On the Sex Life of the Incredible Shrinking Man 1: Pictophilia

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

 

 

I.

Pictophilia - i.e., a love of images regarded by the viewer as sexually arousing - is surely amongst the most universal and ancient of all paraphilias. Who doesn't enjoy responding to the erotic appeal of such pictures (be they openly pornographic in nature, or works that convey a sense of beauty with a greater degree of artistic sutblety); it stimulates us like sunshine on a grey day, as D. H. Lawrence would say [1]. 

 

Indeed, the only people who are genuinely repelled by such images and the natural stirring of sexual feeling are puritans and perverts who have fallen into hatred. And a certain type of feminist who deplores the fetishistic practice of pictophilia on the grounds that it's a form of what Rae Langton terms sexual solipsism and leads to treating real women as less interesting and less desirable than mere representations [2]. 

 

For Langton, and those who share her philosophical position, it is morally wrong to treat people as if they were objects; but it is also illicit to animate objects (including images) and treat them as sexual partners within the world of masturbatory fantasy. For when men begin to rely upon objects and images to gain sexual satisfaction, they invariably begin seeing and treating real women as objects and images.

 

Melinda Vadas takes this line of argument to its logical conclusion. She argues that if something can be used as a female sex object - even if it's just a photo in a magazine - then for all intents and purposes it is a female sex object and not merely a representation or substitute and that the way it is used (and abused) should therefore concern us. 

 

Probably best, then, that neither of the above read Richard Matheson's astonishing 1956 novel The Shrinking Man, which contains one of literature's finest scenes of pictophilia (with added elements of macrophilia) ...

 

 

II. 

 

Whilst fighting for his survival in the basement - threatened by starvation and a black widow spider - the now tiny figure of Scott Carey comes across an old magazine hidden behind some paint cans: 

 

"On the cover was the photograph of a woman. She was tall, passably beautiful, leaning over a rock, a look of pleasure on her young face. She was wearing a tight red long-sleeved sweater and a pair of clinging black shorts cut just below the hips. He stared at the enormous figure of the woman. She was looking at him, smiling. It was strange, he thought as he sat there, bare feet dangling in space. He hadn't been conscious of sex for a long time. His body had been something to keep alive, no more - something to feed and clothe and keep warm. His existence in the cellar [...] had been devoted to one thing, survival. All subtler gradations of desire had been lost to him. Now he had [...] seen the huge photograph of the woman. 

      His eyes ran lingeringly over the giant contours of her body, the high, swelling arches of her breasts, the gentle hill of her stomach, the long, curving taper of her legs. 

      He couldn't take his eyes off the woman. The sunlight was glinting on her dark auburn hair. He could almost sense the feeling of it, soft and silk like. He could almost feel the perfumed warmth of her flesh, almost feel the curved smoothness of her legs as mentally he ran his hands along them. He could almost feel the gelatinous give of her breasts, the sweet taste of her lips, her breath like warm wine trickling in his throat. 

      He shuddered helplessly [...] "Oh, God," he whispered. "Oh, God, God, God." There were so many hungers." [3] 

 

It seems, then, that not only intelligence but also desire exists on an infinite scale or continuum; that just because a man shrinks in size - even if it be to a molecular level where he becomes-imperceptible - he can still get a hard on.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 239. It should be noted, however, that Lawrence himself still objects to those images he regards as indecent and obscene; images that, in his view, do dirt on human sexuality and insult the body.

[2] Rae Langton. Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification, (Oxford University Press, 2009). 

 

For Langton, the production and consumption of pornographic images is an activity almost exclusively associated with heterosexual males which enables the subordination and silencing of women. She says very little about female produced porn aimed at women, or gay male porn. For an interesting critique of her work, see Andrew M. Koppelman, 'Another Solipsism: Rae Langton on Sexual Fantasy', Washington University Jurisprudence Review, Volume 5 Issue 2 (2013): click here to access as a pdf.  

