On the Nine Lives of Cats and Two Methods for Ending Them

I. On the Nine Lives of Cats

The myth of cats having multiple lives is one found in many countries and cultures ...

In England, for example, which is presently home to around eight million cats, they are believed to have nine lives, divided equally between playing, straying, and staying curled up by the fireplace on a comfy chair. In some European nations, however, such as Greece, cats are said to have seven lives; this number falling to just six within the Arab world.   

No one really knows why (or where) this myth originated, but probably it has something to do with the fact that cats are instinctively good at extricating themselves from potentially life-threatening situations. Naturally supple and almost supernaturally sensitive to danger, cats - unlike clumsy human beings - invariably land on their feet and not flat on their faces.  

II. Cat Throwing

Of course, no matter how many lives they possess, cats can be killed if they fall from a significant height; or, indeed, if they are thrown from a belfry, as they used to be by the good people of Ypres during the Middle Ages and early modern period.*

There are various local legends about how this festival of animal cruelty originated; some suggest it was designed to protect the city from evil spirits (cats often being associated in the popular imagination with witchcraft); other sources say the cats were rounded up and killed each spring simply in order to control their numbers.

Whatever the truth of the matter, it was an annual source of great amusement for the townsfolk - as was the craze for cat burning that swept neighbouring France in this period ...


III. Cat Burning     

Cat burning was a gruesome form of popular entertainment in France prior to the 1800s, in which people stuffed dozens of cats into a basket or sack, hoisted them high into the air, and then lit a large bonfire beneath.

According to one historian, the assembled masses "shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized". The remains were often collected as souvenirs and taken home for luck.**

Although the practice varied from place to place, the suffering and ensuing hilarity remained the same; it was said that wherever the scent and sound of burning felines filled the air, laughter was guaranteed.  

Interestingly, Jean Meslier - a French priest (who privately held atheist views) - partly blamed the rise of Cartesian philosophy in which animals were viewed as automata, possessing neither soul nor sentience, for the practice of cat burning. He argued that such thinking inhibited natural feelings of kindness and compassion that man would otherwise have for living creatures.***

Notes

* In fact, the last recorded event of this kind happened as recently as 1817 and is commemorated in the so-called Kattenstoet, held regularly since 1955 on the second Sunday of May. Thankfully, a jester now merely throws stuffed toy cats from the Cloth Hall belfry to the crowd below, who eagerly await with outstretched arms hoping to catch them. For more details, visit the official Kattenstoet website by clicking here.    

** See Norman Davies, Europe: A History, (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 543.

*** See Jean Meslier, Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier, trans. Michael Shreve, (Prometheus Books, 2009), pp. 562-63.

Paul Morel and Knife Crime

Susan Catherine Waters
Young Boy with a Pocket-Knife

I.

According to Professor Woody Caan, experience of bullying or victimisation at an early age is the root cause of knife and gun crime. In other words, many teens carry weapons for self-protection; not because they want to feel powerful and intimidate others, or are inherently attracted to a criminal lifestyle. 

Thus, the best way to prevent stabbings and shootings by angry, but often frightened youths, says the professor, is to invest in effective anti-bullying policies and cultures that do not breed hate and insecurity within primary schools. Make children of six and seven feel loved and safe in their environments and they'll not feel the need to arm themselves as adolescents. 


II.

Such liberal idealism seems a little naive to me. However, the idea that bullying results in a desire to arm oneself and perhaps seek revenge upon thugs who think it funny to threaten and humilate others whom they deem to be weaker or more vulnerable, finds support in the following scene involving a 13-year-old Paul Morel (the protagonist of D. H. Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers).

Paul has a passion for foreign languages and literature. But he doesn't like sports and refuses to compete in anything: "'I don't care whether I'm first or last. I don't care whether [everybody] does things better than me. What does it matter?'"

As Lawrence notes, this "modern and decadent contempt for action separated him from the mass of boys" and made him a prime target for bullying. Paul had a few friends, but the rest "regarded him coldly, with hostility, or contempt", thinking him aloof and somewhat effeminate, with his fancy ways and fancy clothes.

In an astonishing passage, that betrays the fact that, although exceedingly gentle, Paul is full of the molten hot potential for murderous violence, Lawrence writes:  

"Once, the bully faction, which he scorned, avoiding them [...] were set upon him because of the respect or consideration shown him by one of the teachers. They attacked him first with the sleering, coarse abuse of a gang in cry. He made no answer, merely looked away. Meanwhile his heart was boiling with hate. Then they took offence at the bow of black ribbon his mother tied him for a tie. The biggest bully tore it off. Another ripped his collar.

      Paul did not move, only stiffen his back against the tugs on his clothing. He did not speak, nor moved a muscle of his face, only his eye like a mad thing's flashed from neck to neck of the bullies.
      'If,' he said over and over again in his heart, 'If I had a knife, I would stick it there, and there, and there,' glancing his eye from throat to throat, looking always at the big vein. 'If I had a knife, if I had a knife -'

      Then, as he imagined the difficulty of pulling a knife out to strike the next blow, the delay thereof, he changed his glance, looked intensely between the eyebrows of the lads, whose faces he saw not.
      'If I had a revolver - there, there, there,' he counted in a flash, 'with five chambers, I would blow their brains out, one after the other.'

      He chose the spot, felt his fingers stiffen to the trigger.
      'Though,' he said to himself, 'I'd rather have the knife, to strike, to strike in their necks.'"


What this tells us, amongst other things, is that the will to violence and urge to kill is nothing new in teenage boys and that if pushed too far too often - or called upon to protect their friends or family members - even the meekest or most docile of creatures will retaliate or seek revenge:

The smallest worm will turn being trodden on, 
And doves will peck in safeguard of their brood.

See:

D. H. Lawrence, Paul Morel, ed. Helen Baron, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 55.

This early draft of Sons and Lovers is quite different from the final version of the novel published in 1913. There's more humour, but also more violence and nervous energy. It also contains episodes - like the one here, based on Lawrence's own childhood experience - that were eventually discarded.  

