Clan Mackie (Or How We Can All Play Identity Politics If We Want To)

Elizabeth Jane Hall née Mackie 

(my maternal grandmother)

As a rule, I don't like to play identity politics or think in terms of blood and soil; ethnonationalism and a tedious obsession with ancestral roots always seems to have ugly (often fatal) consequences.

However, it may interest some readers to know that I can trace my own history to a Lowland family who were part of the now armigerous clan Mackie; i.e., a clan presently lacking official status or standing under Scots law, failing as it does to have a chief recognised by the Lord Lyon, King of Arms.

The name - familiar to many as the makers of ice cream - is the Anglicised form of the Gaelic MacAoidh, meaning 'Son of Fire'. One might have assumed that the clan coat of arms would therefore have a flame on it, or perhaps a phoenix rising, but it actually has a couple of dead ravens (shot through with an arrow) and a lion.

I don't mind that, but have to admit to finding the clan motto - labora - rather disappointing. It seems to me that sons of fire are sent to set the world ablaze, not to toil.

Equally disappointing is to discover that the clan Mackie doesn't have its own registered tartan, that they (we) are obliged to borrow one of the tartans belonging to the Mackays (of whom the Mackies are but a sept).

Still, it doesn't really matter ... I feel as if I belong more to the punk clan McLaren than to the Mackies, to be honest.

And that's the point: it's our cultural affiliations, our ideas and tastes, that make us who we are and friends and strangers ultimately mean far more to me than kith and kin. For whilst blood is thicker than water, I know which I prefer to see flowing ...     

Notes 

For an earlier post which also addresses this question of blood and water, click here. 

For more info on the clan Mackie, click here.

Sid Vicious: My Way

Sleeve art for the 7" single release (Virgin Records, 1978) 

from the album The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (Virgin Records, 1979)  

For many people, the most memorable scene in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle is the one in which Sid Vicious gives his own unique interpretation of that sentimental slice of cheese made famous by Sinatra: My Way.  

Whatever one might think of him, there's no denying that the 20 year-old Sex Pistol gives an astonishing performance and embodies a look and a moment of punk perfection on stage at the Olympia, Paris.

Indeed, even Paul Anka, who wrote the song - adapted from on an earlier release by Claude François and Jacques Revaux - conceded in an interview thirty years later that whilst he had been somewhat destabilized by Sid's version, he nevertheless admired the sincerity of the performance.

And French pop's greatest poet and pervert, Serge Gainsbourg, who witnessed Sid's finest few minutes on stage, was so smitten that - according to Malcolm - he thereafter kept a picture of him on his piano, alongside that of Chopin.

Whether that's true or not, I don't know. And whether Sid ever did anything his way is, of course, highly debatable; philosophically speaking, the very idea of free will determining an individual's actions seems dubious.

One suspects that had it been his decision, Sid would have covered a Ramones track and that the choice of this particular number was therefore McLaren's. Still, it was a good choice - and a fateful choice; for Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, the end really was near ... 


See: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, dir. Julien Temple, 1980: click here to watch Sid's magnificent performance of 'My Way'. 

Note: Sid's firing of a gun blindly into the audience at the end of the song is a nod towards André Breton's idea of what constitutes the simplest act of Surrealism and is evidence of how the artistic and philosophical roots of the Sex Pistols lay in Paris as much as London and New York. 

For a related post to this one on Sid's Parisian adventures in 1978 as a kind of punk flâneur, click here.           

A Sex Pistol in Paris

One of the more amusing scenes in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle features Sid Vicious wandering the streets of Paris in the spring of '78, confronting locals including a policeman, a prostitute, and a young female fan working in a pâtisserie.

One is tempted to describe it as a provocative form of punk dérive - a mode of experimental behavior, theorised by Guy Debord, in which individuals aimlessly stroll through the city and allow themselves to be seduced by the attractions of urban society and random encounters with strangers. 

I'm not saying that Sid gave a shit about psychogeography - or that he needed lessons from anyone on emotional disorientation - but, as a Sex Pistol, he was well-versed by Malcolm in the art of creating situations that challenge the predictable and monotonous character of everyday life and he cuts an undeniably unique figure as a spiky-haired flâneur, beer bottle in hand, and wearing his favourite swastika emblazoned red t-shirt ...

See: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, dir. Julien Temple, 1980: click here to watch the scenes of Sid drifting round Paris as discussed above. 

For a related post to this one on Sid's performance of 'My Way', click here. 

On Courage and Cowardice (with Reference to the Case of Sir Craig Mackey)

Sir Craig Mackey with the white feather he should receive 

when stripped of his knighthood

Image: Press Association

I. Courage

Courage - be it bravery in the face of physical danger or hardship, or the determination to do the right thing even in the teeth of popular opposition - is one of those ancient virtues that still resonates today. One is even tempted to suggest it's a universal human value.

Certainly in the Western philosophical tradition, courage is right up there; Socrates and his followers may have subjected it to questioning and been unable to ever quite arrive at a satisfactory definition of what it is, but they never doubted its importance. The man who would be master of himself must be able to control his fear and endure suffering. And wisdom alone, as Cicero knew, isn't enough here; it also requires the heart's strength. 

Even Christian thinkers in the medieval period admired courage - often thought of in terms of fortitude - and listed it as one of the cardinal virtues. Indeed, it was also said to be one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. That said, Aquinas and company tend to see courage in purely reactive terms, as a form of perseverance, rather than as something active, such as bravery in battle.

Later, in the modern era, Hobbes thought of courage as a natural virtue belonging to the individual that assists in his survival. Hume also identified courage as a natural virtue and suggested that it was the one of the sources of human pride and wellbeing. For whilst excessive courage can, perhaps, result in recklessness, it brings the individual the admiration of his fellows (and of posterity) and plays a protective role within society - whereas cowardice, on the other hand, lays us open to attack.   

