for Thread', essay on Mauro Nervi's Kafka Project website: click here. Meksin's excellent essay is worth reading in full. 

 

[5] For those readers who are either too young or now too old and forgetful, the British milk company Unigate produced a series of TV ads in the 1970s featuring mysterious characters called Humphreys whose only visible presence was was a red-and-white striped straw. 

      The campaign, devised by John Webster, is best known for the slogan: "Watch out, watch out - there's a Humphrey about!" written and sung by musical genius and creator of the Wombles, Mike Batt. 

[6] Anya Meksin, 'Ragged Bits of Meaning, Wound on a Star-Shaped Spool for Thread' ... click here.

      I don't actually share Meksin's conclusion. Rather, like Camus, I don't see why suicide should be considered in the face of life's absurdity - for there is no more meaning in death than in life. And there's no reason either why a meaningless life should not be a happy and passionate one; the trick is to affirm the void and thereby consummate nihilism, as Nietzsche would say.    

 

 

'Tis Whiter Than an Indian Pipe ...

Zena McKeown: Ghost Flowers (2023) [1]

Instagram: @zeddybear

 

 

What do you get if you cross a floraphile with a hauntologist? The answer, of course, is someone who loves ghost flowers ...

 

As the name Monotropa uniflora implies, the ghost plant - a flowering herbaceous perennial native to temperate regions of Asia and the Americas - is one of a kind and uniquely beautiful. If usually the flowers have a waxy white colouration, some specimens are marked with black flecks or seem to glow with an eerie pinkish hue.

 

Unlike green plants rich in chlorophyll and which synthesise nutrients via photosynthesis, ghost plants are mycoheterotrophic, meaning that they parasitically feed off underground fungi (which live in turn on the root systems of trees). Since they are not directly dependent on sunlight, therefore, it means that ghost plants can grow in very dark environments, such as the undergrowth of dense forests. 

 

All this adds to their spooky reputation - as does the fact that the plant contains glycosides which can be toxic to humans (though not the bumblebees and other insects that disperse their pollen). Having said that, if cooked correctly, ghost plants are perfectly safe to eat and are said to have a flavour similar to asparagus.  

 

The renowned American poet Emily Dickinson loved ghost plants and they feature in several of her verses. She drafted this poem in her own fair hand on a fragment of paper in 1879: 

 

'Tis whiter than an Indian Pipe - 

'Tis dimmer than a Lace - 

No stature has it, like a Fog 

When you approach the place - 

Not any voice imply it here - 

Or intimate it there - 

A spirit - how doth it accost - 

What function hath the Air? 

This limitless Hyperbole 

Each one of us shall be - 

'Tis Drama - if Hypothesis 

It be not Tragedy - [2]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This is an early sketch (pastel on paper) by Miss McKeown (used with kind permission of the artist). The finished work can be viewed on her Instagram account: @zeddybear

 

[2] Emily Dickinson, 'Tis whiter than an Indian Pipe, poem, 1879, Amherst College Archives & Special Collections. Click here to see the handwritten original at the Morgan Library & Museum (New York).   

On the Haunting Beauty of Sue Lloyd

Sue Lloyd (1939 - 2011)

 

'The dead they do not die - they seduce from beyond the grave ...'

I. 

 

I mentioned in a recent post written in memory of Brigit Forsyth [1], that, as I get older, I find my desire is increasingly tied to nostalgia and has effectively become a type of spectrophilia - i.e., sexual attraction to ghosts, or, as in my case, the haunting images of dead actresses from the 1960s and '70s (the decades in which I was born and grew up). 

 

One such actress of whom I particularly fond at the moment is Sue Lloyd, who guest starred in many much loved English TV shows during this period, including The Saint (1964 and '67), The Avengers (1965), Department S (1969), Randal and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1970), The Persuaders! (1971), and The Sweeney (1976) [2].

 

Lloyd also regularly appeared as secret agent Cordelia Winfield, alongside Steve Forrest in the British television series The Baron (1965-66), but is perhaps best remembered today for her long-running role as as Barbara Hunter (née Brady) in the British soap opera Crossroads [3].

 

 

II. 

 

Although Lloyd had studied dance as a child and, in 1953, won a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School at Sadler's Wells Theatre, she unfortunately grew just a little too tall (5' 8") to play a swan princess. And so she became a model - even appearing once on the cover of Vogue - and a showgirl, before embarking on an acting career. 

 

Lloyd did also star in a number of films - including alongside Michael Caine in The Ipcress File (1965), Peter Cushing in the cult horror Corruption (1968), and Joan Collins in The Stud (1978) - but I'm not much of a cinephile and really only care (here at least) about her TV work.  