Woody Caan (Professorial Fellow, Royal Society for Public Health), writing in a letter on knife crime published in The Guardian (18 Jan 2018): click here to read online.

Note: the lines at the end are - of course - from Shakespeare's Henry VI, Pt. 3 (Act II, Scene 2). 

Paul Morel and the Sacrifice of Arabella

I.

Paul Morel was a pale, quiet child, slightly built, with reddish-brown hair, and highly attuned to the feelings of others (particularly his mother). As his elder brother, William, tended to ignore him, he transferred his affections to his sister, Annie, who was intensely fond of him. 

Annie also possessed a large doll "of which she was fearfully proud, though not so fond", called Arabella. One day, Paul accidently jumps on the doll and breaks her face; something that makes Annie cry and, consequently, makes Paul feel helpless with misery.

Seeing how upset he was - once her own tears dried - she immediately forgave her brother. A couple of days later, however, he shocks her with the following suggestion: '''Let's make a sacrifice of Arabella [...] Let's burn her.'''

Naturally, Annie is horrified - yet also, Lawrence writes with knowing insight into the cruelty of children - fascinated by the suggestion and keen to see what her brother would do once she (silently) gave consent to the proposal.      

"He made an altar of bricks, pulled some of the shavings out of Arabella's body, put the waxen fragments into the hollow face, poured on a little parafin, and set the whole thing alight. He watched with wicked satisfaction the drop of wax melt off the broken forehead of Arabella, and drop like sweat into the flame. So long as the stupid big doll burned, he rejoiced in silence. At the end, he poked among the embers with a stick, fished out the arms and legs, all blackened, and smashed them under stones.
      'That's the sacrifice of Missis Arabella,' he said. 'An' I'm glad there's nothing left of her.'"

Whilst the intensity of her brother's hatred for the doll disturbs Annie, she remains silent throughout and following the sacrifice. I think we, as readers, are obliged to say something, however ...


II.
   

Perhaps unsurprisingly, in much of the critical literature on Sons and Lovers, this scene, like so many others, is read symbolically from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Margaret Storch, for example, wearing her Melanie Klein hat, informs us that the sacrifice of Arabella reveals that what lies beneath the triangular oedipal structure is the more primary mother-child dyad and that whilst one might imagine this to be a relationship founded upon love, it can also manifest violent hatred at its core.

She writes:

"The 'sacrifice' is an act of desecration against a figure who should be revered. This is apparent in [...] the aura of 'wicked satisfaction' that emanates from defying a taboo. The body of the mother is, in fantasy, dismembered and destroyed, disintegrating in a flash of fiery consuming anger, and liquified into the wax and sweat of elemental fluids. When already blackened and 'dead', the fragments are retrieved with phallic curiosity by means of a poking stick, and then further pulverized into nothingness, not 'with' stones but 'under' stones, suggesting both a final horror that cannot be looked at and the gravestones that cover the dead [...]"       

Storch concludes that the scene is "a vivid depiction of a child's sadistic fantasy against the mother" - a fantasy that Paul shares with his sister Annie, whose presence and complicity is an essential component; for little girls too can (secretly) resent the suffocating love of a devoted mother and her moral authority.  

III.

As much as I admire this reading, I don't quite buy into it. Which is not to say that it isn't true, only that something else is also true; namely, that children like mutilating dolls and action figures simply for the joy of destroying things, or because they hate the toys themselves - not because they hate their parents (although they might).

Interestingly, researchers at the University of Bath discovered in a study of 2005 that many 7-11 year olds grow to dislike their toys so much that they physically assault them. And of all the products the children were asked about, Barbie aroused the most complex and violent emotions.

Various torture techniques were gleefully experimented with in an attempt to express ambiguous feelings about the figure and common forms of mutilation included decapitation, burning, and even microwaving. What's more, the children interviewed saw these things as belonging to perfectly legitimate play activity; i.e., good clean fun.

It's adults who often find such activity deeply disturbing. Perhaps because they read so much meaning into it. Or perhaps because it's they - not their children - who anthropomorphise cheap plastic figures and get ridiculously sentimental about inanimate objects.

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 82-3.  

Margaret Storch, Sons and Adversaries: Women in William Blake and D. H. Lawrence, (University of Tennessee Press, 1990), pp. 98-100. 

Andrew McLaughlin, University of Bath Press Office, 'Barbie under attack from little girls, study shows', press release (19 Dec 2005): click here to read online.
 

Reflections on a Black Hole in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

A black hole as captured by the Event Horizon Telescope

Photograph: EHT Collaboration

As a nihilistic anti-theist, it made me very happy when astronomers released the first image of a supermassive black hole yesterday, thereby demonstrating that at the heart of the universe is not a loving presence, or judgemental God, but rather an enigmatic object defined by its absence and darkness.

Certainly that's true for the Messier 87 galaxy (or M87, as it's known); a giant elliptical galaxy, fifty-five million light years from Earth in the constellation of Virgo, that was discovered by the French star-gazer Charles Messier in 1781.

And it's doubtless true for our galaxy also (in fact, the EHT team are presently working on producing an image of the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way and hope to have such sometime soon). 

Further, one is tempted to suggest that if there's any truth in the old saying that suggests the microcosm corresponds with the macrocosm - as above, so below - then maybe it's the case that what was once called the soul is nothing but a tiny and mysterious core of chaos; a dark source of eternal creation that exists beyond the event horizon of the known self; a place wherein psychological law collapses and all human reality is distorted beyond recognition.

And who knows, maybe we'll one day even have a picture of that ...

Notes

The astonishing image of the black hole was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (which is actually a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile) using a technique known as interferometry. 

Of course, crackpot conspiracy theorists are, with depressing predictability, already claiming online that - just like the NASA moon landings - the picture is fake and the 200 scientists involved in the collaborative research project are therefore wilfully attempting to deceive the public as part of some elaborate hoax. 

Punk Friends Reunited

I remember with vague fondness my time at Trinity and All Saints College, which was then a small Catholic institution affiliated with the University of Leeds, but which has since gained full university status and autonomy.

