Excessive Brightness Drove the Poet into Darkness

Damien Hirst: Black Sun (2004) 

Flies and resin on canvas (144" diameter)

Photograph: Prudence Cuming Associates 

© Damien Hirst and Science Ltd.

 

 

I. 

 

For D. H. Lawrence, darkness is not thought negatively as a total lack or absence of visible light. 

 

In fact, for Lawrence - as for Heidegger - the dark is the secret of the light [1]; an idea that reminds one of the esoteric teachings of Count Dionys on the concealed reality of the sun and the invisibility of fire.

 

According to the latter, the brightness of sunshine is epiphenomenal and there would be no light at all were it not for refraction, due to bits of dust and stuff, making the dark fire visible: 

 

"'And that being so, even the sun is dark [...] And the true sunbeams coming towards us flow darkly, a moving darkness of the genuine fire. The sun is dark, the sunshine flowing to us is dark. And light is only the inside-out of it all, the lining, and the yellow beams are only the turning away of the sun's directness.'" [2]

 

Thus our luminous daytime world is really just a surface effect; the underlying reality is of a powerfully throbbing darkness, as great thinkers have always understood and which is recognised within various religious mythologies [3].

 

 

II. 

 

Some of Lawrence's loveliest poetry is written, therefore, beneath the dark light of a black sun [4]. But he also acknowledges the chthonic reality of darkness and likes to write of the hellish aspect of flowers, insisting, for example, that they are a gift of Hades, not Heaven [5]. 

 

This is clear in these lines from his famous poem 'Bavarian Gentians':    

 

"Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark

darkening the day-time, torch-like, with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom" [6]     

 

In 'Gladness of Death', meanwhile, Lawrence dreams of actually becoming what some might term a fleur du mal:

 

"I have always wanted to be as the flowers are

so unhampered in their living and dying,

and in death I believe I shall be as the flowers are.

I shall blossom like a dark pansy, and be delighted

there among the dark sun-rays of death. 

I can feel myself unfolding in the dark sunshine of death

to something flowery and fulfilled, and with a strange sweet perfume." [7]

 

At other times, however, Lawrence's dark musing is less floral in character and takes on a more nihilistic aspect as he longs for complete non-existence:

 

"No, now I wish the sunshine would stop,

and the white shining houses, and the gay red flowers on the balconies

and the bluish mountains beyond, would be crushed out

between two halves of darkness;

the darkness falling, the darkness rising, with muffled sound

obliterating everything. 

 

I wish that whatever props up the walls of light

would fall, and darkness would come hurling heavily down,

and it would be thick black dark forever.

Not sleep, which is grey with dreams,

nor death, which quivers with birth,

but heavy, sealing darkness, silence, all immovable." [8]

 

Now, I know that post-Freudians - even really smart ones like Julia Kristeva [9] - will tend to read a poem like this in terms of dépression et mélancolie, but those of us who know Lawrence will understand the necessity of being made nothing and dipped into oblivion [10].   

 

Notes

 

[1] Martin Heidegger, Basic Principles of Thinking (Freiburg Lectures, 1957), in Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, (Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 88.

      In a poem entitled 'In the Dark', the narrator (whom we can assume to be Lawrence) tells a frightened female figure (whom we can assume to be Frieda) that even when she dances in sunshine, it is dark behind her - as if her shadow were the essential aspect of her being. 

      See D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 170-71. And cf. this stanza from 'Climb down, O lordly mind': "Thou art like the day / but thou art also like the night, / and thy darkness is forever invisible, / for the strongest light throws also the darkest shadow." The Poems, Vol. I, p. 411.     

 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, The Ladybird, in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 180. 

      Lawrence probably got this idea of the black sun from Mme. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine (1888), though it by no means originated in theosophy; the ancient alchemists, for example, also wrote of the sol niger. Today, it's our physicists who talk of dark energy and dark matter; and neo-Nazis who fetishise the symbol of the black sun.       

 

[3] In Greek mythology, for example, Erebos was one of the primordial deities; born of Chaos, he was a personification of darkness.

 

[4] Lawrence's 'Twilight', for example, opens with the line: "Darkness comes out of the earth". See The Poems, Vol. I, p. 12.

 

[5] See 'Purple Anemones', The Poems, Vol. I, pp. 262-64.       

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'Bavarian Gentians' [1], The Poems, Vol. I, p. 610. 