For the existentialists, courage is the affirmation of being in the face of the void and life's absurd cruelty; a way for man to exhibit faith in themselves and grace under pressure, as Hemingway once put it.  

II. Cowardice

Etymologically, the word coward enters into English from the Old French term coart and implies having a tail - as in an individual who turns tail and runs whenever danger threatens, or one who places his tail between his legs like a submissive dog.   

Essentially, cowardice is the opposite of courage; a condition wherein fear and/or excessive self-concern stops one from taking decisive action or speaking up and saying the right thing. It is both a failure of nerve and of character and is looked down on as universally as courage is respected. Indeed, it is often not only stigmatized, but severely punished; particularly within a military context that demands every man do his duty and be brave under fire.  

III. The Case of Sir Craig Mackey

And so to the case of Sir Craig Mackey, Deputy Commissioner of the Met ... A man now condemned and widely mocked by colleagues, journalists, and members of the public as a coward, after it was revealed that during the Westminster terror attack last March, in which PC Keith Palmer was fatally stabbed, he drove off, sharpish, having first locked the windows of his car.

To be fair, he was unarmed and had no protective equipment; he also had the safety of his passengers to consider. So maybe he was simply following police protocol. But, having said that, this story is profoundy dispiriting; one expects more from a British Bobby and a knight of the realm (or indeed any Englishman worth his salt).

Let the People See (Reflections on the Open Casket Controversy)

Dana Schutz: Open Casket (2016) 

Oil on canvas (99 x 135 cm)

I.

There are of course several famous portraits of black boys painted by white artists. One might think, for example, of the mid-19th century picture of a youngster who, having crossed the Atlantic as a stowaway, found himself in Liverpool and an object of aesthetic interest to the Pre-Raphaelite William Windus.  

But perhaps none have been as controversial or caused as much fuss around issues concerning race and representation, as the recent portrait by Dana Schutz of Emmett Till - a black teenager who was brutally murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 ...


II.

Entitled Open Casket, the work was displayed at the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York. Campaigners, led by the British conceptual artist and author Hannah Black, called for the removal - and, indeed, destruction - of the picture on the grounds that it transmuted black suffering into profit and pleasure (which, in a sense, I suppose it does).

There was also a small-scale protest at the museum, organised by African-American artist and activist Parker Bright, who described the exhibiting of the work as a black death spectacle (which, in  a sense, I suppose it is).  

Ironically, however, Schutz was attempting to signal her own bleeding-heart liberalism. For the work - based in part on a famous photograph of Till's disfigured and mutilated corpse lying in an open casket (this at the request of his mother, so that everyone might view the violent reality of American racism) - was created in response to the media coverage of recent shootings involving young black men and white police officers.  

Schutz responded to the criticisms of her picture by pointing out that whilst she may not know what it's like to be black in America, she does know what it's like to be a mother and to experience pain; that the importance of art, for her, lay in its power to open up a space of empathy and bring people together. Acknowledging otherness and the pathos of distance that exists between individuals, Schutz nevertheless - perhaps naively - insists that we still share a common humanity.

Some of those coming to her defence tried to frame this issue in terms not of racial identity and the imperial white gaze, but freedom of expression. But Hannah Black doesn't have much time for this line of argument: not when, in her view, white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded upon the silencing and constraint of others and the contemporary art scene remains a fundamentally white supremacist institution, despite all the nice people working within it.

Again, this may or may not be true - and I don't really care one way or the other to be honest - but Black's last line, dripping with contempt, is one that made me smile. As Nietzsche said, it's merely Christian to forgive one's enemies; you must also learn how to hate your friends (even when these people are your dealers, curators, or publishers).

On Goya's Red Boy

Goya: Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga (1787-88)

Commonly referred to as Goya's Red Boy

Commissioned by an aristocratic banker to produce a series of family portraits, including one of his youngest son, Manuel, Goya produced one of the most charming - if creepiest - pictures in modern art. 

The whey-faced child is dressed in a rather splendid red outfit. In his right hand, he holds a string attached to his pet magpie; the bird has Goya's calling card in its beak and is watched intently by three wide-eyed cats. On Manuel's left, sits a cage full of finches.

Whilst portraits of children and animals have a long and popular history in Spanish art, Goya seems to pervert this tradition by using the beasts to add an element of menace rather than delight to the work. To suggest, for example, that even the innocent world of childhood contains cruelty and is threatened by the forces of evil: Manuel, sadly, would die a few short years later, aged eight. 

His death is surely coincidental; child mortality was simply a fact of life in 18th century Europe (Goya saw only one of his own children reach adulthood). But there's something uncanny in this work which seems to anticipate such a fate. Little Manuel, despite his finery and the presence of his animal companions, looks like a lost soul.  

Still, he's achieved a level of fame and immortality far beyond that of his siblings who survived him; even Andy Warhol would one day sit at his feet. 

Notes 

Readers interested in viewing the Red Boy can find the work displayed at The Met Fifth Avenue (Gallery 633). 

For a fascinating essay on the painting and its extraordinary popularity, see Reva Wolf, 'Goya's "Red Boy": The Making of a Celebrity': click here to read online. 

See also The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett, (Penguin Books, 2010). In the entry dated Friday, December 31, 1976, Warhol writes about a party at Kitty Miller's apartment: "And after dinner, I sat underneath Goya's 'Red Boy'. Kitty has this most famous painting right there in her house, it's unbelievable."    

The Blue Boy Will Never Die: On Fear, Fashion and Immortality

Gainsborough: The Blue Boy (c.1770)

According to D. H. Lawrence, the northern consciousness is gripped by a fear - almost a horror - of the body, especially in its sexual implications. This naturally has a detrimental effect on the plastic arts which "depend entirely on the representation of substantial bodies, and on the intuitional perception of the reality of substantial bodies". 