Although I was there under the pretext of studying for a degree in Sociology and Media, essentially, like many undergraduates at this time, I was more interested in extracurricular activities that might broadly be categorised as messing around and fucking about. 

This included the cultivation of my own punk persona, Jimmy Jazz - after the song by the Clash - and becoming part of a small gang of misfits that numbered amongst its members:

(i) Clive Hooker, a drummer and DJ from Northampton, with a speech impediment that unfortunately made him sound like Klunk from Stop the Pigeon.

(ii) August Finer, a bass player with a knicker-invading smile and a mohican haircut; ultimately, a nice, middle-class Jewish boy, from Knutsford, posing as a punk (but who did have a brother in The Pogues).     

(iii) Kirk Field, a drama student (who couldn't really act) and a vocalist (who couldn't really sing), but a clever, funny, charming personality with a quiff and a penchant for magic mushrooms who went on to become a successful tour operator and events organiser for people who like to party.

During the years 1981-84, we four were as thick as thieves. But, amazingly, the moment we graduated the magic spell that bound us together was completely broken; even my friendship with Mr. Field, which had been extremely intimate and intense, didn't long survive the move to London.

I suppose there were reasons for this - but no real reason - and I'm told that it's a common phenomenon; that adolescent friendships often blossom with spectacular colour, but then quickly fade and die and that it's pointless trying to hold the petals on.

Regrets? I have a few. But then again, too few to mention. Besides, any lingering sense of loss only adds a delicious poignancy to nostalgic reflections like this; which is how dead friendships can continue to give pleasure.           

If the opportunity ever arose, I'd be happy to meet any or all of the above for a drink. But I suspect there'd be moments of awkward silence. And underneath the delight of seeing them again there'd be a slight sense of boredom and embarrassment and a longing to get away as soon as possible ...  

On Poetry, Fashion and Punk

Sonia Delaunay and Tristan Tzara

Robe poème, Le ventillateur tourne ... (1922)

Photo: R. Riss / The Delaunay Estate (Paris)

According to an article in Vogue, poetry is back in fashion and a number of recent collections have been inspired by verse.

Pierpaolo Piccioli, for example, collaborated with several poets to create a series of garments for his autumn/winter 2019 Valentino collection, in an attempt to redefine romanticism for a digital generation (i.e., to transport millennials beyond the screen and into the realm of dreams). 

But of course, as Rosalind Jana reminds us:

"The dialogue between clothes and poetry isn’t a novel one. In the '20s, textile artist Sonia Delaunay collaborated with [...] Dadaist poets including Tristan Tzara and Joseph Delteil to cover a series of dresses in snippets of their poetry. She called them robes poèmes. None of the resulting works still exist, but illustrations show gorgeous, colour-blocked garments with words snaking across arms and descending down skirts."

As a philosopher on the catwalk, I'm naturally excited by this combination of words and fabrics - or text and textiles - animated by the body of the wearer. However, as more punk-provocateur than poet, I'm perhaps more interested in the possibilities that fashion provides for political sloganeering rather than the reproduction of lines of verse.    

Thus, lovely as Delaunay's colourful designs could be - and as amusingly avant-garde as Tzara's poems were - I prefer the clothes of - or inspired by - McLaren and Westwood that incorporated Situationist slogans and lyrics by the Sex Pistols. I'm not sure to what extent (if any) these items brought about social and cultural change, but they certainly made one feel heroic and dangerous at the time.

I remember, for example, riding the rush hour tube in my youth and attempting to antagonise commuters by wearing a hand-painted shirt that read: 'Wise up sucker! Punch your boss, not the clock!'       

c. 1984/85

Notes

Rosalind Jana, 'Why Poetry is Back in Fashion', Vogue (15 March 2019): click here to read online.

The poem by Tristan Tzara that appears on the dress design by Sonia Delaunay above reads in the original French:

Le ventillateur tourne
dans le coeur de la tête
La fleur du froid serpent
de tendresse chimique

Susan de Muth's English translation reads:

The extractor fan turns 
In the head's heart
Bloom of the cold snake
Of chemical tenderness

See: Tristan Tzara and Susan de Muth, 'Dress Poems', Art in Translation, (Routledge, 2015), Vol. 7, No. 2, 304-308. Published online 17 August 2015: click here.    

When Ancient and Modern Worlds Collide: Notes on the Profane Fate of Plato's Sacred Olive Tree

A preserved section of Plato's olive tree

Agricultural University of Athens

According to legend, the ancient Greeks had the minor deity and culture-hero Aristaeus to thank for teaching them three essential skills: cheese-making, bee-keeping and - most crucially of all - the care and cultivation of olive trees.

For whilst the Greeks liked their feta and honey, they really loved their olive oil ...

Not only was the latter a key ingredient in their cuisine, for example, but they would anoint their kings and champion athletes with it. Indeed, even ordinary citizens, including philosophers, liked to rub olive oil onto their bodies in order to keep the skin supple and healthy.

Thus, it's really no surprise to discover that Plato's Academy was situated next to a sacred olive grove dedicated to the goddess Athena. It's believed that each of the twelve gated entrances to the school had its own tree standing as an evergreen sentinel and symbol of wisdom, fertility, and purity.

But there was also one very special olive tree under which Plato was said to have taught his students. And this tree continued to stand for thousands of years - long after the Academy itself had crumbled into dust - until, on one fateful day in October 1976, a bus was driven into it, breaking the noble trunk in two.

The upper section was taken to the Agricultural University where it has been preserved and displayed ever since. The lower part, however, including the enormous roots, remained at the original site until being dug up in January 2013 to serve as firewood by local people adversely affected by the Greek financial crisis.

Or so the popular story goes, as reported widely at the time by both local and international media ...  

Seeking to clarify the situation, however, the General Directorate of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage issued a (seemingly little-read) statement a few days later explaining that Plato's olive tree had, in fact, been uprooted and killed - not merely damaged - as a result of the accident 37 years earlier.