      See also 'Glory of Darkness' [1], The Poems, Vol. I, p. 591, in which Lawrence eulogises the darkness embodied in some Bavarian gentians which make "a magnificent dark-blue gloom" in his sunny room.  

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Gladness of Death' [2], The Poems, Vol. I, p. 584.  

[8] These are the first two stanzas of Lawrence's '"And oh - that the man I am might cease to be -"', The Poems, Vol. I, pp. 165-66. 

      This theme of an annihilating darkness can also be found in 'Our day is over', ibid., p. 369.

[9] See Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, (Columbia University Press, 1989). 

      For Kristeva, depression is a form of discourse with a language to be learned, rather than strictly a pathology to be treated. This depressive discourse often reveals itself in poetry or other creative forms of self-expression. See Garry Drake's M.A. thesis - D. H. Lawrence's Last Poems: 'A Dark Cloud of Sadness', (University of Saskatchewan, 2008) - which reads Lawrence's work in light of Kristeva's theory: click here. 

[10] I'm referring here to one of Lawrence's last poems, 'Phoenix', which can be found in The Poems, Vol. I, pp. 641-42. 

Most of the poems by Lawrence that I refer to in this post can be found online:

 

'In the Dark' - click here.

 

'Twilight' [aka 'Palimpsest of Twilight] - click here. 

 

'Purple Anemones' - click here. 

 

'Bavarian Gentians' - click here. 

 

'Glory of Darkness' - click here.

 

'And oh - that the man I am might cease to be' - click here.

 

'Our day is over' - click here. 

 

 

For a sister post to this one, click here. 

 

 

Hello Darkness My Old Friend ...

Hello darkness, my old friend - by Niranjan Morkar

dribble.com

 

 

I. 

 

The three fundamental laws of logic - (i) the law of non-contradiction; (ii) the law of the excluded middle; and (iii) the principle of identity - are all well and good, but cannot be thought valid for all forms of thinking. 

 

Why? Because - whether our logicians like to admit it or not - some forms of thinking rely upon creative madness and daimonic inspiration and so are not regulated by reason alone. 

 

Our very greatest poets, for example, playfully affirm paradox, ambiguity, and what Barthes terms the pleasure of the text; they are unafraid of appearing inconsistent or irrational and are proud to proclaim that if, like Whitman, they contradict themselves that's fine with them (for they contain multitudes) [1].        

 

II. 

 

Similarly, our great poet-philosophers, like Heidegger, argue that even the most enlightened thinking requires darkness: 

 

"This darkness is perhaps in play for all thinking at all times. Humans cannot set it aside. Rather they must learn to acknowledge the dark as something unavoidable and to keep at bay those prejudices that would destroy the lofty reign of the dark. Thus the dark remains distinct from the pitch black as the mere and utter absence of light. The dark however is the secret of the light. The dark keeps the light to itself. The latter belongs to the former. Thus the dark has its own limpidity." [2] 

 

This dark limpidity of thinking, is something that must always be protected. However, it's hard to do so when everything is now lit up with electric lights and we aspire to an ideal of excessive brightness that is brighter than a thousand suns.

 

As Heidegger says:   

 

"The light is no longer an illuminated clearing, when the light diffuses into a mere brightness [...] It remains difficult [...] to keep at bay the admixture of the brightness that does not belong and to find the brightness that is alone fitting to the dark. [...] Mortal thinking must let itself down into the dark depths of the well if it is to see the stars by day. It remains more difficult to guard the limpidity of the dark than to procure a brightness that only wants to shine as such. What only wants to shine, does not illuminate. [3]

 

In sum: whenever you start to think about thinking, you are instantly transported into darkness ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 51: click here to read on poets.org.  

 

[2] Martin Heidegger, Basic Principles of Thinking (Freiburg Lectures, 1957), in Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, (Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 88.

 

[3] Ibid., pp. 88-89. 

 

 

This post (as promised) is for Jenina Bas Pendry. 

 

For a sister post to this one, click here.

It's Not the Cough That Carries You Off ...

Capsula Mundi

 Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel

 

 

Growing up, whenever I had a cold my father liked to joke (à la George Formby Sr.): It's not the cough that carries you off - it's the coffin they carry you off in [1].

I remembered this when reading the following passage from Heidegger in relation to the German regular verb stellen (which in English means to set in place, or to position):

"The carpenter produces a table, but also a coffin. What is produced, set here, is not tantamount to the merely finished. What is set here stands in the purview of what concernfully approaches us. It is set here in a nearness. The carpenter in the village does not complete a box for a corpse. The coffin is from the outset placed in a privileged spot of the farmhouse where the dead peasant still lingers. There, a coffin is still called a 'death-tree' [Totenbaum]. The death of the deceased flourishes in it. This flourishing determines the house and the farmstead, the ones who dwell there, their kin, and the neighbourhood. 

