Forever Dead and Lovely: Notes on Izima Kaoru's Landscapes with a Corpse

Izima Kaoru: Kimura Yoshino wears Alexander McQueen #484 (2007)

Part of the Landscapes with a Corpse series

Galerie Andreas Binder (Munich)

artnet.com

 

No matter how we die, we will travel up to the world 

beyond the sky without regretting how we lived

The phrase drop dead gorgeous, popular with necrophiles and thanatologists alike, also inspired the Japanese fashion photographer Izima Kaoru to stage elaborate death scenes featuring attractive models and well-known actresses dressed in expensive designer outfits that oblige viewers to consider the cultural fascination with the beautiful female corpse.

The sequence of images begin with wide-angle shots and gradually narrow to close-ups of the model. The resulting pictures look rather like film stills and remind us that there's nothing more cinematic than the death of a beautiful woman (to paraphrase Poe), although Kaoru's work demands to be contextualised within a wider art history; one that includes traditional Japanese woodcuts [Ukiyo-e].

It's also important to understand the influence of the Buddhist practice of maranasati - a musing on one's own mortality using various visualisation techniques - upon Kaoru's photography. Thus it is that, prior to taking any pictures, Kaoru asks his models to imagine the circumstances surrounding their deaths (where, when, how, etc.) and to consider also what would constitute the most sightly way of exiting this world (leaving behind a beautiful corpse is never an easy task). 

In sum, Kaoru's pictures are a highly stylised and aesthetically pleasing form of what we in the West term memento mori and not merely images to do with fashion, sex, and cinema born of the floating world (though even if they were that alone, they'd still appeal to me). 

Izima Kaoru: Kimura Yoshino wears Alexander McQueen #483 (2007)

Part of the Landscapes with a Corpse series

Galerie Andreas Binder (Munich)

artnet.com

See: Izima Kaoru, Landscapes with a Corpse, German and English text by Roy Exley, Yuko Hasegawa and Peter Weiermair, (Hatje Kantz, 2008), 192 pages, 171 colour illustrations.

See also the documentary film by Chad Fahs, Landscapes with a Corpse (2014), which follows Izima Kaoru on a journey to create new work and perhaps find the answer to the question of what best constitutes a beautiful death. 

Readers interested in a sister post to this one - on Melanie Pullen's High Fashion Crime Scenes - should click here.

Cover Girl Killer (1959)

Sex and horror are the new gods 

in this polluted world of so-called entertainment

I.

There are many reasons to love the black and white British film Cover Girl Killer (dir. Terry Bishop, 1959).

For one thing, it stars Harry H. Corbett in a pre-Steptoe role that demonstrates what a fine dramatic actor he was; one trained in Stanislavski's system (famously developed as method acting in the US). He may never have become England's Marlon Brando, as some critics predicted, but he coulda been a contender, could've been somebody, instead of a rag-and-bone man ...

      

II.

The film is set in the seedy but seductive world of post-War Soho; a world of strip-clubs, brothels, and dirty bookshops, where it was de rigeur to wear a raincoat whatever the weather.

Corbett plays a psychopath who hopes that, by killing the young models who appear on the cover of a notorious glamour magazine, he may free himself from his unsavoury obsessions and the lustful images that corrupt his thought.  

(It's always shocking to be reminded that murder and misogyny are often regarded as less shameful than masturbation by puritans who, as a matter of fact, have been driven insane by their own moralism, rather than corrupted by pornography.)

Having killed several young women - including Gloria, the showgirl with the most on show - Corbett's creepy character is lured into a trap set by the police and the publisher of Wow magazine, with the very lovely Felicity Young (as June) providing the bait. This results in a pervylicious climax to the movie, as the latter is chased around backstage at the Kasbar theatre in her underwear ...  

Cover Girl Killer may not be a great film - it's no Peeping Tom, Michael Powell's masterpiece that was released a year later - but it is, arguably, a seminal one that anticipates the direction that cinema (and popular entertainment in general) was moving: sexually explicit and ultra-violent; two decades later and the slasher movie was a staple of the horror genre and Mary Millington was starring in The Playbirds (1978).  

Well done to Talking Pictures TV (Sky 343, Freeview 81, Freesat 306) for deciding to broadcast it as part of their superb archive of films.

Harry H. Corbett and Felicity Young in Cover Girl Killer (1959)

To watch the trailer to Cover Girl Killer (1959): click here.

Reflections on Madam Butterfly 2: Puccini's Influence on Pop and Fashion

Galliano for Dior: Japanese New Look (S/S 2007)

Model: Ai Tominaga

I. Hip-Hopera

Taken from the album Fans (1984), the single 'Madam Butterfly' is a perfect fusion of opera and electronic beats, performed by Betty Anne White and Debbie Cole, with the added bonus of having Malcolm McLaren in the role of Lt. Pinkerton.