[3] Richard Matheson, The Shrinking Man, (Gold Medal Books, 1956), Ch. 5. 

 

Matheson's novel was adapted for the screen in 1957 as The Incredible Shrinking Man, dir. Jack Arnold, starring Grant Williams as Scott and Randy Stuart as his wife, Louise (as seen in the publicity photo above). The film, whilst a classic work of cinematic sci-fi, ignored many of the pervy aspects of the book which interest me here in this series of posts. 

 

 

For part two of this series (on paedophilia), click here. 

 

And for part three (on agalmatophilia), click here.  

Build Back Better

Zen fascists will control you ...

  

I. 

 

In an episode of The Inbetweeners, an increasingly frustrated Will ends up describing French exchange student Patrice as a 'fucking baguette eating dickhead frog'. When Simon points out the racist nature of the remark, Will replies: 'He's made me racist' [1], which is not merely an amusing but also a thought-provoking idea. 

 

Similarly, one can't help observing that the seemingly irrational actions of governments here and elsewhere in response to Covid-19 - such as massively curtailing freedom and deliberately wrecking the economy - have significantly contributed to public paranoia; that they have, if you like, made conspiracists of us all.       

Thus it is that previously reasonable individuals who once would have laughed at ideas of the Great Reset and the New World Order, are now beginning to wonder if there isn't some truth in them as they (desperately) try to make sense of what's going on. 

 

They want to know why it is, for example, that politicians the world over - across the political spectrum and including Boris Johnson and Joe Biden - have adopted the mantra Build Back Better and promise us a fairer, greener future with electric cars, social justice, and a universal basic income, whilst insisting we all wear masks and live online.   

II.

This holistic - or, if you prefer, totalitarian - concept of Building Back Better was first discussed at the UN in relation to the issue of disaster management and adopted by the General Assembly as an official programme in 2015. The main principle is to regard crises - including pandemics - as opportunities to create more resilient social structures and economic models than before.     

Prior to this, the phrase had been floating around for several years, used not only by politicians, economists, and members of think tanks, but by the sort of people involved in aid agencies and various NGOs who dream of a safer tomorrow for all the world's children - oh, and a global government run by a technocratic liberal elite who know what's best for everyone at all times.   

Today, key personnel at the IMF, WHO, WEF, and EU, seem to have miraculously arrived at some kind of ideological consensus re the need to Build Back Better. 

 

Of course, it's hardly a conspiracy - more like an open secret - when individuals like Klaus Schwab are unashamedly setting out their visions of a post-Covid utopia and declaring: "The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine and reset our world." [2] 

 

They call this the new normal. And they laugh at those who naively believe we'll soon return to the old ways once there's a vaccine ...

 

Notes

[1] See: The Inbetweeners, S2/E3, 'Will's Birthday', dir. Ben Palmer, written by Damon Beesley and Ian Morris, (original air date 16 April 2009).  

[2] Klaus Schwab (Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum), 'Now is the time for a "great reset"',  article on the WEF website (3 June 2020): click here.  

Deleuze and the Philosophy of Slander

La philosophie est une introduction 

à un monde scandaleux

 

 

I. 

 

In his late work, Deleuze famously defines philosophy as the invention of concepts. But in a very early text from 1946, he suggests that philosophy is that which teaches us "to strip things and beings of their pejorative meaning" [276] and thus presumably defend them from defamation.

 

That's interesting: but isn't all meaning pejorative; i.e., doesn't all meaning essentially slander or disparage the object to which it is applied like a thick coat of doxa? We might even ask if, at some level, all language lies (and, if so, should that concern us) ...? 

 

 

II. 

 

Defined as the oral communication of a false statement in order to inflict damage, slander is a scandalous form of bad-mouthing - even hate speech - but it is not quite lying. It is, rather, a method of "designating beyond the facts" [280], albeit with malicious intent. 