      Everything is otherwise in the motorized burial industry of the big city. Here no death-trees are produced." [2]   

Personally, I would love to be buried like King Arthur in a coffin made from a tree trunk, preferably oak, that has been split longitudinally and hollowed out by a skilled local carpenter. 

 

Having said that, I'd be just as satisfied with any number of alternative arrangements, providing they can legitimately be described as natural (eco-friendly) forms of burial; i.e., methods of interment which use biodegradable materials and do not artificially inhibit decomposition of the corpse. 

 

Basically, as long as my body is free to rot, I'll be happy - although, at the moment, I'm particularly keen on the egg-shaped burial pods envisioned by designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel, which will have trees planted directly above them, so that decomposing waste is sucked up by hungry young root systems in search of nutrients.

 

In this way, death flourishes, as Heidegger would say, and this flourishing determines (in part at least) the surrounding woodland and the life within it.     

 

 

Notes

[1] George Formby Sr. (1875-1921) - known as 'The Wigan Nightingale' - is acknowledged as one of the greatest music hall performers of the early 20th century. His comedy played upon northern stereotypes and his own poor health; he even incorporated his bronchial cough into his act and came up with the saying that my father liked to repeat whenever the opportunity to do so arose. He died of pulmonary tuberculosis aged 45.    

 

[2] Martin Heidegger, 'Positionality', from the 1949 Bremen Lecture series Insight Into That Which Is, see Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, (Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 25. 

 

 

This post is for Heide Hatry: Königin des Todes und eine Ausnahmekünstlerin.

I Shall Speak of Geist, of Flame, and of Glimpses

Glimpse of a goddess (2017) by Syd Mills (Vetyr)

See: V's art on tumblr.com 

Buy: on inprnt.com

 

 

I. 

 

One of my favourite English words of German origin is glimpse.

 

Whilst most people understand it simply to mean a brief or partial view - to catch a quick look, perhaps in passing, of something or someone - it has a more poetic and philosophical resonance for those with ears to hear ...

 

 

II. 

 

D. H. Lawrence, for example, was fascinated by the word glimpse and often used it in the verses found in The Nettles Notebook, suggesting that aspects of divinity are revealed in the faces and forms of people when they are momentarily unaware of themselves:

 

When men and women, when lads and girls are not thinking,

when they are pure, which means when they are quite clean from self-consciouness

either in anger or tenderness, or desire or sadness or wonder or mere stillness 

you may see glimpses of the gods in them. [1]

  

It's this glimmer of godhood which gives human beings their more-than-human beauty; which makes the flesh gleam with a kind of radiance or the bright flame of being:

 

O, if a flame is in you, be it so!

When your flame flickers up, and you flicker forth in sheer purity

for a moment pure from all conceit of yourself, and all after-thought

you are for that moment one of the gods [...] [2]

 

Without this flamy element, we cannot become who we are, says Lawrence.   

 

 

III.

 

German philosopher Martin Heidegger would surely appreciate what Lawrence writes here. For he too wrote of flame (as the being of spirit) [3] and he also privileged the word Blick, which I would translate as glimpse, but which is given here as glance:

 

"In the glance [im Blick] and as the glance, what is essencing enters into its own illumination. Through the element of its illumination, the glance shelters back in the glancing whatever it catches sight of; at the same time, glancing likewise guards in illumination the hidden darkness of its provenance as what is unilluminated." [4]   

 

A glimpse is thus a kind of lightning flash in which the truth of being is revealed. 

 

In other words, it provides what Heidegger describes as an insight into that which is. And that's important: for as long as we do not experience what is, then "we can never belong to what will be" [5].     

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'All sorts of gods', The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 579. 

      See also the related verses 'Glimpses' [579], 'For a moment' [579-580], and 'Man is more than homo sapiens' [581-82]. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Be it so', ibid., p. 581.   

 

[3] Derrida picks up on the idea that in German Geist ist Flamme (rather than breath, as it is in Greek and Latin); see Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, (University of Chicago Press, 1989). 

      Readers of Nietzsche may also recall at this point his famous closing line to the poem 'Ecce Homo': Flamme bin ich sicherlich! The poem can be found in 'Joke Cunning, and Revenge', Nietzsche's prelude of rhymes to The Gay Science.       