Thus, whilst English painters are very good at painting people hidden away inside their clothes, they daren't handle the living flesh that lies beneath; the social persona becomes more important than the actual man or woman.      

This may of course contain an element of truth. But isn't it also possible, as Cioran suggests, that what really terrifies is not the body in its erotico-libidinal aspect, but the body as an object prone to disease, ageing and death; that, ultimately, clothes don't serve to get between us and life in all its naked beauty, but us and nothingness ...    

"Look at your body in a mirror: you will realise you are mortal; run your fingers over your ribs [...] and you will see how close you are to the grave." 

Maybe that's why Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough et al cared so much about painting subjects in all their finery; not simply because they were bourgeois - and not in order to deny the "gleam of the warm procreative body" - but because it's only when he has his glad rags on that man is able to entertain ideas of immortality: how can we die when we wear a pair of blue satin knee-breeches?  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Paintings', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Lawrence knows that it's not the sexual body so much as the diseased body that scares the pants on people, which is why he spends most of this essay discussing the cultural and psychological consequences of syphilis [click here for a discussion of this elsewhere on this blog]. He also knows the importance of clothes, even if, as here, he likes to think flesh as more important than fashion and imply that human nakedness has greater authenticity than our sartorial splendour.  

E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard, (Penguin Books, 2018). See the section entitled 'Sartorial Philosophy' in chapter 6, 'Abdications'. 

Gainsborough's Blue Boy is quite clearly a costume study as well as a portrait; the shimmering blue satin of the clothes is rendered in a spectrum of cleverly calibrated tints and applied with a complexity of fine brush strokes. It's a picture in which Jonathan Buttall, the son a wealthy merchant, achieves his immortality. The work now hangs in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

  

Wigging Out with Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol: Self-Portrait  
from the Fright Wig series (1986)

I.

A wig is a head covering made from human or animal hair; or, rather less convincingly, synthetic fibres. Whilst concealing baldness is certainly a popular reason for wearing one, there are many others; some people wear them on religious grounds, for example; some do so simply for the pleasure of enhancing, disguising, or transforming their appearance. 

The Case of Andy Warhol is particularly interesting ...


II.

If, initially, Warhol wore a wig as a young man in the 1950s in order to hide prematurely thinning hair, he eventually styled his public persona upon a never anything but artificial looking collection of silver-white wigs. Indeed, Warhol's wig-wearing might even be seen as a wonderful piece of performance art concerned with self-creation and self-promotion.    

Made from hair imported from Italy and sewn by famous New York wig maker Paul Bochicchio, Warhol opted for his trademark silver-white wig in order to look slightly alien and also in the knowledge that if you have always looked old, no one can guess your real age. Allowing his own hair to protrude at the bottom of the wig ensured no one mistook it for anything other than a piece of artifice.

Strangely, however, just as the wig came to be seen by others as Andy's natural look, so too did Warhol grow to feel it was an essential element of his identity - we might almost say that just as some wear their hearts upon their sleeves, he wore his soul upon his head. 

And so it is that when Warhol had his wig snatched off his head by a young woman at a book signing in October 1985, it was as much a violent assault as when Valerie Solanas shot and seriously injured the artist back in the summer of '68. Indeed, Warhol described this shocking and painful later event as the day his greatest nightmare came true. 

Nevertheless, real trooper that he was, Warhol simply pulled up the hood on his Calvin Klein coat, smiled, and continued signing copies of his newly published work America. It might also be noted that although the perpetrator of the assault was held until the police arrived, no charges were pressed.


See: Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett, (Penguin Books, 2010). In the entry covering this wig-grabbing incident at the Rizzoli bookstore in the Soho district of Manhattan, Warhol describes his assailant as very pretty and well-dressed and suggests that this may have been what prevented him from pushing her over the balcony.  

(Un)Common People: Jarvis Cocker and William Shatner

I.

Although it peaked at number two in the UK Singles Chart back in the summer of 1995, pretty much everyone now agrees that Pulp's Common People is the finest - maybe even definitive - Britpop single; one with all the humour, anger, energy and intelligence of punk.

So, hats off to Jarvis Cocker, who came up with the tune on a small Casiotone MT-500 keyboard and wrote the lyrics. For me, Cocker is not only a more interesting frontman, but also an eminently more likable human being than either of the Gallagher brothers or, indeed, Damon Albarn and the rather self-satisfied members of Blur.       

Having said that, I'm tempted to suggest that as brilliant as his interpretation and performance of his own song is, there's one man out there who has given us an even greater version - and that man is William Shatner ...  

II.

Whilst primarily known as an actor, William Shatner is actually a man of many talents - although, arguably, singing isn't one of them. Not that this has stopped him from recording a number of albums, beginning with The Transformed Man (1968), in which he delivered his uniquely exaggerated (cod-Shakespearean) take on songs including 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' and 'Mr Tambourine Man'.

During the 1978 Science Fiction Film Awards, Shatner gave a memorable reading of the Elton John song 'Rocket Man'. It's a performance beyond parody that still leaves many viewers who watch it on YouTube in a state of utter astonishment: click here.

Shatner's greatest musical moment, however, was to come in 2004, on the album Has Been, produced and arranged by Ben Folds; an indie rock version of 'Common People', featuring Joe Jackson as a guest co-vocalist.

Critics and fans alike - including Jarvis Cocker himself - were shocked at just how amazing the result was. Shatner does an excellent job, paying due respect to the original whilst, at the same time, putting his absurdly over-dramatic spin on the song. So, hats off also to Capt. Kirk! 