A new tree, with three trunks, had been planted in its place by the Agricultural University of Athens and it was one of these that was removed, having died, on January 6th, 2013 (the other two trunks remaining intact and in situ).       

Whilst there are amusing aspects to this tale, one can very well imagine what Plato - who esteemed truth above all things - would think of fake news: False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Photo: Olive Oil Times Collection

A Vagina Monologue

Poster for the film Chatterbox starring Candice Rialson 

(dir. Tom DeSimone, 1977)

I.

Many people are familiar with Eve Ensler's critically acclaimed but philosophically problematic play, The Vagina Monologues (1996). But not everyone knows of the artistic tradition to which it belongs and which can be traced back to an ancient folkloric - and phonocentric - origin.      

The vagina loquens is a particularly popular motif in France. When not working on his Encyclopédie, for example, the philosopher Diderot was also writing a novel entitled Les bijoux indiscrets (published anonymously in 1748), whose story concerns an African sultan who possesses a magical ring - given to him by a genie - that when rubbed and pointed in the right direction grants female genitalia the autonomous power of speech.   

This is often awkward for the women concerned, as what shameless cunts most like to speak of when given the opportunity is past amorous experience, including acts of infidelity that their owners might prefer to keep secret and remain silent about.

Now, whilst I quite like this idea of an independently-minded, free-speaking vagina, nobody likes a rat and nobody wants a snatch that snitches. Also, I have problems with the idea of locating a moral-confessional notion of truth in the vagina, thereby simply turning the cunt into another form of soul and reviving traditional ideas of sex and subjectivity.


II.

In effect, this brings us back to some of the philosophical criticisms made of Ensler's play. For example, some feminists, trans activists and genderqueer individuals are far from happy to see women being reduced once more to their biology and are dismissive of the claim that they can be politically empowered via a form of cunt-awareness. 

Critiquing The Vagina Monologues from a very different perspective - but with even more overt hostility - is Camille Paglia, who regards the play as a bourgeois perversion of feminism and a psychological poison that denigrates men and celebrates victimhood.

Whilst I don't quite share Paglia's almost obsessive insistence on discussing female sexuality in terms of elemental mysteries and bloody horror, I do agree with her that Ensler's sentimental and complacent humanism in which the vagina is turned into a user-friendly safe space and given a winning personality is deeply depressing.

Ultimately, of course, it's not for me to suggest what a speaking vagina might have to tell us. But one would hope it might amuse and challenge, rather than bore to tears by merely repeating what it's already heard the mouth blabber on numerous occasions.

Either that, or, preferably, just stay mute with a noiseless soft power of its own that lies beyond all truth (unless it be the truth of zero), all identity, and all metaphysics of presence. In fact, that's precisely what I want the cunt to be; a kind of ontological black hole or site of sheer loss, as silent and as inviting as a freshly dug grave. 

In Support of Rachel Riley (With a Brief Note on Israel and Anti-Zionism)

Photo: Mike Marsland / Getty Images

I.

Apart from being very beautiful and highly intelligent, Countdown's resident mathematician and co-presenter, Rachel Riley, is also a woman of great courage and integrity - as demonstrated by her standing up to the anti-Semitism of those who regard themselves as belonging to the radical left (and/or Corbyn's Labour Party), something for which, as might be imagined, she has received appalling abuse from online cowards. 

Born in Rochford, Essex, educated at Oxford, Ms. Riley describes herself as Jewish (albeit non-religious) and so is sensitive to the question of anti-Semitism and fully entitled to speak out on it: this is not prostituting her heritage, as one (now suspended) member of the Labour Party tweeted; nor is she poisoning the memory of her ancestors (quite the contrary).   

Despite the abuse - much of it followed by the hashtag #BoycottRachelRiley - I'm glad to see Ms. Riley announce her intention to carry on sharing her views on social media and elsewhere. I'm also pleased to see that several of her celebrity pals have come to her defence, including David Baddiel, David Schneider and Katherine Ryan.

I'm not a celebrity. Nor am I a friend of Ms. Riley's. But I would also like to add my support here. Special mention should also go to the actress Tracy Ann Oberman who, like Rachel Riley, has dared to take a stand and call out anti-Semitism. She too has my admiration and fond regards.

II.

Many people insist that anti-Zionism is distinct from anti-Semitism and I'm broadly sympathetic to this argument; clearly, there can be perfectly legitimate criticism made of Israel and its government.

Having said that, we all know that anti-Zionism is often a coded (or disguised) form of anti-Semitism and, ultimately, like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, I think one has to show solidarity with the State of Israel and question the thinking behind Deleuze's support for Palestinian terror attacks, or Badiou's desire to see Israel disappear off the face of the earth (perceiving as he does its very existence to be a crime).       

And I say this not as someone who has a vested interest in politics or is particulary well-informed about all the issues, but, rather as someone who, like Larry David, would be perfectly happy to eat great chicken anywhere and who knows that the penis doesn't care about race, creed, or colour ...*


* Note: I'm referring here to the season 8 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm entitled 'Palestinian Chicken', (dir. Robert Weide, 2011) in which Larry, a Jew - a big Jew - meets Shara, a virulently anti-Semitic Palestinian (played by Anne Bedian). Despite their differences, they are instantly attracted to one another and amusingly use the political and religious tension between themselves to heighten and intensify a sexual encounter: click here.   

What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?

But don't tell my heart / My achy breaky heart

I just don't think he'd understand

As Nietzsche was fond of pointing out, in so far as antithetical values exist, then things often originate in their opposite.

Thus, it's not surprising that the modern American success story is one rooted in the terrible failure of the original pioneers in conflict with the inhuman conditions of the continent itself. They eventually tamed the American wilderness, but at an appalling cost to themselves and it was later generations who reaped the reward of their efforts.    

D. H. Lawrence, who has a unique insight into American history and literature, identifies this cost, arguing that in order to break the back of the country, the early Americans had to sacrifice something essential within themselves: "the softness, the floweriness, the natural tenderness" [119].  