 

[4] Martin Heidegger, 'The Turn', from the 1949 Bremen Lecture series Insight Into That Which Is, see Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, (Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 70.  

[5] Ibid., p. 72. 

On Autumn

Giuseppe Arcimboldo: Autumn (1573)

 

"I notice that autumn is more a season of the soul than nature ..." 

 

 

Ever since childhood, autumn has been my favourite season: a time of conkers and bonfires; pumpkins and toffee apples; giant spiders and daddy longlegs ... What's not to love? I even like the first sharp frosts and shortening of the days.    

 

I've certainly never found anything painful or depressing about this season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and poets who do, I would suggest, merely reveal their own melancholic dispositions [1].

 

Still, not to worry; who needs sad and sickly poets when there are philosophers capable of writing lines like these which beautifully capture the joy of this time of year:

 

"Autumn - not deterioration and dying, not the over and done - quite to the contrary, the fiery, glowing entrance into the certain silence of a new time of waking to the unfolding - the acquisition of the restraint of the established jubilation of the inexhaustibe greatness of being [Sein] at its bursting forth." [2]   

 

  

Notes

 

[1] To his credit, although there are traces of sadness and regret in Keats's famous ode that I quote from here, he primarily affirms the fact that autumn is a season of great beauty and abundance. To Autumn (1819) can be read on the Poetry Foundation website: click here.          

 

[2] Martin Heidegger, 'Intimations x Ponderings (II) and Directives', (95), in Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 26. 

      One might argue that this short piece demonstrates that philosophy is poetic in a way that poetry never can be (in much the same manner that it's scientific in a way that no science can be). 

 

 

Bonus: to read a fascinating web feature entitled Nietzsche: The Problem of Autumn, by David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates, (University of Chicago Press, 1997), please click here.  

 

 

On the Spiritualisation of Politics

(Indiana University Press, 2016)

 

 

When, in the Black Notebooks, Heidegger attempts to distinguish a spiritual national socialism from its more vulgar form [1], I assume he's dreaming of a non-ideological politics founded upon a non-theoretical understanding of being, contra the crude biological fantasy of racial purity adhered to by Party ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg. 

 

But I might be mistaken. For it's tricky - to say the least - to know for sure what Heidegger means when he speaks of Geist (or national socialism) and one invariably falls back on Derrida's brilliant and provocative study, Of Spirit, in search of clues [2]. 

 

Whether I do or do not fully understand what Heidegger means, I'm reminded that D. H. Lawrence anticipated this spiritualising of national socialism in The Plumed Serpent (1926); i.e., several years before Heidegger made his (infamous) rectoral address in 1933.

 

As Lawrence soon discovered, the problem is that when one attempts to realise one's ontological vision - or substantiate living mystery - within the world of history and politics, one opens up not only new areas of thought, but new (and tragic) possibilities of action. 

 

For even the most spiritual of revolutions requires "manipulative controls and coercive regulations to sustain itself against those who resist or evade its strictures" [3]. And so it is that Ramón's neo-pagan revolution soon collapsed into a black hole:

 

"The whole country was thrilling with a new thing, with a release of new energy. But there was a sense of violence and crudity in it all, a touch of horror." [4]  

 

Much the same could be said of Hitler's Third Reich; it promised to restore to the world an aura of primordial wonder, but ... Well, we all know what happened in the end [5].   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Martin Heidegger, 'Ponderings and Intimations' III, in Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 2016). 

 

[2] Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, (University of Chicago Press, 1989). 

      Derrida's musing on the shifting role of Geist in Hedegger's work - particularly after 1933 and in relation to the latter's engagement with national socialism - remains fascinating, even if written more than twenty-five years prior to publication of the Schwarze Hefte (which commenced in 2014).        

 

[3] William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity, (Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 66. 

      The problem is, even if a movement is populist in character, it still cannot speak to and for everyone in a modern plural society - and that's why even the most spiritual of revolutionary leaders ends up relying on the army and secret police. 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 420. 

[5] Similarly, we all know how things turned out in Iran after the 1979 revolution, which, at the time, was greeted enthusiastically by numerous intellectuals, including Michel Foucault, who believed it promised a welcome new form of political spirituality. See James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, (Flamingo, 1994), p. 309.    

Fragment from the Dementia Diary: Day 2000

Ich und meine Mutter (SA/2021)

  

 

Day 2000 - much like any of the previous 1,999 days spent here (continuously) since 2 April, 2016:

 

08.00: get my mother up, washed, and dressed ...