Notes

Pulp, 'Common People', released 22 May 1995, from the album Different Class (Island Records, 1995): click here to watch the official video, featuring Sadie Frost, on YouTube. 

William Shatner, 'Common People', from the album Has Been, (Shout! Factory, 2004): click here.

  

On Philosophy and Prostitution (Reflections on An Illicit Lover's Discourse)

Everything I know I learned in the School of Vice!

I.

Reading a fragment by Cioran in which he advises the philosopher who is "disappointed with systems and superstitions" to imitate the street savvy scepticism of that "least dogmatic of creatures: the prostitute", reminded me of my own musings from long ago on this topic, collected as An Illicit Lover's Discourse ...    

II.

The aim of this short work, written many years ago and privately published (with a revised title) by Blind Cupid Press in 2010, was not to describe in detail the world of the Prostitute, but to examine the nature of the love affair that exists between her and her clients; for in this relation we discover much of the violence, obscenity, and poignancy of modern life.

The necessity for the book lay in the following consideration: the discourse of the Prostitute and her Illicit Lover was at that time openly displayed in every other central London phone box. This discourse, spoken and shared by thousands of amorous subjects, had received very little attention, scorned as it is by the languages of authority which, nevertheless, often share in its image-repertoire and sustain its stereotypes.

Essentially, I was hoping to indicate the manner in which some of the more frequently occurring myths upon which the pornographic imagination is founded are circulated by and within wider culture and reveal how legitimate discourses - of literature, fashion, and advertising, for example - frequently feed off and into the writings and images of the Prostitute.

The short fragments were written in relation to a large number of cards collected casually over a two-year period from phone boxes mostly in the Paddington and Soho areas of London, where they'd been conveniently placed by the Prostitute. To my mind, these cards constituted a populist and promiscuous medium and could be thought of as an obscene form of folk-art. Mushrooming in the fetid, urine-soaked environment of the phone box, they represented the public face of prostitution and were an affirmation of the Prostitute’s right to self-expression and self-promotion.

I made no attempt to establish any unity or development between the fragments. In fact, the only link between them was one of insistence and repetition; qualities which are of course inherent to pornography as a genre. Thus, as in the cards upon which they were based, the same words would appear over and over in the text, constructing the Prostitute not as a woman like any other, but as a symptomal subject of the pornographic imagination.

Some fragments broke off short; others contradicted something that had already been said elsewhere in the text. Ultimately, however, this was unimportant: the fragments were not meant to be taken too seriously and the success or otherwise of each depended on whether the reader was able to relate it to some aspect of their own experience and in this way be able to declare its truth.

If there was anything central to my assemblage of fragments, then, I suppose, it was the body of the Prostitute - although whether we can actually locate and reveal such is debatable. For the body of the Prostitute must not be thought of as a natural object just waiting to be discovered, but rather as a cultural construction in which is encoded a whole set of values: the shape, size, colour, age and all the ornamental attributes of the Prostitute’s body signify what we imagine illicit sexual desire and femininity to be. Thus the body of the Prostitute exposes our own fantasies.

Wishing neither to celebrate nor condemn the Prostitute, my affection for the figure as a woman who denies nothing and no one and lives beyond judgement, was fairly obvious throughout the text. Found in all places, all cultures, and all ages, the Prostitute is, paradoxically, someone who is forever at the margins of society and has abolished all history in her person. She is, in this manner, untimely.

And if this makes her philosophically interesting, then the manner in which she silently accepts the abuse of those who speak against her and call for her punishment makes her lovable in my eyes.

Notes

E. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard, (Penguin Books, 2018). See the section 'Philosophy and Prostitution' in chapter 1: 'Directions for Decomposition', pp. 81-82.

If I'd known of this text at the time of writing, I almost certainly would have referred to it. For what Cioran writes here is very close to my own position. I agree, for example, that the prostitute offers us a mode of behaviour which philosophers would do well to consider; detached and yet open to everything; lacking moral convictions and prejudices; quick to change position, etc. And, crucially, whores don't fuck between the bed-sheets ...   

Stephen Alexander, Whores Don't Fuck between the Bed-Sheets: Fragments from an Illicit Lover's Discourse, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). 

In Memory of Tara Fares (Notes on Fanaticism)

Tara Fares on Instagram / Photo by Omar Moner

Tara Fares, the Iraqi beauty queen and outspoken social media star, has been shot dead in Baghdad by unknown assailants, after receiving a series of vile threats on her life. She was 22. A spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior promises an investigation - but we all know why she was murdered and by whom.  

Her death comes just days after the murder of Suad al-Ali, an Iraqi human rights activist who was shot and killed in the southern city of Basra. Again, whilst the gunman has so far been unidentified, one doesn't have to be Columbo to crack this case.  

When men enthusiastically put their most cherished ideals and beliefs into action, the result is all too often bloody; history is nothing but this violent trajectory. As Cioran says: "Once a man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable."    

Cries of religious ecstasy and shouts of devotion are echoed in the moans of victims. And blood always flows when epileptics and ideologues - primed with explosive conviction - insist their way is the way; "firm resolve draws the dagger; fiery eyes presage slaughter".

To live peacefully and happily requires learning how to curb enthusiasm and counter all certitudes, absolutes and convictions with irony and a smiling insouciance. For if the former ideals are allowed to contaminate the soul, the result is fanaticism: that fundamental human defect which instills in us the desire for truth and terror.

To quote Cioran once more:

"Only the skeptics (or idlers or aesthetes) escape, because they propose nothing, because they [...] undermine fanaticism's purpose, analyse its frenzy. I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity. [...] What Diogenes was looking for with his lantern was an indifferent man ..."

He concludes:

"The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster."

And that's why I prefer Instagram over Islam, fashion over faith ...