In other words, America was conquered and subdued, but only once the pioneers were heart broken.

This broken heartedness had two main consequences: firstly, the people became creatures of pure will; secondly, they (unconsciously) became physically repulsive to one another. With regard to the first of these consequences, Lawrence writes:

"The heart was broken. But the will, the determination to conquer the land and make it submit to productivity, this was not broken. The will-to-success and the will-to-produce became clean and indomitable once the sympathetic heart was broken." [120] 

Having repeatedly come up against the malevolent spirit of the American continent and been defeated by it, the early settlers lost their instinctive belief in the inherent kindness of other people and the essential goodness of the universe itself (a belief which, according to Lawrence, lies at the core of the human heart).

When this happens, the result is either "despair, bitterness, and cynicism" [120], or people make their hearts hard - hard enough to eventually shatter - and exercise a new (individual) will; a will-to-succeed if possible, but, ultimately, to persist no matter what and in the face of everything:

"It is not animality - far from it. [...] They have a strange, stony will-to-persist, that is all. [...] It is a minimum lower than the savage [...] Because it is a willed minimum, sustained from inside by resistance, brute resistance against any flow of consciousness except that of the barest, most brutal egoistic self-interest."[123]

Of course, they continue to worship a benevolent God and subscribe to a moral world order - continue to be good neighbours and upstanding citizens, etc. - but their faith and behaviour no longer comes from the heart and they are no longer genuinely connected by a shared warmth of fellow-feeling. They fall out of touch into wilfulness and idealism. And this leads to the second consequence:

"While the old sympathetic flow continues, there are violent hostilities between people, but they are not secretly repugnant to one another. Once the heart is broken, people become repulsive to one another [...] They smell in each other's nostrils. [...] Once the blood-sympathy breaks, and only the nerve-sympathy is left, human beings become secretly intensely repulsive to one another, physically, and sympathetic only mentally and spiritually." [121]

I don't know if there's any truth in this great psychic and physical transformation, but, amusingly, it helps Lawrence explain the American twin obsessions with plumbing and personal hygiene:

"The secret physical repulsion between people is responsible for the perfection of American 'plumbing', American sanitation, and American kitchens, utterly white-enamelled and anti-septic. It is revealed in the awful advertisements such as those about 'halitosis', or bad breath. It is responsible for the American nausea at coughing, spitting, or any of those things. The American townships don't mind hideous litter of tin cans and paper and broken rubbish. But they go crazy at the sight of human excrement." [121] 
 
As Lawrence goes on to note, this repulsion for the physicality of others - and, indeed, our own bodies - has spread from America to Europe and the rest of the modern world, as our literature reveals:

"There it is, in James Joyce, in Aldous Huxley, in André Gide [...] in all the very modern novels, the dominant note is the repulsiveness, intimate physical repulsiveness of human flesh. It is the expression of absolutely genuine experience." [122]

Of course, Lawrence wrote this ninety years ago, so doubtless things have changed since then; though whether they have changed for the better or for the worse is debatable. Perhaps the inward revulsion for any kind of physical contact with other people has only intensified and extended - thus the triumph of social media.

For whilst there may be various forms of online abuse and trolling to contend with, at least friends don't smell on Facebook ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Bottom Dogs, by Edward Dahlberg', Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 117-24. All page refs. given in the post are to this work.   

It's worth noting that despite what Lawrence says here about the dangers of a broken heart, he had himself expressed a poetic preference for such: "For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. / It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack." See 'Pomegranate', in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923): click here to read online. It can also be found in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), on p. 231. 

The image used for this post is the Broken Heart Emoji on Apple iOS 11.2: see emojipedia.org for details.

The lyric quoted underneath is from 'Achy Breaky Heart', a country song written by Donald L. Von Tress and most famously recorded by Billy Ray Cyrus for the album Some Gave All (Mercury Records, 1992). The track was also released as a single on 23 March 1992. The lyrics are © Universal Music Publishing Group.

D. H. Lawrence's Vision of a Demonic America

Jasper Johns: Flag (1954-55)

moma.org

I. 

I've never been to America. But I have always loved all things American, including the people. Perhaps this is due in some mysterious way to the fact that my mother-to-be dated a GI during the War (he even proposed and planned to take his teen-bride back with him to New York, but my mother-to-be said no).

Whatever the reason, I've always thought of myself as, in some sense, American and I fully appreciate why so many Brits - including Christopher Hitchens and Johnny Rotten - are proud to become US citizens.

Despite his determination to remain English in the teeth of all the world, I also believe D. H. Lawrence would have made a fine American. Indeed, it's rather surprising that he didn't settle in the States and turn his back forever on the country of his birth, which treated him so poorly on so many occasions.*        

For whilst Lawrence despised many aspects of modern life in America - telephones, tinned meat, automobiles, indoor plumbing, incomes and ideals, etc. - he was fascinated by the spirit of place and the alien quality also of American art-speech that he discovered in the classic literature:

"The furthest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached. The European moderns are all trying to be extreme. The great Americans I mention just were it." [12]

I think that's true: which is why, for example, I think The Scarlet Letter a more provocative novel than L'histoire de l'œil.

I also think Lawrence might be right to suggest that the real American day hasn't dawned as yet. And that when it does, it'll surprise everyone - not least the pale-faced, apple-pie loving idealists who think of themselves as the true Americans of today. For the America to come will be one that has reckoned at last with the full force of the daimon that belongs to the American continent itself.   

Troubling as it is to contemplate, I admire Lawrence's queer dark vision of a demonic America, inhabited by a people whose destiny "is to destroy the whole corpus of the white psyche, the white consciousness" [81]. This doesn't mean primitive regression - Lawrence is clear that there can be no going back - but it does entail a dusky-bodied posthumanism with a rattle snake coiled at its heart.**  

II.

Even before he had made his first visit in 1922, Lawrence was pinning his highest hopes on America. In a letter of October 1915 to the American editor, critic and poet Harriet Monroe, he writes:

"I must see America. I think one can feel hope there. I think that there life comes up from the roots, crude but vital. Here the whole tree of life is dying. It is like being dead: the underworld. I must see America. I believe it is beginning, not ending." 

