Torpedo the Ark: images from posts published on
28 December (2013-2021)
Sometimes, it's interesting to look back and see what one was thinking on the same date in years gone by - and sometimes it's simply embarrassing ...
On this date in 2013, for example, I was keen to express my support for a twenty-year old philosophy student and Femen activist, Josephine Witt, who staged a one-woman protest at St. Peter's Cathedral in Cologne, briefly disrupting a televised Christmas mass by getting her tits out and declaring herself to be God, before half-a-dozen horrified clerics wearing an assortment of robes pulled her from the altar, bundled her out of the
building, and handed her over to the secular forces of law and order.
I'm not sure I would now be quite so sympathetic to such an action.
Skip forward three years and on this date in 2016 I was keen to challenge the judgement of God by refusing to accept what medical professionals describe as death by natural causes; i.e., the all-too-predictable kind of death that results from
illness, old age, or an internal malfunction of the body and its
organs.
As a philosopher, I argued, one should always desire and seek
out the opposite of this; i.e., the joy of an unnatural death, be it by
accident, misadventure, homicide, suicide, or that mysterious
non-category that is undetermined and which, for those enigmatic
individuals who pride themselves on their ambiguity, must surely be the
way to go.
I then confessed my own preference to be executed, like William Palmer, the notorious nineteenth-century murderer known as the Prince of Poisoners, who is said to have climbed the gallows and placed a foot tentatively on the trapdoor before enquiring of the hangman: Is it safe?
I would like, in other words, to go to my death with the cool courage
and stoicism of the dandy and a ready quip on my lips that might cause
even my executioner to smile (and serve also to annoy the po-faced
authorities who demand seriousness and expect contrition in such
circumstances).
In December 2018, meanwhile, I was entering my Daphne Du Maurier phase - a phase that never really passed and became a long-lasting love for the author and her astonishing body of work. On the 28th of this month I wrote a series of notes on one of her near-perfect short stories - suggested to me by the poet Simon Solomon - 'The Blue Lenses' (1959).
The premise of the post and story was the same: what if everyone were to suddenly lose their human features and be seen with the head of the creature that best expresses their inhuman qualities; not so much their true nature, as what might be termed their molecular animality - would we still find this gently amusing?
I suspect not: in all likelihood, initial astonishment would quickly give way to horror.
However we choose to describe it, du Maurier's tale is not simply an
imaginative fantasy and she, like D. H. Lawrence, is "another of the
writers who leave us troubled and filled with admiration" precisely
because she was able to tie her work to "real and unheard of becomings".
Hers is a genuinely black art, as Deleuze and Guattari would say.
Making particular reference to the case of Serge Gainsbourg, back on 28 December, 2019 I was concerned with the history of the badge that Jews were often obliged to wear for purposes of public identification
(i.e., in order to clearly mark them as religious and ethnic outsiders).
Although we tend to think of this practice in the context of Hitler's Germany, the Nazis were actually drawing upon an extensive (anti-Semitic) history when they revived the
practice of forcing Jews to wear a distinctive sign upon their clothing,
including, most famously, the yellow Star of David with the word Jude
inscribed in letters meant to resemble Hebrew script.
Gainsbourg was required to wear such as a young boy in
wartime Paris; an experience he made bearable by pretending that it
was a sherrif's badge, or a prize that he'd been awarded, and which he eventually wrote a song about: click here.
On 28 December of the following year, 2020, I expressed my fascination with piquerism; i.e., the practice of penetrating the skin of another person with sharp objects, including pins, razors, and knives - something that I traced back to young childhood and the time I placed a drawing pin on a fat girl's chair in order to see if she would explode like a balloon with a loud bang.
Following this, I then explored episodes of knife play in the work of D. H. Lawrence, of which there are several, including the notorious scene in chapter XXIII of The Plumed Serpent (1926) in which Cipriano publicly executes a group of stripped and blindfolded prisoners with a
bright, thin dagger, plunging the latter into their chests with swift, heavy stabs.
I think even at the time I was uncomfortable with this and not able to dismiss it with the same ease as Kate Leslie who, if shocked and appalled at first by the killings, eventually concludes that her new husband's penchant for a little ritualised murder is fine if carried out in good conscience.
If over the Xmas period in 2018 I was reading Daphne du Maurier, in 2021 I was enjoying the work of J. G. Ballard, including a short story entitled 'Prima Belladonna' which was included in the collection Vermilion Sands (1971) - a collection which celebrates the neglected virtues of the lurid and bizarre within a
surreal sci-fi setting described by Ballard as the visionary present or
inner space; the former referring to the future already contained within
the present and the latter referring to the place where unconscious
dreams, fears, and fantasies meet external reality.
The alien female figure of Jane Ciracylides, with her rich patina-golden skin and insects for eyes, has continued to fascinate me to this day. Who knows, perhaps I'll get to play i-Go with her one day (even if she always cheats).