See: E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard, (Penguin Books, 2018). Lines quoted are from the section entitled 'Genealogy of Fanaticism' in chapter 1, 'Directions for Decomposition'.

On Marcus Aurelius: Meditations

Marcus Aurelius (121-180 EV) 

Although a white European male, mature in years, I'm not a statesman or ruler of any kind, so it surprised me to discover just how much affinity I felt with Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher described by Matthew Arnold as the most beautiful figure in history.  

His Meditations constitute such a remarkably modern series of philosophical reflections on ethics, rationality, and the nature of the self, that it's hard not to love both book and man. And it's difficult also not to look at those moral and intellectual pygmies in positions of power today, exercising their authority over millions of lives, and feel a growing sense of despair.

I can't, for example, imagine Donald Trump tweeting something as lovely - or as profound - as this passage taken from Book 3, in which Aurelius stresses the importance of attending to little things in life, including small imperfections, and of affirming elements of baseness and corruption on the grounds that these too possess their own charm and belong to what Nietzsche will later term an economy of the whole:

"Take the baking of bread: the loaf splits open here and there, and those very cracks, in one way a failure of the baker's profession, somehow catch the eye and give particular stimulus to our appetite. Figs likewise burst open at full maturity: and in olives ripened on the tree the very proximity of decay lends a special beauty to the fruit. Similarly the ears of corn nodding down to the ground, the lion's puckered brow, the foam gushing from the boar's mouth, and much else besides - looked at in isolation these things are far from lovely, but their consequences on the processes of Nature enhances them and gives them attraction. So any man with a feeling and deeper insight for the workings of the Whole will find some pleasure in almost every aspect of their disposition, including the incidental consequences. Such a man will take no less delight in the living snarl of wild animals than in all the imitative representations of painters and sculptors; he will see a kind of bloom and fresh beauty in an old woman or an old man; and he will be able to look with sober eyes on the seductive charm of his own slave boys." [3.2]           

As Diskin Clay, Professor of Classical Studies at Duke University indicates, this passage not only has real philosophical interest, but an almost poetic quality.

In conclusion, we might say that whilst it's true the Ancient world cannot directly provide us with answers to the problems facing us today, there are nevertheless a number of texts containing a treasury of devices, techniques, ideas, and procedures, that may help us, as Foucault argues, form a perspective upon the present and serve as tools for analysing what's happening today. Meditations is surely one such text.         

See: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. with notes by Martin Hammond, introduction by Diskin Clay, (Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 16-17. 

Melt: On the Transubstantiation of Love

Cover art for the single 'Melt!' by

Siouxsie and the Banshees 

(Polydor, 1982) 

"Are you familiar with the frightening sensation of melting", asks Cioran; "the feeling of dissolving into a flowing river, in which the self is annulled by organic liquidization?" 

Well, as a matter of fact, thanks to the British post-punk band Siouxsie and the Banshees, I am ... 

The lovely song 'Melt!', released as a single from their fifth studio album, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, gave an interesting - some might say psychedelic - insight into the phenomenon way back in 1982.

The lyrics betray a decadent and delirious fascination with sex and death and some of the images have fetishistic overtones; the melting lover is handcuffed in lace, blood and sperm, before eventually being beheaded.        

Whilst it's tempting and certainly wouldn't be mistaken to discuss the song in relation to Baudelaire and Masoch - or the sleeve art with reference to Klimt - I think it just as legitimate (and in some ways more interesting) to refer to Cioran's astonishing first book, On the Heights of Despair (1934).

(Don't get me wrong: I love Flowers of Evil and Venus in Furs as much as the next man, but so much has already been written about these texts, that it's hard to offer any further insight. Cioran's work, on the other hand, is shamefully underdiscussed and undervalued. Indeed, much of it is hardly known in the English-speaking world, even by people who thrill to similar authors, such as Bataille and Blanchot, for example.)    

Like the Banshees, Cioran eroticises the notion of melting, or what Barthes would describe as the body's liquid expansion and include crying as well as ejaculating. For love, writes Cioran, "is a form of intimate communion and nothing expresses it better than the subjective impression of melting, the falling away of all barriers of individuation".   

Although he seems to regard sex as marginal to the irrationality of love, Cioran concedes that you cannot conceive of the latter without the former and insists that there's no spiritual love between the sexes; "only a transfiguration of the flesh" via which lovers identify themselves so intensely with one another that they create an illusion of spirituality.

Only at this point does the sensation of melting occur: "the flesh trembles in a supreme spasm, ceases resistance, burning with inner fires, melting and flowing, unstoppable lava". In other words, it's a form of suicide in sex, as Siouxsie sings.

Notes

See: E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992). I'm quoting from sections entitled 'Weariness and Agony' and 'On the Transubstantiation of Love', pp. 16-17 and 84. 

Play: Siouxsie and the Banshees, 'Melt!', from the album A Kiss in the Dreamhouse (Polydor, 1982): click here.

This post is in (mostly) fond memory of Gillian Hall.

D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Cioran on Sex Appeal and the Beauty of Flames

Image: Desktop Nexus

I. Sex on Fire 

Just as for Lawrence sex and beauty are one and the same thing, so too is being something he always conceives in terms of fire, or what he calls the god-flame, burning in all things. Indeed, Lawrence ultimately conflates terms so that his erotico-aesthetic and ontological speculations form a unified metaphysics.

Thus it is, for example, that Mellors characterises his illicit relationship with Connie in terms of a little forked flame that they fucked into being.

And thus it is that Lawrence asserts in a late article that whilst he doesn't quite know what sex is, he's certain that it must be some sort of fire: "For it always communicates a sense of warmth, of glow. And when the glow becomes a pure shine, then we feel the sense of beauty."