Lawrence's contrasting of American vitality with European deadness is a constant in his work from this period. Thus, it's not surprising to find that in a foreword written for Studies in Classic American Literature, he attempts to persuade Americans to get up off their knees before European culture and tradition and be thankful for their own barbaric freedom from the past.

Like Nietzsche, Lawrence is only interested in serving history to the extent that it serves life; when it becomes disadvantageous - i.e., when it merely instructs without increasing or directly quickening human activity - then he's happy to draw a line under it.

It's a pity, says Lawrence, that Americans are always so wonderstruck by European monuments: "After all, a heap of stone is only a heap of stone - even if it is Milan cathedral. And who knows that it isn't a horrid bristly burden on the face of the earth?" [381]

He continues:

"America, therefore, should leave off being quite so prostrate with admiration. [...]
      Let Americans turn to America, and to that very America which has been rejected and almost annihilated. [...] America must turn again to catch the spirit of her own dark, aboriginal continent.
      That which was abhorrent to the Pilgrim Fathers and to the Spaniards, that which was called the Devil, the black demon of savage America, this great aboriginal spirit the Americans must recognise again, recognise, and embrace. The devil [...] of our forefathers hides the Godhead which we seek. [...]
       It means a surpassing of the old European life-form. It means a departure from the old European morality [...] It means even a departure from the old range of emotions and sensibilities. [...]
      [...] Now is the day when Americans must become fully, self-reliantly conscious of their own inner responsibility. They must be ready for a new act, a new extension of life. They must pass the bounds." [383-85]       

In a sense, as these lines indicate, Lawrence is transferring Nietzsche's project of a revaluation of all values into the wild west. One can almost picture the overman in a poncho, cowboy hat and spurs - a bit like Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name. (Readers might think I'm only teasing here, but, as Lawrence says, the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic ... and a killer.)*** 

 thedigitalpilgrimage.wordpress.com 

Notes

* In a letter written to his friend Catherine Carswell in 1916, Lawrence makes it clear that he had, at this time, determined that he wanted to leave England for good and at the earliest possible opportunity, transferring all his life to America, a country in which he could "feel the new unknown". 

** See what Lawrence writes in 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo' (Final Version, 1923), in Studies in Classic American Literature, pp. 126-28. And see also his remarks in 'Indians and an Englishman', in Mornings and Mexico and Other Essays, pp. 119-20. The essential point is that whilst Lawrence advocates Americans picking up where the native peoples left off, he also wants those who accept this challenge to perfect the old way of being as a new body of truth in the future; not make a vain and naive attempt to simply return to the past: I can't cluster at the drum any more. 

*** Reading Eastwood's movies - particularly the Dollars Trilogy - in terms of a postmoral existentialism, is not an original move on my part; several scholars have produced interesting work in this area. See for example the collection of essays ed. Richard T. McClelland and Brian B. Clayton, The Philosophy of Clint Eastwood, (University Press of Kentucky, 2014).

 
Bibliography

D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.

D. H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
 
D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II (1913-16), ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), letter 1028, to Harriet Monroe, 26 October, 1915.

D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III (1916-21), ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), letter 1306, to Catherine Carswell, 7 November, 1916.

Nietzsche, 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life', Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1997). 


Many thanks to James Walker of The Digital Pilgrimage for use of the Lawrence as cowboy image.

He That Aches With Amorous Love: Lawrence's Critique of Walt Whitman's Idealism

Lawrence's essay on Whitman in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) is more piss-take than critical analysis. Lawrence is particularly mocking of the American poet's claim to be he that aches with amorous love, which he thinks a ludicrous assertion born of the latter's idealism rather than genuine feeling.

Better, says Lawrence, to have a belly-ache, which is at least localised. For man is a limited creature and if he aches with love (i.e. physical longing) it's usually for someone or something specific; such as the girl next door, for example. Only some sort of superhuman being aches with amorous love for the entire universe: "And the danger of the superman is that he is mechanical." [149]  

Whitman insists on some kind of elective affinity between himself and every Tom, Dick and Harry he should ever happen to encounter and relates this to the gravitational pull of the earth: 'Does not all matter, aching, attract all matter? / So the body of me to all I meet or know.' 

In what is, for me, a crucial passage, Lawrence writes:

"What can be more mechanical? The difference between life and matter is that life, living things, living creatures, have the instinct of turning right away from some matter, and of blissfully ignoring the bulk of most matter, and of turning towards only some certain bits of specially selected matter. As for living creatures all hurtling together into one great snowball, why, most very living creatures spend the greater part of their time getting out of sight, smell or sound of the rest of the living creatures. Even bees only cluster on their own queen. And that is sickening enough. Fancy all white humanity clustering on one another like a lump of bees.
      No Walt, you give yourself away. Matter does gravitate, helplessly. But men are tricky-tricksy, and they shy all sorts of ways." [149]  

If Whitman finds himself gravitating towards everyone it's a sign not only of his promiscuous idealism, but of something having gone very wrong with him; the "lonely phallic monster" [150] of his individual and sensual self has either been murdered or mentalised. Or allowed to go all mushy and leak out into the universe.    

Healthy individuals keep themselves to themselves; happy to meet and embrace a few others, but unwilling to touch most people with a barge-pole.

Whitman, however, insists with false exuberance on grasping everyone to his bosom, believing as he does in One Identity as the great desideratum: "Walt becomes in his own person the whole world, the whole universe, the whole eternity of time", until he reaches the supreme state of Allness. Or until, as Lawrence rather cruelly says, he becomes a fat old man bloated with "senile, self-conscious sensuosity" [151].    

Lawrence - to his credit - knows that there are many things outside of himself that, in their very otherness, he can never know or assimilate: "But Walt wouldn't have it. He was everything and everything was in him. He drove an automobile with a very fierce headlight, along the track of a fixed idea, through the darkness of this world." [152]

Whitman was a great poet. But the very greatest poets are those who sleep under bushes in the dark and prefer the trackless wildernesses, or the woodpaths, to zooming along the Highway of Love in one direction only. For it becomes a dead end at last, as we'll eventually discover. 