 

Statements that have verifiable evidence to support them can still be hurtful, of course. But slander, in its pure form, is completely different and for Deleuze takes on metaphysical grandeur, becoming "a sort of supreme and spiritual insult" which seeks to "determine the essence" [285] of the one it causes to suffer and reveal a possible world unreliant upon accurate description (what we might term today the world of fake news).   

 

See: Gilles Deleuze, 'Words and Profiles', in Letters and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2020). Page numbers given in the post refer to this work. 

 

Readers interested in other posts that discuss the youthful writings of Deleuze can click here and here.   

Notes on the Youthful Writings of Gilles Deleuze 2: From Christ to the Bourgeoisie

 A young Deleuze pretending to read for the camera

 

 

I.

 

From Christ to the Bourgeoisie [a] was another very early text by Deleuze, first published in 1946, when he was twenty-one. It's central argument and conclusion is: "The relationship that connects Christianity and the Bourgeisie is not contingent." [275] Which is true, I suppose, though hardly an original insight.

 

Deleuze opens the essay by discussing the decline of spirit in our modern world, which critics and opponents of modernity and materialism often decry: "What they mean is that today, many people no longer believe in internal life, it doesn't pay." [266] 

 

Deleuze continues:

 

"To be sure, there are different reasons why the internal is disdained today. My first thoughts go to the revolutionary consciousness in an industrial and technological world. The greater the power of this technological world, the more it seems to empty people of all internal life like a chicken and reduce them to total exteriority." [266]

My first thought is that this seems rather unfair on chickens, which remain sacred birds within some cultures. One wonders how Deleuze might know anything about their internal life, or lack thereof? For whilst I'm sure this young French philosopher enjoyed many a dish of coq-au-vin, had he ever tried to form a relationship with a living bird? 

 

I'm doubtful: for despite what he might believe, they are intelligent and sensitive creatures, who display some degree of self-awareness (i.e., have a fairly complex inner life) [b].   

 

Personally, I'm with Lawrence on this point: I like to imagine that even a common brown hen is a goddess in her own rights and blossoms into splendid being, just as we do, within the fourth dimension and that we might form a vital (non-anthropocentric) relationship with her [c].     

 

But I digress ... And, to be fair, there's an ambiguity in what Deleuze writes here; he could be saying that chickens too are emptied of internal life (i.e. have their being negated) within techno-industrial society thanks to factory farming (Heidegger controversially suggests that there is a metaphysical equivalence between mechanised food production and the Nazi extermination camps).      

 

Anyway, let's move on ... And let's do so by immediately pointing out that Deleuze isn't necessarily complaining about this loss of soul - because, like Sartre, he hates moist interiority and regards the issue as a far more complex one than it is often characterised. For one thing, Deleuze suggests the possibility of a spiritual life outside of (and without reference to) any interiority and he believes in a revolution that takes place as a form of action and as an event in the world, rather than in us:

 

"The revolution is not supposed to take place inside us, it is external - and if we do it in ourselves, it is only a way to avoid doing it outside." [267]

 

Again, like Sartre whom he quotes, Deleuze suggests that ultimately everything is outside - including the self (l'existence précède l'essence, and all that jazz):

"'Outside, in the world, among others. It is not in some hiding-place that we will discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a human among humans.'" [268]

 

Interestingly, Deleuze finds this existentialism in the Gospel: Christ, he says, shows us a new possibility of life that is not lived posthumously in some kind of heaven, but in the external world. Only this, paradoxically, "is not a social, historical, localized world: it is our own internal life" [268].