 

But what is it I like so much about Miss Lloyd, I hear you ask ... Well, simply put, she exuded the kind of dazzling beauty and sexual sophistication of the older woman which excited me as an adolescent and continues to work its magic some 50 years later ...

 

As Simon Farquhar writes in his obituary for the star who died in 2011 (aged 72):

 

"There was always something of the ghost of a fading Hollywood glamour queen possessing Sue Lloyd [...] With half-closed eyes, cigarette gravel voice and elegant, haughty poise, she brought an air of smouldering decadence and feline allure to often decidedly mundane productions, as if a world-weary Lauren Bacall was deeming to cross the Atlantic and play with the little people for a while." [4]    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the post entitled 'Whatever Happened to the Likely Lasses?' (2 Dec 2023): click here. 

 

[2] Unlike some other actors, Lloyd was delighted at the cult status much of her television work had acquired, and she happily contributed interviews and commentaries to subsequent DVD releases and responded to fan requests.

 

[3] Lloyd was in Crossroads from 1979 to 1985, so this slightly falls outside the period that interests me and is not really a genre of show that I particularly care for. 

[4] Simon Farquhar, writing in The Independent (30 Oct 2011): click here.

Foucauldian Thoughts on Never Mind the Bollocks

Cover design by Jamie Reid for the Sex Pistols' compilation album 

Flogging a Dead Horse (Virgin Records, 1980), featuring the gold 

disc awarded to the band for sales of 500,000 copies of  

Never Mind the Bollocks ... (Virgin Records, 1977)

 

 

I.

 

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols is the only studio album by English punk rock band the Sex Pistols. 

 

Released on 28 October 1977, by Virgin Records, it entered the UK Album Charts at number one, having achieved advance orders of 125,000 copies. Within weeks, it went gold and it remained a best-seller for most of the following year, spending 48 weeks in the top 75. 

 

In the many years since its original release, NMTB has been reissued on several occasions; most recently in 2017, proving that you can continue to flog a dead horse even when just the bare bones remain.   

 

NMTB has inspired many bands and musicians and is frequently listed by critics not merely as the most seminal punk album, but one of the greatest albums across all genres of popular music. In 2015, the album was officially inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, the music industry thereby acknowledging its lasting qualitative and/or historical significance.

 

II. 

 

The idea that NMTB is the Sex Pistols' greatest achievement cannot be allowed to pass without close critical examination. Don't get me wrong - there are lots of things I love about it; the title, for example, and Jamie Reid's artwork for the sleeve. It even contains half-a-dozen or so songs that I still listen to today. 

 

However, rather than being viewed as an ideal reference point to which all later manifestations of what we term punk rock must nod, NMTB might be seen as just some product released, distributed, and promoted by Virgin Records. The belief that it somehow eludes and resists power and possesses radical or revolutionary properties, is simply a romantic fantasy. 

 

Of course, this isn't to deny that the myth of the Sex Pistols as anti-establishment hasn't proved to be commercially useful - or that it will cease to function in the immediate future. God's shadow is still to be seen long after his death and for a great number of fans the band continues to provide them with their most precious form of identity. Indeed, to such people NMTB is a kind of sacred artefact.

 

But it gets tedious, does it not? 

 

One grows tired of having to treat NMTB with reverence and bored of the austere monarchy of the Sex Pistols ruling over our thoughts and actions. Ultimately, one gratefully accepts the escape root from punk fandom and the worship of Saint Johnny offered by The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle ...

 

As Michel Foucault might say, in a postpunk future, many years from now, people will be unable to fathom our fascination with NMTB. And they will smile when they recall that there were once critics, like Robert Christgau, who believed that in the lyrics of the Sex Pistols resided forbidden ideas containing an undeniable truth value ...

 

 

Till A' the Seas Gang Dry

Messrs. Lovecraft and Burns

 

I.

 

My love is like a red, red rose ... 

 

For many people - indeed, we can almost certainly say most people - this will be the line written by the 18th-century Scottish poet and lyricist Robert Burns with which they are most familiar [1].

But for fans of the 20th-century American author H. P. Lovecraft, whose fiction can best be described as a form of weird realism [2] founded upon a philosophy known as cosmicism [3], it's a later line from the same poem that most resonates: Till a' the seas gang dry.

For this line inspired (and provided a title for) one of Lovecraft's best short stories, written in collaboration with his (then teenage) friend R. H. Barlow in 1935 [4].   

 

 

II. 

 

The story consists of two parts:

 

The first describes events that took place on Earth from a few millennia to a few million years after the present day. As the global climate becomes increasingly warm, oceans and bodies of fresh water are slowly disappearing and groups of semi-barbarous people, faced with extinction, are retreating towards the poles in order to try and survive. 

 

The second part starts in a small village in the desert. There is only one man left in the village; the old woman who had been his only companion, having recently passed away. The young man, named Ull, journeys in search of other people using his knowledge of old legends. 