This communicating of warmth and beauty is what Lawrence understands by the term sex appeal, something which he believes to be a universal human quality and not just something belonging to the young and conventionally attractive. In a typically Lawrentian passage, he writes:

"We all have the fire of sex slumbering or burning inside us. If we live to be ninety, it is still there. Or, if it dies, we become one of those ghastly living corpses which are unfortunately becoming more numerous in the world.

      Nothing is more ugly than a human being in whom the fire of sex had gone out. You get a nasty clayey creature whom everybody wants to avoid.

      But while we are fully alive, the fire of sex smoulders or burns in us. In youth it flickers and shines; in age it glows softer and stiller, but there it is." 

I quite like this (re)definition of a golem as a human being in whom the fire of sex has been extinguished and who communicates only a cold, ugly deadness (unfair and as meaningless as it may be). 

And I like the idea of fire calling to fire and of sex appeal kindling a sense of joyful warmth and optimism. Lawrence is right, the loveliness of a really lovely woman in whom the sex fire burns pure and fine not only lights up her whole being, but transforms the entire universe. Such a woman - extremely rare even in a world of numerous good-looking girls and cosmetic enhancement - is an experience.  

Lawrence concludes:

"If only our civilization had taught us how to let sex appeal flow properly and subtly, how to keep the fire of sex clear and alive, flickering or flowing or blazing in all its varying degrees of strength and communication, we might, all of us, have lived all our lives in love, which means we should be kindled and full of zest in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of things …

      Whereas, what a lot of dead ash there is in life now."

II. Light My Fire

I don't know if Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran read Lawrence when young - his obsessions led him towards German and French thinkers, rather than English novelists - but there are certainly quasi-Lawrentian resonances in his early work for those of us familiar with the writings of Lawrence.

Thus, like Lawrence, Cioran was interested in love in all its forms, particularly the concrete and monogamous love between man and woman which he took to be the quintessential form; not only in its sexual aspect, but as a "rich network of affective states". Love, born not of suffering, but of sincere generosity, is what Cioran most cherishes.

And, like Lawrence, Cioran ties his idea of love to beauty, being, and to fire. Man's sensitivity to beauty, he writes, intensifies as he approaches the joy that love brings. And in beauty "all things find their justification, their raison d'être".

Further, beauty allows us to conceive of things as things and to accept existence as is: "To place the world under the sign of beauty is to assert that it is as it should be [...] even the negative aspects of existence do nothing but increase its glory and its charm." This, of course, is a profoundly Nietzschean as well as a Lawrentian idea.

Beauty, concludes Cioran, may not bring salvation, "but it will bring us closer to happiness" and to the point where we can make a total affirmation of life. And what is more beautiful than the nakedness of flames, dancing in darkness:

"Their diaphanous flare symbolizes at once grace and tragedy, innocence and despair, sadness and voluptuousness. [...] The beauty of flames creates the illusion of a pure, sublime death similar to the light of dawn."

It's not only moths, it appears, that are transfixed by candlelight and dream of a fiery climax to their lives ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). See the famous letter from Mellors to Connie with which Lawrence closes the novel.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Sex Appeal', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Often known as 'Sex Versus Loveliness', this article can be read online by clicking here. 

E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (the University of Chicago Press, 1992). See: 'Enthusiasm as a Form of Love' (75), 'The Beauty of Flames' (88), and 'Beauty's Magic Tricks' (119). All lines quoted above from Cioran are taken from these three sections.

Readers interested in earlier posts that compare and contrast Lawrence's work with that of Cioran on questions to do with becoming-animal and becoming-ash, can click here and here.

Musical bonus #1: click here. Musical bonus #2: click here. I must admit that I don't much care for either of these (hugely overrated) songs, but readers of a more hippie-persuasion will doubtless enjoy listening to them once more.    

D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Cioran on the Bath of Fire and Becoming-Ash

Phoenix design by Stephen Russ for the cover of Penguin's 

unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1960) 

According to D. H. Lawrence, unless the individual is willing to be dipped into oblivion and made nothing, then they will never really change. For like the phoenix, we renew our youth only when we are burnt down to hot and flocculent ash.

Interestingly, the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran thinks along similar lines when it comes to the question of how best to achieve one's immortality - with the latter conceived in terms of immaterial purity (a synonym for nothingness).

In his astonishing first work - written whilst still only 22 years of age - Cioran speaks of the bath of fire which "purifies so radically that it does away with existence". Its scorching flames set one's very being ablaze, until, finally, one has become-ash.

In a moving final passage, he asks: "when the inner conflagration has scorched the ground of your being, when all is ashes, what else is there left to experience?" There is, he confesses, "both mad delight and infinite irony in the thought of my ashes scattered to the four winds, sown frenetically in space, an eternal reproach to the world".

Thus, unlike the vitalist Lawrence, the nihilist Cioran feels no need to imagine himself rising from the ashes like some mythical bird, with bright new feathers. For him, the passing into death isn't any kind of triumph, nor a preliminary to a new and better life.

Having said that, even Cioran allows himself to occasionally dream of a world that is transfigured by the bath of fire, rather than simply reduced to ruin:     

"If I could [...] I would set a fire burning insidiously at the roots of life, not to destroy them but to give them a new and different sap, a new heat. [...] In this way life would adjust to higher temperatures and would cease to be an environment propitious to mediocrity. And maybe in this dream, death too would cease to be imminent in life." 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Phoenix', in The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 

E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992), see the sections entitled 'The Bath of Fire' and 'The World and I'. 

This post is dedicated to my beautiful friend, the artist Heide Hatry, who knows more than most about becoming-ash. 

Readers interested in a sister post to this one on DHL and EMC and the question of becoming-animal, should click here. 