 

Unfortunately, it's not this aspect of the Gospel that has triumphed and ultimately Christianity has been more bad news than good and brought about the disastrous "dissociation of Nature and Spirit" [268]. Deleuze continues:

 

"Some might say that the union did not exist at the time of the Greeks either. No matter. The identity of Nature and Spirit exists as nostalgia in the modern consciousness; whether it is defined in reference to Greece, to a state preceding original sin, or, if you prefer psychoanalysis, to a state prior to the trauma of birth, it matters little. Once upon a time there was a union between Nature and Spirit and this union formed an external world. Nature was mind and mind, nature; the subject was not involved except as an error coefficient." [268-69]  

 

Christianity subjectified both nature and spirit and ended up with a torn consciousness unable to grasp in itself "the relationship of natural life to spiritual life" [269]. Jesus as mediator came to fix this via the Gospel which is "the exteriority of an interiority" [269]. 

To be honest, I'm not sure I understand this. But let's see how Deleuze now relates this material to the bourgeois opposition between private life and the state ...

 

II.

At first glance, says Deleuze, this latter opposition seems "very different from the Christian opposition between Nature and Spirit" [269]. But - surprise, surprise - it isn't:

 

"The bourgeois has been able to internalize internal life as mediation of nature and spirit. By becoming private life, Nature was spiritualized in the form of family [...] and Spirit was naturalized in the form of homeland [...] What is important is that the bourgeoisie is defined first by the internal life and the primacy of the subject. [...] There is bourgeoisie as soon as there is submission of the exterior to an internal order [...]" [269]

 

Deleuze expands:

 

"The bourgeoisie is essentially internalized internal life, in other words the mediation of private life and state. Yet it fears the two extremes equally. [...] Its domain is the golden mean. It hates the excess of an overly individualistic private life of a romantic nature [...] Yet it is no less fearful of the state [...] The domain of the bourgeoisie is the domain of the apparently calm humanism of human rights. The bourgeois Person is substantialized mediation; it is defined formally by equality [...] and materially by internal life. If formal equality is materially refuted, there is no contradiction in the eyes of the bourgeois nor is there a reason for revolution. The bourgeois remains coherent." [270]

Ultimately, they have no interest in the question of to be or not to be; they wish to have (to own, to possess); property rights are their concern - not ontological unfolding. But money - as an abstract flow - is problematic; it is not substantialized, "on the contrary, it is fluctuating [...] Whence the threat and danger" [271]. Anticipating his work with Félix Guattari written twenty-five years later, Deleuze notes: "Money negates its own essence [...]" [271] and capitalism inexorably moves towards its own external limit [d].

So, in sum: the fraudulent and secretive bourgeoisie internalise interior life in the form of property, money, and possession: "everything that Christ abhorred and that he came to fight, to substitute being for it" [273] - coming, in effect, not to save the world, but to save man from the world (in all its manifest evil). 

 

Having said that, I rather like the world in all its demirugal and external beauty and resent the idea of salvation, however you present it ...      

 

Notes 

 

[a] Gilles Deleuze, 'From Christ to the Bourgeoisie', Letters and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2020). All page numbers given in the above post refer to this work.

 

[b] See Lori Marino, 'Thinking chickens: a review of cognition, emotion, and behavior in the domestic chicken', Animal Cognition 20, (Jan 2017), pp. 127-147. Click here to read online. 

 

[c] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Him With His Tail in His Mouth', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 307-317. Lawrence discusses forming a relationship with his Rhode Island Red on pp. 313-316.  

[d] In Anti-Oedipus, for example, Deleuze and Guattari describe money as that which has been substituted by capitalism for the very notion of a social code and which has created "an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius". See Anti-Oeipus, trans. Robert Hurley et al, (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 33. 

 

Part 1 of this series on Deleuze's youthful writings - Description of Women - can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

Notes on the Youthful Writings of Gilles Deleuze 1: Description of Women

 Young man, there's no need to feel down

 

 

I.

 

The first text that French philosopher Gilles Deleuze ever published, in the autumn of 1945, when still a 20-year old student, was a contribution towards a gendered philosophy of the other entitled 'Description of Women'.