 

09.00: do my mother's breakfast and administer medication ...

 

10.00: do the shopping and pick up my mother's prescription from chemist ...

 

11.30: start preparing my mother's midday meal ...

 

16.30: start preparing my mother's tea ...

 

19.30: do toast and tea for my mother's supper ...

 

20.00: administer more pills ...

 

21.00: put my mother to bed ...

 

In between the above routine tasks: do the washing up; do the laundry; clean the house; do the gardening; pay the bills; make cups of tea, take my mother to and from the toilet, feed the cat, etc. Very little time to read, write, think, or breathe.  

 

As I said on Day 1, I repeat now: caring is tedious and depressing. Any small joys are fleeting and what we extol as blessing depends on what afflicts us as plight [Heidegger].  

 

 

On the Question of Distance and Proximity

Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant - Heidegger [1]

 

 

I.

 

In what I thought was an important post written at the start of the year, I invited members of the D. H. Lawrence Society and wider Lawrence world to reconsider their use of (and increasing reliance upon) Zoom: click here.

 

Alas, despite the post picking up almost 1,300 views, it seems that my fellow Lawrentians decided to ignore the issue I raised concerning technology and carry on Zooming. 

 

Indeed, during the summer, the D. H. Lawrence Society of Great Britain even organised and hosted an international virtual symposium in the belief that such an online event would bring "Lawrence scholars and enthusiasts from around the world back into proximity" [2].

 

In order to indicate why this belief is philosophically naive, let us turn to Heidegger's thought in this area ...

 

 

II.   

 

In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that natural science depends on a concept of time and space that limits our understanding of being in the world. We cannot construct meaningful notions of distance - this is near, that is far - or appreciate how things might reveal themselves in a manner that isn’t enframed by technology, simply based on what our boffins tell us. 

 

Twenty-years later, in his Bremen lecture series, Heidegger notes that because of planes, trains, and automobiles - as well as advances in the telecommunications industry - all distances in time and space are shrinking and yet, paradoxically, this does not bring nearness; for the latter does not consist in the mere closing of distance. 

 

Indeed, not only has nearness remained far away, but, if anything, it has become kept at bay by the frantic abolition of all distances [3].

 

The irony is, because everything in an age of techno-obscenity is close-up and immediately present in HD, we no longer have any experience of the nearness of those things that are nearest to us. For in order to experience nearness one needs to encounter things as things; i.e., in their actuality, not merely as representations or images on a screen.

 

One needs, in other words, to appreciate that the distance between objects is not something that can simply be measured in feet and inches; for it is neither neutral nor abstract, but a question of lived experience - or, more precisely, what Lawrence would think of in terms of relationship (or touch). 

 

Zoom, which during the coronavirus pandemic has risen to a position of dominance within the world of social media [4], will not enable you to climb down Pisgah and back into the nearness of the nearest; nor will it allow you to come back into touch, or meet within what Lawrence terms the fourth dimension.

 

I would suggest, in closing, that Heidegger is right to argue that nothing is more unearthly (and less Lawrentian) than the (nihilistic) collapsing of everything into uniform distancelessness, so that everything present is equally near and equally far. Those who value proximity need to recognise the importance of also preserving distance.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Martin Heidegger, 'Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?', trans. Bernd Magnus, in The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 20, no. 3 (March 1967), pp. 411–31. Click here to read on JSTOR. 

 

[2] I'm quoting from the promotional pdf for 'D. H. Lawrence, Distance and Proximity: an international virtual symposium' (10-14 July, 2021): click here.

[3] Martin Heidegger, 'The Thing', Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, (HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 161-180.

[4] In 2020, Zoom was the fifth most downloaded mobile app in the world.

O For a Slice of Possum and Yam!

I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten

Look away, look away, look away, Dixieland [1]

 

 

I.

 

I don't know for sure when the utopian fantasy of Dixie first entered my imagination as a child, or why it has remained there ever since. I've never been to the American South and it's unlikely I ever will. But I've always dreamed of doing so ...

 

 

II. 

 

I suspect I first heard of this mytho-cultural region [2] in the classic Laurel and Hardy film Way Out West (1937). 

 

At the end of the movie, their troubles over, Stan and Ollie - accompanied by a young women on a mule - decide to head way down south where the hens are doggone glad to lay / scrambled eggs in the new mown hay ... [3] 

 

I don't know if that's true about the hens, but it illustrates the thing that people in the Southern States pride themselves on and value above all else: hospitality.     