D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Cioran on Man's Becoming-Animal

Helmo: from the Bêtes de Mode series (2006)

I. Becoming All the Animals in Turn. 

Sick and tired of well-domesticated modern men like her husband, the female protagonist of Lawrence's short novel St. Mawr (1925), ponders if there mayn't be something else to marvel at in men besides "'mind and cleverness, or niceness or cleanness'" and that perhaps this something else is animality. 

Her mother, however, is unconvinced by this idea and imagines that her daughter secretly desires a caveman to club her over the head and carry her away. Angered that her suggestion has been misinterpreted as a vulgar rape fantasy, Lou responds:

"'Don't be silly, mother. That's much more your subconscious line, you admirer of Mind! I don't consider the caveman is a real human animal at all. He's a brute, a degenerate. A pure animal man would be as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath. [...] He'd be all the animals in turn, instead of one, fixed automatic thing, which he is now, grinding on the nerves."

Mrs. Witt, unnerved by this, argues that whatever else such a combination of man and beast would be, he'd certainly be dangerous. Lou, angry now with her mother, replies that be that as it may, she'd still rather live in a world of animal-men that one full of tame and humble half-men who are merely sentimental and spiteful.     

II. Not to Be a Man Anymore

Of course, D. H. Lawrence isn't the only writer to dream of man's becoming-animal, or, indeed, becoming-plant. So too does the French-Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran. In his first book, for example, published just ten years after Lawrence's St. Mawr, he writes these rather lovely lines:

"I am not proud to be a man, because I know only too well what it is to be a man. [...] If I could, I would choose every day another form, plant or animal, I would be all the flowers one by one: weed, thistle or rose [...] Let me live the life of every species , wildly and un-self-consciously, let me try out the entire spectrum of nature, let me change gracefully, discreetly, as if it were the most natural procedure."

But it's important to note that Cioran isn't looking to escape from or abandon his humanity once and for all, so much as to make it seem a newly attractive option once more:

"Only a cosmic adventure of this kind, a series of metamorphoses in the plant and animal realms, would reawaken in me the desire to become Man again."    

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'St. Mawr', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 59-62, and E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 68-69. 

Note: Helmo is a French design studio established by Thomas Couderc and Clément Vauchez. In the Bêtes de Mode project, they collaborated with Thomas Dimetto to produce a series of double-exposure photographs of man and beast, exhibited at the Galeries Lafayette, Paris, (2006). To see more of these images, click here. 

Readers interested in a sister post to this one on DHL and EMC and the question of becoming-ash, should click here. 

On the Anguished Lyricism of E. M. Cioran

Emil Cioran - crazy hair, crazy guy!

I.

From out of the blue comes a book in the post: a copy of E. M. Cioran's On the Heights of Despair (1934), kindly sent to me by my friend and sometimes collaborator, the Dublin-based poet Simon Solomon ...

Originally published in his native Romania, this was Cioran's first book in which many of the themes and obsessions of his mature work are already foreshadowed. It might best be described as a series of existential meditations on death, suffering and life's absurdity, in which a young writer openly borrows some of Nietzsche's more theatrical poses and mystical clown's tricks.    

Unfortunately, however, Cioran isn't ever going to be my cup of tea. Even his translator, Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, concedes that he's a specialized taste - "too sharp and bitter for many palates and, paradoxically, too lyrical and funny for some others" - though I'm not entirely sure this explains my own aversion. 

After all, I'm perfectly happy with rancorous, darkly comic authors. So perhaps, then, it is the unrestrained lyricism; the fact that there's simply too much blood, sincerity, and fire within the pages for my tastes. If only Cioran had curbed his enthusiasm - and his rhetorical flourishes - I may have found this book easier to read and enjoy.      

Of course, I've no doubt that the self-professed barbarian and passionate young fascist who authored On the Heights of Despair would brand my unlyrical (and perhaps at times even anti-lyrical) call for the exercising of caution cowardly - a sign of my own sclerosis and hollow intellectualism.  

II. 

The vital importance of lyricism to Cioran in the above work is clear from the opening section, in which he roots it in what he terms inner fluidity or spiritual effervescence - the chaotic, unconscious turmoil of the deepest self. Lyricism is thus an outward expression of profound interiority:

"One becomes lyrical when one's life beats to an essential rhythm and the experience is so intense that it synthesizes the entire meaning of one's personality."

I don't know what that sentence means and it's not one I could ever imagine writing; not even in the throes of death or some other decisively critical experience, "when the turmoil of [my] inner being reaches paroxysm". In fact, such language and such thinking is antithetical to my substantial centre of subjectivity.

Thus, I'll just have to remain a stranger to myself and to reality; a loveless being, trapped in an impersonal bubble of objectivity and "living contentedly at the periphery of things", never knowing the lyrical virtues of suffering and sickness, but vegetating in scandalous insensitivity and sanity.  

For according to Cioran, just as there's no authentic lyricism without illness, nor is there absolute lyricism "without a grain of interior madness". Indeed, the value of the lyrical mode resides precisely in its delirious and savage quality; it knows nothing of aesthetics or cultural refinement and is utterly barbarian in its expression. 

Sounding more like Bataille than Bataille, Cioran concludes his vision of excess with the following:

"Absolute lyricism is beyond poetry and sentimentalism, and closer to a metaphysics of destiny. In general, it tends to put everything on the plane of death. All important things bear the sign of death."

As a thanatologist, I agree with this last statement. Only consciousness of death and of the fact that all being is a being toward death, isn't something that I find particularly troubling. In other words, whilst I might share Cioran's nihilism, I don't experience his intense anguish and black drunkenness.

I prefer a practice of joy before death, not a practice of misery (no matter how lyrical) ...

See: E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Zoonosis (Revenge of the Animals)

Recent reports of the rare viral disease known as monkeypox recorded in the UK for the first time - first in Cornwall, then in Blackpool - oblige one to reconsider the question of zoonosis ...    