 

After a few days, exhausted and dehydrated, he finds a small settlement. 

 

Ull enters one of the houses, but finds nothing but a dusty old skeleton. Despondent, he starts searching for water and comes across a well that, miraculously, hasn't completely dried up. Trying to reach the rope so as to pull up the bucket, he falls into the well and dies. 

 

After his death - and it transpires that he was, in fact, the last man on Earth - all record of human presence is completely erased. Two of the final passages of the story encapsulate Lovecraft's cosmicism and are worth reproducing in full here:

 

"And now at last the Earth was dead. The final, pitiful survivor had perished. All the teeming billions; the slow aeons; the empires and civilizations of mankind were summed up in this poor twisted form - and how titanically meaningless it all had been! Now indeed had come an end and climax to all the efforts of humanity - how monstrous and incredible a climax in the eyes of those poor complacent fools of the prosperous days! Not ever again would the planet know the thunderous tramping of human millions - or even the crawling of lizards and the buzz of insects, for they, too, had gone. Now was come the reign of sapless branches and endless fields of tough grasses. Earth, like its cold, imperturbable moon, was given over to silence and blackness forever. 

      The stars whirred on; the whole careless plan would continue for infinities unknown. This trivial end of a negligible episode mattered not to distant nebulae or to suns new-born, flourishing, and dying. The race of man, too puny and momentary to have a real function or purpose, was as if it had never existed. To such a conclusion the aeons of its farcically toilsome evolution had led."

As a reader of Nietzsche, I obviously love this and it reminds me, of course, of the famous fable in which the latter "perfectly distils nihilism's most disquieting suggestion: that from the original emergence of organic sentience to the ultimate extinction of human sapience 'nothing will have happened'" [5]. 

 

Man is a clever beast - no doubt about it - but our cleverness won't save us and human knowledge remains just a passing phenomenon when considered cosmically. As Lovecraft is repeatedly at pains to stress, the vast empty universe is entirely indifferent to our existence and we are entirely at the mercy of forces that are beyond our control and full understanding.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Robert Burns, 'A Red, Red Rose' (1794). Originally a song based on traditional sources, it is often referred to as 'My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose' and published as a poem. Click here to read on the Poetry Foundation website.

 

[2] The term weird fiction refers to a sub-genre of speculative literature originating in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, which either rejects or radically reinterprets the traditional elements of supernatural horror writing in an attempt to inspire more than merely fear. Lovecraft is closely associated with this sub-genre. 

      The object-oriented philosopher Graham Harman used the term Weird Realism for the title of his study on Lovecraft and philosophy (Zero Books, 2012). 

 

[3] Cosmicism - about which I shall say more later in the post - is a philosophy developed by Lovecraft in his fiction. In brief, it is both an antitheism and an antihumanism, promoting the idea that there is no loving divine presence in the universe and that mankind's temporary existence upon the Earth has zero significance. 

 

[4] H. P. Lovecraft and R. H. Barlow, 'Till A' the Seas', in The Californian (1935). The story can be read online at the H. P. Lovecraft Archive: click here. 

[5] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 205.          

      Brassier, like me, refers to Nietzsche's fable in the essay 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense', which can be found in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press, 1979), p. 79.

Thoughts Inspired by Ben Woodard's 'On an Ungrounded Earth' (2013)

Punctum Books (2013)

 

 

I.

 

When I hear the term geophilosophy my first thought is not to Deleuze and Guattari's work, but, rather, back to Zarathustra's injunction that above all things his followers should remain true to the earth and not listen to those who speak of superterrestrial hopes [a].

 

So a study such as Woodard's - author also of the darkly vital text Slime Dynamics (2012) [b] - was always one I'd feel obliged to get around to reading sooner or later. 

 

That said, I'm not sure his attempt to unground the earth will be something I'll be entirely comfortable with, although maybe that's the point and I'm certainly not adverse to the idea that we might denaturalise, destabilise, and deterritorialise the earth if that's what it takes to challenge certain models of thought that justify themselves by showing how they are grounded (and anchored) in the security of terra firma.

 

For I know what Nick Land means when he writes of a dark fluidity that rebels against such philosophies [c] - one wouldn't be able to continue with a blog called torpedo the ark if that wasn't the case. But, it's important not to be too swept up and carred away by talk of dark fluidity and solar waves etc.

 

For ultimately, I agree with Negarestani writing in his Cyclonopedia (2008) - and quoted here by Woodard - that whilst the earth with its solidity, gravity, and wholeness can be restrictive, the destruction of all ground to stand on only results in another hegemonic regime. 

 

Ungrounding, therefore, has to be about something more than mere destruction; has to involve the discovery or unearthing of an underside to the ground, or what I suppose those excited by the demonology of a new earth might call an underworld - although it's more the realm of worms [d] rather than horned devils; a place of decay and decomposition rather than evil.  