Ultimately, Whitman's major mistake was confusing his own message of sympathy, with Christian moral-idealism: "He didn't follow his Sympathy. Try as he might, he kept on automatically interpreting it as Love, as Charity." [158]

What a shame, says Lawrence, that Whitman didn't see that sympathy is a form of compassion, i.e.,  feeling with rather than feeling for, and has nothing to do with identifying (or merging) with others in the name of solidarity, social justice, and self-sacrifice.

In other words, sympathy means "partaking of the passion" [159] which inspires the other; it doesn't mean that their experience, their pain, their struggle, is yours. It means lending support where and when you can, but without trying to walk in shoes (or wear headscarves) that don't belong to you. 

For sympathy also means drawing limits, even to love, and preserving integrity: Love what the soul loves; hate what the soul hates; be compassionate, but don't be an indiscriminate. And remember: it's better to display starry indifference, than sentimental stupidity and false feeling. 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman', Studies in Classic American Literature (Final Version, 1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 148-61. 

See also the Intermediate Version (1919) of the Whitman study in the above edition, pp. 358-69, and the 1921-22 version which appears as Appendix V, pp. 401-17. In many respects, these versions are more interestingly complex, although Lawrence's argument remains the same: Whitman is the best modern example of the great triumph into infinitude. 

Every Little (Act of Animal Cruelty) Helps ...

A nest full of swallows 

Photo by Amy Sancetta / AP

The shocking tale of retail giant Tesco using nets to prevent returning swallows from nesting in one of their trolley parks, was widely reported in the press earlier this month and rightly caused a storm of protest from bird lovers up and down the country and across social media.   

As the writer and conservationist Kate Blincoe rightly argued, this isn't just a small inconvenience for the birds, but an action that can have fatal consequences, as swallows - a species that, like so many others, has suffered a significant decline in numbers during recent decades - return faithfully to the same breeding sites year after year.

At best, therefore, the extensive use of netting in this case - making the birds' summer home completely inaccessible - will result in no eggs being laid (and thus no young being raised); at worst, the adult birds may become trapped and die. What it doesn't do is encourage the birds to find alternative nesting sites, as some spokescunt for the supermarket suggested.

Thankfully, after Kate and others started an online campaign to save the swallows - and after hundreds of customers threatened to boycott the Norwich store at the centre of the row - Tesco relented and removed the netting, allowing the birds to find refuge after their long migratory flight from Southern Africa.    

Unfortunately, however, just as one swallow does not a summer make, nor does one happy ending mean the national scandal of bird netting has been resolved. For this incident in a Tesco trolley park is by no means an isolated one. Farmers and developers all over England, are covering trees and hedgerows with nets in order to prevent birds from nesting, so that they can then dig the trees and hedgerows up - a practice that is not only perfectly legal, but increasingly widespread as more and more land is set aside for new housing.     

I agree entirely with Ms. Blincoe, using nets in this manner is not only vile and pernicious, it's anti-life. And every little act of animal cruelty such as this helps reinforce my misanthropic contempt for Man.  

See: Kate Blincoe, 'Are nets to stop swallows nesting any way to treat the natural world?', The Guardian (21 March 2019): click here to read online.

See also: Samantha Fisher, 'Why are nets appearing over trees and hedges?', BBC News website (23 March, 2019): click here. 

Sign: the petition to make netting hedgerows to prevent birds from nesting a criminal offence: click here.

Cicchetti and Toxic Masculinity

cecconisshoreditch.com

I finally got to eat at Cecconi's last week, at the Redchurch Townhouse, Shoreditch; something that I've been wanting to do since it opened in October of last year.

Basically a stylish but informal pizza and pasta restaurant, the food and wine is predictable but delicious, and the mostly Italian, mostly female staff are friendly and very easy on the eye. Lunch with Zed should've, therefore, been a perfectly enjoyable occasion. 

Unfortunately, however, there was a prick at the next table displaying hegemonic masculine character traits that some - not unfairly - might label toxic; angry, boorish, sexist, super-sensitive to any perceived slight, unable to admit any weakness or failing, etc.

If he was trying to impress the woman he was with on the one hand, he was clearly trying to intimidate the waiter on the other. Thus, for example, when the latter very politely attempted to explain the menu - after being informed of its overly-complex layout - the prick ejaculated: 'I've been to some of the best restaurants around the world so I know how to read a menu.'    

A few minutes later, having given his suggestions at how to simplify the menu, he decided he next wanted to discuss staffing levels and complain about what he regarded as a poor quality of service. Then, rather surprisingly, he wanted to know why they didn't lay the tables with white table cloths, as this always adds a little class.  

I felt so sorry for the waiting staff. And so sorry for his companion - particularly when, at one point, he left her sitting alone at the table for twenty minutes whilst he took a call on his mobile ...

I don't know what the antidote to this rude, inept, and bullying model of masculinity might be - castration seems a rather drastic last resort - but it would be nice if such men could learn to moderate their own behaviour, check their privilege, and overcome the social and sexual anxiety that surely drives it.  

Sur la terre et le terrorisme: A Brief Sadean Response to Rebecca Solnit

According to the American writer Rebecca Solnit, it was no coincidence that the Christchurch mosque massacre took place on the same day and in close vicinity to a climate protest by youngsters with hope and idealism in their hearts: "It was a shocking pairing and also a perfectly coherent one".

Was it? Surely such perfect coherence - or synchronicity - is in the mind of the beholder ... 

But then Solnit is an idealist who specialises in discerning causal relations and meaningful connections between events; a woman who believes in harmonious global unity, which she describes as "the beautiful interconnection of all life and the systems [...] on which that life depends".

Other than the murderous racism, the thing she really dislikes about white supremacists is that they refuse to care about climate change and thus threaten to destroy or disrupt the above systems, making the world not just warmer, but more chaotic, "in ways that break these elegant patterns and relationships".  