The term, zoonosis - from the Greek ζῷον (animal) and νόσος (sickness) - refers to the fact that some infectious diseases can naturally be transmitted between animals and humans. Examples include potentially deadly conditions such as Ebola, rabies, and salmonellosis, as well as the relatively mild - but still deeply unpleasant - monkeypox.

Many strains of swine and bird flu are zoonoses and HIV was originally a zoonotic disease transmitted to people in the early part of the 20th century from our simian friends, though it has since evolved to a separate human-only condition.

Despite the urban myth that infection with HIV was due to human-ape sexual contact, it was most likely due to the consumption of the latter served as bushmeat. Indeed, eating infected food is one of the most common modes of zoonotic transmission.

However, as zoonoses can be caused by a range of pathogens - viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites - there are numerous modes of transmission, both direct and indirect. Sometimes, this can involve a third party or intermediate species, known as a vector, which carries the disease without itself being infected; think mosquitoes and malaria. 

The fact is, like it or not, zoonotic transmission can occur in any context in which there is intimate contact with animals. Be they livestock, domestics pets, or wild creatures, they'll always find a way to undermine the health of man and extract a symbolic revenge upon a human order that treats them with disdain.  

On Art and Syphilis

Elizabethan Era Syphilis (detail)

by Swedish makeup artist 

Ylva Konradsson 

Even though, by his own admission, Lawrence knows "nothing about medicine and very little about diseases", that doesn't prevent him from offering a reading of English art history that is both critical and clinical in character and from assuming the role of what Nietzsche terms a cultural physician. 

Thus, in a fascinating late essay, Lawrence asserts that the reason the English produce so few painters is not because they are, as a people, "devoid of a genuine feeling for visual art", but because they are paralysed by fear. 

It is this which distorts Anglo-Saxon existence; an old fear which "seemed to dig into the English soul" during the Renaissance and that we might characterise as a morbid and mystical terror of sex and physical intimacy. The Elizabethans came to regard their own bodies with horror and began to privilege spiritual-mental life over instinctive-intuitive being.     

And, according to Lawrence, this was caused by the "great shock of syphilis and the realisation of the consequences of the disease" - particularly by the late-16th century when its "ravages were obvious" and, having initially entered the blood of the nation, it now "penetrated the thoughtful and imaginative consciousness". 

Someone, he suggests, ought to "make a thorough study of the effects of 'pox' on the minds and emotions and imagination of the various nations of Europe at about the time of our Elizabethans", who, despite their attempts to joke about the disease, were haunted by the fear of it. For the fact is "no man can contract syphilis, or any deadly sexual disease, without feeling the most shattering and profound terror go through him ... And no man can look without a sort of horror on the effects of a sexual disease in another person." 

I suspect that's probably true - and dare say many who experienced the outbreak of AIDS in the 1980s will agree. Like the arrival of syphilis, AIDS not only gave a "fearful blow to our sexual life", but the horror of it shaped our cultural imagination. We recoiled further and further away from one another - from physical communion - and into virtual reality (including online porn). 

Now we know know one another only as ideal entities on social media, or obscene online images; fleshless, bloodless, and cold. And our contemporary art reflects this great move into abstraction. It's often very clever, often very amusing, but it's real appeal is that it's germ-free.   

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Paintings', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

Johannes Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare's England, (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1994).

Arguably, the above book is the serious study Lawrence calls for and it lends support to his thesis concerning the manner in which syphilis profoundly changed the manners and morals of Renaissance Europe and shaped the literary and artistic imagination. Fabricius also suggests - as I have - that, in many ways, the emergence of syphilis has numerous parallels with the AIDS epidemic and the socio-political reaction to it. 

Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors, (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1989). 

In this brilliant work of critical theory - a companion text to her earlier work Illness as Metaphor (1978) - Sontag extends her arguments made about the way in which cancer is culturally conceived to AIDS, deconstructing harmful myths surrounding the disease. Further, she also provides an interesting comparison between AIDS and syphilis    

The History of a Phone Box

When I was little, one of the things I loved to do was walk with my big sister to the phone box on Straight Road, where she went to call her boyfriend, Barry.

The box was one of those iconic dome-topped designs by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott; iron-cast, bright red in colour and emblazoned with a crown, and which, even until relatively recently, remained a familiar and reassuring sight on British streets. I'm not sure, but I think people with an interest in telephone kiosks refer to it as a K2 - but possibly it was the smaller, cheaper 1935 model, known as the K6.

In fact, it probably was the latter. But, either way, I thought it was a magical object (and space) as a six-year-old and enjoyed every aspect of helping my sister make a call; lifting the handset from its cradle, dialing, putting the pennies in the slot, hearing the pips go, etc. I even liked the fact that sometimes there would be someone waiting impatiently outside in the cold (less so if that someone was me).           

Sadly, post-privatisation in the 1980s, the traditional red phone box was gradually replaced by a ghastly-looking glass booth: the KX100. Nick Kane, Director of Marketing for BT Local Communications Services, announced that the old boxes had to go as they no longer met the needs of customers. Even more outrageously, he claimed the old boxes were not only expensive and difficult to clean and maintain, but unpopular with the public - something I refuse to believe.        

Today, of course, in this age of the mobile, even phone booths in the KX series have mostly vanished from our streets and those that remain are unloved relics in a state of disrepair or ruin, not even fit to piss in. This includes the one pictured above, standing where a handsome-looking red box once stood and made a young child happy.

Despite how it may appear, I'm not overly nostalgic for the past. But it has to be said that there's something brutal and charmless about life in Britain today, shaped by men like Nick Kane and company, who, as Lord Darlington would say, know the price of everything and the value of nothing.