 

Does Woodard wish for man to inhabit such a world? I'm not sure - although he does point out that humans have, at times, lived beneath the surface of the earth and does insist that we "must burrow deeper into the earth, into the strange potentiality of infernal geologies" [70].  

 

Personally, I wouldn't fancy such an existence; living in a network of tunnels and underground bunkers, like a smuggler or terrorist. I don't even like riding the Tube. 

 

 

II. 

         

To be honest, Woodard's book only really came alive for me when, in chapter 4, he took us on a tour of that chthonic underworld that is commonly referred to as Hell, explaining along the way how the latter "in its chthonic configuration, suggests an odd short circuit between the earth as a shallow phenomenological playground and a deeper understanding of the earth as a complex geological system" [72]. 

For Woodard, Hell is best thought of as a volcanic inferno, rather than the dwelling place of demons; it is unfortunate, he says, when infernology is overridden by demonology (something that Deleuze is often guilty of).

III.

 

I also enjoyed the concluding fifth chapter on a monstrous dark earth that generates life which eventually rots back into compost and chaos, and a malevolent black sun, about which I have myself have written on numerous occasions: click here for example. 

 

Of the dark earth, Woodard writes:

"The earth [...] does not require much labor to become a monster. The earth is a stratified globule, a festering confusion of internalities powered by a molten core and bombarded by an indifferent star. This productive rottenness breeds the possibility of escaping the solar economy through the odd chemistry of ontology." [83-84] 

 

I'm not sure I entirely understand what he means at the end there, but I do like the thought of this earth as a storm of forces and a darkly productive monster - one that is "far removed from the Earth discussed in ecology studies and in popular culture, where it is caught between a thing to be worshiped and a thing to be exploited" [86].

 

I do not like the sons of Prometheus. But nor do I care for those sons of Orpheus who subscribe to a naive neo-pagan fantasy set in some post-industrial eco-utopia in which man is supposed to live once more in perfect harmony with nature.    

 

As for the sun, Woodard reminds us it's not simply the life-giving yellow star that so many philosopher's worship, but also a darkly malevolent monster that burns your skin and causes cancers and madness [e]: 

 

"Again it is tempting to return to Land and his pseudo-Bataillean nature philosophy. The sun must be the illuminator for Plato and Socrates. But there is, for Bataille, a second sun, a dark sun, a black sun: 'The sensations we drink from the black sun afflict us as ruinous passion, skewering our senses upon the drive to waste ourselves.'" [90] [f]

Woodard rightly notes how certain thinkers have strange dreams "about surviving this aspect of the sun, which culminates in the cataclysm of its destruction preceded by its darkening, its blackening, and its degradation towards meltdown" [90], but the fact is we're not going to outlive solar cataclysm. 

 

As Ray Brassier writes: "Solar death is catastrophic because it vitiates ontological temporality as configured in terms of philosophical questioning's constitutive horizonal relationship to the future." [g] 

 

That's a pretty nihilistic note on which to end - but there's really not much that can be done about it. For whether we like it or not, it's all going to end and not merely in the elimination of all terrestrial life, but, ultimately, in the annihilation of all matter. 

 

Woodard is by no means the greatest thinker or writer in the world, but he's to be congratulated for reminding us that oblivion is the name of the game and any humanistic optimism on this point - whether secular-scientific or mytho-religious in character - is simply pitiful [h].  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathusra, Prologue 3. The original German reads: "bleibt der Erde treu und glaubt Denen nicht, welche euch von überirdischen Hoffnungen reden!" 

 

[b] Woodard's Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation,and the Creep of Life, (Zero Books, 2012) is another text I've not got round to fully reading, although I have previously mentioned it on Torpedo the Ark: click here.  

[c] Woodard quotes the line from Land that I refer to on p. 6 of Ungrounded Earth. It reads: "A dark fluidity at the roots of our nature rebels against the security of terra firma." See The Thirst for Annihilation (Routledge, 1992), p. 106. Note that all future page references to Woodard's book will be given directly in the post.  

 

[d] Woodward has a fascination with worms of all kinds (real and fictional); he calls them "engines of a terrestrial weirdness". See On an Ungrounded Earth, p. 21. 

[e] I have written elsewhere and at length on this; see the essay 'Sun-Struck: On the Question of Solar Sexuality and Speculative Realism', published on James Walker's Digitial Pigrimage (14 Jan 2019): click here. 

 

[f] Woodard is quoting Land writing in The Thirst for annihilation, p. 29.   

[g] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 223. Woodard also quotes this line in his text, see. pp. 90-91. 

[h] See the recent post published on oblivion (22 Nov 2023): click here.