 

Although he later renounced the piece - as he did other writings prior to 1953 - it has now been re-published with the agreement of his wife and daughter, in order to counter the unauthorised (and sometimes error-strewn) versions already in circulation. An English translation, by Ames Hodges, can be found in Letters and Other Texts, the third and final volume of posthumous pieces, edited by David Lapoujade, (Semiotext(e), 2020). Page numbers given below refer to this edition.            

 

 

II.

 

This amusing (sometimes confusing) work opens in agreement with Sartre that Heidegger was mistaken to conceive of Dasein in asexual terms; a philosophical insufficiency that makes the youthful Deleuze uneasy. Why that should be, I don't know. But one imagines that Deleuze, like many young Frenchmen, found it difficult not to view everything through the prism of sex, including human reality or being, and would naturally, therefore, think it utterly monstrous to conceive of an asexual world. 

 

Deleuze wants gender to be marked in both the lover and the beloved and for it to be essentially distinct in each; not for the sexual identity of the latter to merely be a pale reflection of that of the former: "Phenomenology must be of the loved one" [254], which I think means that the loved one should not be thought of as merely another type of subject, but philosophically acknowledged in their otherness as those who express the possibility of an entirely different and external world.         

 

And how does this relate to the question of women? Well, according to Deleuze, "the description of women cannot be made without reference to the male-Other" [255]. But this male-Other is absolutely not to be confused with that seductive being who wears makeup and torments tender young men, such as himself: 

 

"You could search in vain for the expression of an absent external world on the face of this woman. In her, all is presence. The woman expresses no possible world; or rather the possible that she expresses is not an external world, it is herself." [255]

 

At best, this self-expressive woman acts as an intermediary beween "the pure object that expresses nothing and the male-Other, who expresses something other than himself, an external world" [255].     

 

I'm not sure if I entirely understand what Deleuze is saying here - and, to be honest, I kind of like the sound of the woman with her enormous presence who possibilizes herself in the "overflowing triumph of flesh" [256]. I think she secretly thrills Deleuze as well; why else would he quote from Jean Giono's Le Chant du monde about the blood-tingling appeal of a female body? 

 

Deleuze might pretend that what really turns him on is the paradoxical fact that "the more she plunges into materiality" [256], the more this woman becomes immaterial and is returned to the being she is and its possibility of expression, but I suspect he's still thinking of her softness of belly and what Giono describes as her two big headlights when lying in bed at night. Such a woman may have no external world to offer, but she's desirable and provides a "compressed internalized world" [257] to find pleasure within. 

 

Unlike the young Deleuze, I don't see it as particularly dangerous or unspeakably painful for a woman to lose her being and become "no more than a belly, an overflowing materiality" [257]. For if, on the one hand, becoming-object allows for the "prodigious sexual success of women" [257], on the other, it allows them to gain their revenge upon the male subject (with whom friendship remains impossible).  

 

 

III.

 

So far, then, Deleuze has establised an opposition between woman and the male-Other. Only the latter  expresses a possible external world; to try and force the former into such a role compromises her internal life, with the latter understood as a union of contraries  - material and immaterial aspects - that combine together mysteriously to give woman her essential identity. 

 

Only a sadist would take pleasure in threatening this living interiority; the sort of man who imposes a mask of suffering on the woman, or who tells her: "Sit down and crease your forehead" [259].* 

 

Or the sort of man, perhaps, who would deny a girl her makeup kit (Deleuze is adamant that the supernatural art of cosmetics is crucial in the formation of a woman's essence); or her expensive shoes (Deleuze describes the ankles as an important site of womanly consciousness and so naturally favours high-heels).   