This chaos, according to Solnit, is essentially an extension of terrorist violence; the violence not of guns and bombs, but of "hurricanes, wildfires, new temperature extremes, broken weather patterns, droughts, extinctions, famines" that the poor Earth is coerced or triggered into unleashing.

And this is why climate action, she says, has always been and must remain non-violent, in stark contrast to the actions carried out by men like Brenton Tarrant. For environmentalism is a movement to protect life and restore peace and harmony; protesting against global warming is "the equivalent of fighting against hatred" and disorder. In other words, it's a form of counter-terrorism. 

Personally, I think such claims are highly contentious, to say the least. But who knows, perhaps Ms. Solnit is right. After all, not only does she know a lot of climate activists, but she also knows what motivates them ... Love! Love for the planet, love for people (particularly the poor and vulnerable), and love for the promise of a sustainable future.

How many people at the opposite end of the political spectrum from herself and her friends she also knows isn't clear. Presumably not many. But that doesn't stop her from dismissing them all as irresponsible climate change deniers, unwilling to acknowledge that "actions have consequences", and full of the kind of libertarian machismo and entitlement that ultimately ends in violence.    

What Solnit doesn't seem to consider is that the Earth is a monster of chaos and indifference; that it's not a living system or self-regulating organism and is neither sentient nor morally concerned with the preservation of life.

I think it's mistaken to think of the planet as some kind of home, sweet home and to ascribe the world with some sort of will. But, if we must play this game, then it's probably best to take a neo-Gnostic line and accept that all matter and events are imbued with the spirit of evil.

Indeed, push comes to shove, I'm inclined to think that human agency and geological catastrophe conspire not because innocent Nature has been groomed by terrorists or provoked into taking her revenge due to man-made climate change (as some followers of Lovelock like to imagine), but because they are both expressions of what is a fundamentally immoral existence. 

Finally, Solnit might like to recall this from Sade writing in Justine: "Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power."

See:

Rebecca Solnit, 'Why climate action is the antithesis of white supremacy', The Guardian (19 March 2019): click here to read online. 

Marquis de Sade, Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, trans. John Phillips, (Oxford University Press, 2012). 

See also the excellent essay by David McCallam entitled 'The Terrorist Earth? Some Thoughts on Sade and Baudrillard', in French Cultural Studies 23 (3), (SAGE Publications, 2012), 215-224. Click here to access as an online pdf via Academia.edu.

Amongst other things, McCallam indicates how eighteenth-century discourses on revolutionary politics and the aesthetics of the sublime provide the conceptual framework for the contemporary idea of the Earth as terrorist; an idea, developed by Jean Bauadrillard, that allows us to think terror attacks and natural disasters interchangeably.   

Note: The photo of Rebecca Solnit is by John Lee: johnleepictures.com

Gallows Corner (Reflections on Capital Punishment and Lessons in Paganism)

I.

Living as I do just north of the notorious road junction known as Gallows Corner - a large roundabout with five exits, a flyover, a nearby retail park, and an above average number of collisions -  mean my thoughts often turn to the subject of capital punishment; particularly in the wake of some ghastly local crime, such as the murder of Jodie Chesney ... 

I'm not suggesting that they should demolish the drive-thru KFC and re-erect the gallows as a place of public execution, but it has to be asked what should be done with violent felons who have placed themselves outside of the law and society and what role cruelty, punishment and death (as a form of truth) should play within the socio-legal space.


II.

Historically, as Foucault notes, public executions were always about more than justice; they were a theatrical display of force within a system founded upon a notion of sovereignty. But we, of course, no longer live in such a world; as citizens and as subjects, we are are constituted by a very different regime of power - one that has given itself the task (and the right) to administer life, rather than take it.

Such a regime - let's call it liberal humanism - prides itself on its ability to sustain and coordinate life within a system of law and order: "For such a power, execution was at the same time a limit, a scandal, and a contradiction." It's because this is the case - because having to execute a prisoner is an embarrassing sign of failure - that most Western democracies have abolished capital punishment (and why those states that still carry out executions do so behind closed doors as a joyless, bureacratic procedure witnessed only by officials and a few selected individuals). 

It's not that they - we - have become more humanitarian or more squeamish; death isn't carefully evaded or hidden away within our culture due to a heightened moral sense or some peculiar form of modern anxiety, but due to the fact that death is that which frustrates (bio-)power's desire to micro-manage every aspect of an individual's life. 

III.

Again, I'm not saying that we should attempt to turn the clock back and resurrect violent spectacles or what Nietzsche would term festivals of cruelty, though one suspects that here in Essex - home of the witch trials - there would be an enthusiastic audience for such.

I'm just reminding readers that, as Foucault suggests, public executions were once an occasion also for the exercise of popular power; a chance for citizens to directly vent their anger and make their views known; to not only rejoice in the execution of a criminal, but to mock those who act with pretensions of higher (universal) authority.   

Perhaps there is still something important to learn from Lyotard's lessons in paganism after all ...


IV.

By the term paganism Lyotard refers to a style of thinking which affirms the idea of incommensurable differences founded upon an ontology of singular events. For Lyotard, all things - including crimes - should be considered on their own terms, without attempting to arrive at a universal law of judgement that can make sense of (or do justice to) each and every unique happening.       

In other words, paganism is a kind of godless politics; one that abandons One Truth and One Law in favour of a multiplicity of specific judgements that have no pre-existing (ideal) criteria to refer back to. This would, arguably, allow us to develop a kind of post-Nietzschean legal sytem wherein judgement becomes an expression of an active and affirmative will to power.   

I have to admit that I find it difficult to see how this plurality of judgements would work in practice, but that might simply be because I lack the constitutive imagination to do so (a Kantian notion that Lyotard also invokes in his work on paganism).

See:

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1998); see Part Five: 'Right of Death and Power Over Life'.

Jean-François Lyotard, 'Lessons in Paganism', The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin, (Blackwell, 1998).