   

III.     

 

Southern hospitality - like much else associated with Dixie - is today sneered at and cast in a negative political light. The courtesy, kindness, and generosity shown to strangers was founded, it is pointed out, on a system of slavery:

 

"African Americans had little place in this initial conceptualization of hospitality beyond the role of servant. Yet, it was the labor and hardships of the enslaved that allowed southern planters to entertain their guests so lavishly and seemingly so effortlessly. Southern hospitality from and for whites was in large part achieved by being inhospitable and inhumane to African Americans." [4] 

 

This (apparent) contradiction is usually presented as evidence of the corruption and hypocrisy of Southern society in the antebellum era, but it could be seen to provide a justification for slavery - if one wished to misinterpret the above somewhat perversely.

 

At any rate, one is reminded of Nietzsche's contention that, contrary to the liberal belief that slavery and suffering are morally objectionable and that society should therefore do everything in its power to eradicate these twin evils, culture requires cruelty ... [5]    

 

 

13-starred variant of the first national flag of

the Confederate States of America (1861-1865)

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lyrics from I Wish I Was in Dixie (1859), by Dan Emmett (1815-1904). 

      If best remembered today as the composer of this song, Emmett was also founder of the Virginia Minstrels, the first troupe of performers in this tradition. To listen to a contemporary version of Dixie, sung by Bob Dylan, click here.

 

[2] Obviously, Dixie - or, if you prefer, Dixieland - isn't purely a mytho-cultural fantasy. But whilst it refers to the Southern States, there's no agreement about which ones; i.e., there's no clear or official definition of which states constitute the region, although most people would agree that, at the very least, it includes (or at one time included) the eleven states which seceded from the Union to form the Confederacy in 1860-61: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee. 

      I have to admit, I like the idea that the location and boundaries of Dixie have, over time, become increasingly subjective and variable. I like also that the origins of the term Dixie are themselves obscure and disputed. 

 

[3] As they set off on their journey, the happy trio break into their version of the Irving Berlin / Ted Snyder song, I Want to Be in Dixie (1912): click here.

 

[4] Derek H. Alderman and E. Arnold Modlin Jr., 'Southern hospitality and the politics of African American belonging: an analysis of North Carolina tourism brochure photographs', Journal of Cultural Geography, Vol. 30, No. 1, (2012), pp. 6-31. The lines quoted are on p. 12. Click here to read as a pdf online.

      For a book-length study of this topic, see: Anthony Szczesiul, The Southern Hospitality Myth: Ethics, Politics, Race, and American Memory, (University of Georgia Press, 2017).      

[5] Nietzsche's thoughts on this topic are explicit and he doesn't shy away from drawing the social and political implications of his view that a high level of culture requires discipline, breeding, and hierarchy; that man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him.

      Of course, the good people of the South, such as Alexander H. Stephens, who vehemently defended the institution of slavery, based their arguments for white supremacy on spurious racial science, the so-called laws of nature, and biblical teaching; not Nietzschean philosophy. Similarly, when it came to being hospitable, they acted in the name of Jesus, not Zarathustra, and their good deeds were a reflection of their Christian beliefs. 

      It's difficult to imagine Nietzsche siding with the Confederacy, therefore, although there are some scholars, such as Martin A. Rhuel - a lecturer in German intellectual history at Cambridge - who would disagree. See his essay 'In defence of slavery: Nietzsche's dangerous thinking', in the Independent (12 January 2018): click here.         

Explain to the Angels Who Norm Macdonald Is ...

Norm Macdonald (1959-2021)

AP Photo / Dan Steinberg (2008)

 

 

If I remember correctly, the first time I ever saw Norm Macdonald was on an episode of Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.*

 

It was clear that whether doing an impression of Richard Nixon discussing the Watergate break-in, telling a story about an (imaginary) episode of Kojak involving Crocker and a murdered prostitute, or simply reacting to hot sauce on his food, he was a uniquely funny character. 

 

Equally clear from the many tributes paid by friends and fellow comics following his death earlier this week, is the fact that he was much loved as well as hugely admired. Of these, Bob Saget's video posted on YouTube is perhaps the most touching: click here.  

 

On a lighter note ... A frog goes into a bank to get a loan ... 

 

* See 'A Rusty Car in the Rain', episode 2 of season 9, (Jan 12, 2017). Available on Netflix or you can click here to watch (a mirror-image version of) the episode on dailymotion.com