 

At this point, I'm sure there will be readers who will think I'm making this up - but I'm not; I'm doing my best to stick closely to the text. Deleuze really does, for example, write of eyeliner, lipstick, and nail varnish; he also discusses the problem of eyebrows (to pluck or not to pluck), beauty spots (of which we should be wary), and his penchant for freckles (a symbol of the interior): 

 

"I do not understand at all why women are ashamed of [...] freckles and combat them with makeup [...] It can only be explained by women being mistaken as to their own essence." [261]

 

This last line is, I would imagine, for many women - not just those who identify as feminists - particularly galling, coming as it does from a precocious young philosopher who concludes that secretive, lying women - whose place "is not outside, it is in the house" [259] - basically need a man to reveal their truth - and a lover to caress them:

 

"And if the lover can approach the essence of woman through the caress as act, it is because the woman herself is being as caress [...] The woman therefore needs a lover. A lover who caresses her, and that is all. [...] Her being only exists in the form of an act performed by another." [264-65]  

 

One wonders what Simone made of this if she read it ...?   

 

 

Notes

 

*I feel that some explanation is needed for this otherwise cryptic line: according to Deleuze, a wrinkle on the forehead of the male-Other is a good thing. For the forehead of the male-Other is made for long, well-defined lines, signifying the attempt to see and understand better. But a wrinkle on a woman's forehead - "Oh! [...] one could cry, it is ridiculous and touching" [259]. 

 

Part 2 of this series on Deleuze's youthful writings - From Christ to the Bourgeoisie - can be read by clicking here.

 

  

On Magical Names and the Nietzsche-Crowley Connection (A Post for Halloween)

Aleister Crowley aka Frater Perdurabo 

aka the Great Beast 666 

 

 

The practice of adopting a magical name or motto by a newly initiated member of an occult order - including members of the Golden Dawn, probably the best-known of all secret societies - has an amusing quaintness to it. 

 

The names, usually in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, are intended to express the neophyte's highest ideal towards which they aspire, or perhaps contain some esoteric allusion. Fellow members address them by their new identity so as to create a special bond and to help foster the feeling that they were leaving their old selves behind - even if those old selves were highly accomplished and respected in the everyday world. 

 

W. B. Yeats, for example, one of the foremost figures of twentieth-century poetry and a pillar of the Irish literary establishment, was still obliged to take on a new name when he joined the Golden Dawn by which he would be known; he initially chose the classical adage Festina Lente, though later changed his motto to Demon est Deus inversus. 

 

As for the Hermetic Order's most notorious member, Aleister Crowley - the wickedest man in the world and much despised by Yeats and other members of the Golden Dawn for his libertine lifestyle - he took the name Perdurabo when initiated by MacGregor ('S Rioghail Mo Dhream) Mathers, in November 1898. 

 

It's an interesting choice: and one wonders if Crowley was at all influenced by his reading of Nietzsche, for whom the idea of endurance was central to his Dionysian philosophy: 

 

"To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities - I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not - that one endures." [1]

 

We know that Crowley thought highly of Nietzsche, describing him as a Gnostic Saint, a prophet of the Aeon of Horus, and an avatar of Thoth, the god of wisdom. Crowley even wrote a short essay on Nietzsche (c. 1914-15), in which he attempted to vindicate the latter's work. 

 

So it's possible that Crowley was influenced by Zarathustra's incitement to become hard and learn how to endure like the diamond. I like to think so, at any rate ...

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1968), section 910, p. 481. 

 

It should be noted, of course, that this fragment by Nietzsche was published after Crowley joined the Golden Dawn; the first English translation of Der Will zur Macht came out in 1910 as part of the Oscar Levy edition. It's probably impossible to know for sure what books Crowley read by Nietzsche - and if he read them in the original German - but it's likely he was familiar with The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Anti-Christ. Readers who are interested in knowing more about the Nietzsche-Crowley (or, if you prefer, Crowley-Nietzsche) connection should visit the Thelemic Union website: click here. 

 

This post is for Christina.  

 

 

Perdurabo (Notes from a Hard Knock Life)

Becoming hard is the really distinctive sign 

of a Dionysian nature

 

 

One of the things I hate being asked - usually in relation to my role as a full-time carer for an elderly parent with Alzheimer's - is: How are you coping? 

 

It's a question that entirely misunderstands my situation and reveals that the questioner has failed to grasp the fact that, for me, this is not about finding a way to cope, but is, rather, all about endurance ...

 

What's the difference? 

 

Well, I suppose we might say - borrowing a term privileged by Nigel Baines - that coping is the attempt to stay afloat when feeling all at sea; i.e., learning how to deal effectively with a set of challenging circumstances in order to manage and minimise one's own stress and keep one's head above the water. 

 

Endurance, on the other hand, is the ability to withstand an extended period of trauma and fatigue; an affirmation of suffering and a willingness to go under - at the risk of drowning - in order to explore the depths and confront the horrors thereof.   

 

In other words, whilst coping is a psychological technique for self-preservation, endurance is a philosophical test of one's physical, mental, and emotional reserves in the face of danger. That's why Nietzsche valued only those individuals who could endure: 

 

"To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities - I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not - that one endures." [1]

          

That's a diamond-like teaching from Zarathustra's school of hard knocks. But perhaps my favourite quote in relation to this topic and the providing of care for a loved one, comes from a letter by the American writer Willa Cather to her younger brother in 1916:

 

"The test of one’s decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please." [2]

 

Precisely! And those charcoal souls - always planning how best to cope - will never understand this ... 

  

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1968), section 910, p. 481.   

[2] Willa Cather, letter to Charles Douglas Cather (8 July 1916), in A Calendar of Letters of Willa Cather: An Expanded, Digital Edition, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis P. Stout, The Willa Cather Archive: click here.    

 

Surprise musical bonus from the soundtrack of my life: click here. 

 

 

On Travel/Writing (with a Deleuzian Punchline)

 Have monogrammed trunk will travel 

 

To consider travel writing is one thing: but to conceive of literature as travel is something else; something a bit more philosophically interesting, a bit more Deleuzean ...

 

For Deleuze understood that penser c'est voyager and that the true nomad doesn't need to traipse around the world or migrate here and there; that they move even when standing still and that the most vital trips are in intensity, not space. 

 

Deleuze hinged his theory of travel upon observations from several writers, including: 

 

(i) Fitzgerald, who insisted that travelling - even to remote islands or the darkest jungles - never amounts to a real break if one takes along one's old beliefs, memories, and habits of thought ... 

 

(ii) Beckett, who described it as dumb to travel simply for the pleasure of travelling itself; there had to be a destination of some kind ...

 

(iii) Proust, who said that upon waking the true dreamer has to go and check things out in the world; i.e., what motivates their desire to travel is not to discover new lands, but to confirm the reality of their own nightmares and visions. [1]     

 

Deleuze was also a serious reader of D. H. Lawrence - and Lawrence was both a great traveller and a great writer, frequently overtaken by the necessity to move, although, amusingly, his own savage pilgrimage ultimately brought him to the conclusion that travel is a splendid lesson in disillusion. [2]

 

Of course, that hasn't stopped Lawrence scholars packing their suitcases and floating from international conference to conference, in order to endlessly discuss Lawrence's world tour and talk about his uncanny ability to connect with the so-called spirit of place. 

 

For as Deleuze once joked, that's how academics travel - by generating a lot of hot air ...   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Gilles Deleuze: 'Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel', Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 77-78.  

 

[2] Readers interested in knowing more about Lawrence's thoughts on travel can click here for a related post to this one.  

This post is for Adam Peter Lang.

 

 

On the Limits of Staying Afloat

 Flying Carp Books (2019)

nigelbaines.com

 

To be fair, Nigel Baines defines himself as a cartoonist and illustrator, rather than a writer, and his graphic memoir, Afloat, which documents his experience of caring for someone with dementia, interspersed with reflections on his childhood, gerontology, and the death of a beloved parent (in this case, the woman he refers to throughout as mum), is more successful as a pictorial project, than as a written work.   

 

Indeed, one wonders why he didn't simply produce a wordless book in the style of Frans Masereel or Lynd Ward: I think that might have worked better. 

 

For I sometimes found the narrator's voice intrusive and slightly flippant in tone. I also think that the silence of the text would have nicely echoed the silence that the demented subject often slips into. Further, as Baines himself notes, often the most important thing in graphic novels - as in life - happens in the spaces between panels and the silences between words; that's where stories unfold.  

 

Having said that, perhaps it's necessary to provide some autobiographical background and maybe the personal element is something that's all too often missing in my own musings on this topic.

 

However, you have to exercise caution with such material. Otherwise, as is the case here, you end up telling us too much about yourself and not enough about the ravishing violence of dementia. In his attempt to stay afloat, Baines misses the opportunity - at the risk of drowning - to really plumb the depths of pain, loss, and the other profoundly monstrous aspects of life lived in extremis.    

Notes

 

Thanks to Catherine Brown for kindly gifting me this book. 

 

For a follow up post to this one on coping contra enduring, click here. 

Welcome to Free Town (Beware of the Bears!)

(PublicAffairs, 2020)

 

 

I.

 

Although vaguely sympathetic to the principles of libertarian philosophy, I certainly wouldn't call myself a libertarian and think that even freedom becomes problematic when turned into an ideal: I can see why limits might be placed upon individual liberty and I accept the need for some form of minimal state. 

 

Thus it is that Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling's new book attracted my interest ... 

 

 

II. 

 

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear (2020) amusingly exposes the shortcomings of libertarian politics put in to practice; in this case, the attempt to establish a self-governing, small-town utopia in rural New Hampshire, in which everyone marches to the beat of a different drum and no one pays taxes. 

 

Twenty years ago, a group of self-styled free radicals came up with the Free Town Project; a plan to take over a small community of roughly a thousand souls and shape it in their own image. In 2004, they moved to Grafton, NH, a sparsely populated settlement with only one main road running through it and quickly took control - just like the corrupt New York City police officers who dominated Garrison, NJ, in the movie Cop Land (1997). 

The first thing they did was cut public funding by 30 percent, negatively impacting the schoolhouse, the library, and the fire department. State and federal laws were still on the books, but no longer enforced. Citizens were free to carry whatever weapons they liked, ignore hunting regulations, and dispose of their own garbage however they saw fit.

 

Soon, with rubbish piling up and sensing an opportunity, the local bears decided to move into town and an ideologically-driven social experiment conducted by quirky individuals who had met over the internet in dubious chatrooms where they discussed Ayn Rand, came up against grizzly reality. 

 

It seems that autonomous individuals don't always self-regulate and assist one another - they don't even empty their bins! Living free often means living an impoverished existence in which one is always at risk - if not from bears and potholes, then from one's neighbours (New Hampshire has the highest per capita rate of ownership for fully automatic weapons). 

 

As Hongoltz-Hetling notes, despite all their best efforts, the 200-odd libertarians who had promised to create a robust and dynamic private sector, had instead made an already poor town much worse off - and overrun with aggressive and increasingly bold black bears, whilst those now in positions of authority argued whether they should or should not do something about it. 

 

(Surely it was up to each individual to defend themselves and their property? Isn't bear management just another statist attempt at control?)         

 

Ultimately, the New Town project failed because no one - or, at least, no one in their right mind - wants to encounter a huge hungry bear in their backyard. 

 

As Patrick Blanchfield concludes in an excellent review of Hongoltz-Hetling's book, whether libertarians wish to accept it or not, "when it comes to certain kinds of problems, the response must be collective, supported by public effort, and dominated by something other than too-tidy-by-half invocations of market rationality and the maximization of individual personal freedom."

 

 

 

    

See:

 

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, A Libertarian Walks into a Bear, (PublicAffairs, 2020).

Patrick Blanchfield, 'The Town That Went Feral', The New Republic, (Oct 13, 2020): click here to read online.