It's a kind of punk version of Hooked on Classics, which sounds as if it really shouldn't work, yet somehow does work - and works in a way that even Puccini would have approved of, belonging as it does to the post-Romantic tradition of verismo that he favoured (a form of realism that often deals with violent and sexual themes, but in a seductively beautiful manner).   

I once conducted an informal interview with Malcolm in which I asked him about his fascination with opera and particularly the work of Puccini. He explained that, for him, what appealed most was the intensity of feeling and the authenticity of emotion expressed. Opera was the very opposite of what he later termed karaoke culture. It was this sincerity of expression that opera and punk rock shared that made them so powerful.   

II. Cio-Cio San on the Catwalk

John Galliano may say terrible things when drunk, but he remains one of the undisputed geniuses of British fashion who, during a fourteen year period as artistic director at Dior, ruled Paris and the world. In 2007, celebrating his tenth year at the company, he presented a spring/summer couture collection called Japanese New Look, inspired by Puccini's legendary opera, Madama Butterfly.

The collection featured an elegant, yet bold use of colour that mixed and matched gentle cream tones with bright yellows, lime greens, and hot pinks. The tailoring, of course, was impeccable (as was the geometric detailing). Stephen Jones designed the extraordinary headpieces (think bonsai trees and cherry blossom), whilst Pat McGrath produced showstopping makeup that suggested a contemporary geisha look (or a rather punkish Cio-Cio San).   

I mentioned in a sister post to this one discussing Puccini's musical masterpiece, that there are some people now who find the opera problematic on woke political grounds ...

Doubtless, these same people would also object to Galliano's 2007 collection due to its cultural appropriation and his use of mostly white models, although it should be noted that the Japanese model Ai Tominaga, pictured above, happily participated in the Paris show, as did the Chinese model Emma Pei (below), who took to the catwalk to the sound of Malcolm McLaren's unique take on Madam Butterfly ...   

Notes

My taped interview with McLaren has been transcribed, edited, and posted on Torpedo the Ark: click here.

To read the sister post to this one on Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly (1904): click here.

Play: Malcolm Mclaren, 'Madam Butterfly', single from the album Fans (Charisma Records, 1984): click here.

Or click here for the promotional video to the above, directed by Terence Donovan. Set in a Turkish bath and featuring a languid parade of beautiful young women, the video was banned by Top of the Pops on the grounds that the artist - McLaren - fails to appear in it.  

Watch: Galliano's Japanese New Look couture show for Dior (S/S 2007): click here.

Reflections on Madam Butterfly 1: The Opera

Poster for Madama Butterfly (1904) 

by Adolfo Hohenstein

Puccini's Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala 116 years ago today ...

Based on a short story by the American author John Luther Long, the work has become a firm favourite with opera goers the world over, although, in its original two act version, it was poorly received, obliging Puccini to significantly revise it; dividing the second act in two, for example, and inserting the Humming Chorus as a bridge to what became Act III.

These and other changes did the trick, although Puccini continued to revise the work, producing a fifth and final version in 1907 - the composer's cut - which has become the one most often performed today.

And, rather surprisingly perhaps, Madama Butterfly is still frequently staged, despite our living in a politically woke era obsessively concerned with racism and sexual abuse, things that are central to this tragic tale of an American naval officer's exploitation and betrayal of a 15-year-old Japanese girl and her subsequent suicide.   

I suppose this shows that whilst some contemporary audience members - as well as some members of the cast and production team - may struggle to reconcile their enjoyment of this musical masterpiece with the fact that it was written by a dead white European male indulging in Orientalism of the first degree, most members of the paying public don't give a shit as long as they get to hear one of the most famous (and beautiful) of arias, Un bel dì vedremo.

The fact is, when most people pop along to the theatre, they do so hoping to be entertained; they don't buy tickets for Madama Butterfly because they are concerned about white male privilege or the sexual exploitation of vulnerable young women in the developing world, any more than when buying tickets to The Phantom of the Opera it's because they care about facial disfigurement or the condition of the sewers in 19th century Paris ...

Play: Maria Callas, 'Un bel dì vedremo', from The Very Best of Maria Callas, (EMI, 2002): click here. 

To read a sister post to this one, on Puccini's influence on pop and fashion - with reference to the work of Malcolm McLaren and John Galliano - please click here. 

 

The Shamrock and the Swastika: Notes on Irish Republicanism and National Socialism

Statue of Seán Russell
Fairview Park, Dublin

Oh here’s to Adolph Hitler / Who made the Britons squeal

Sure before the fight is ended / They will dance an Irish reel

I.

Whilst my knowledge of Irish history and politcs is rather limited, I was surprised to hear that Sinn Féin had polled almost a quarter of all votes cast in the recent general election; more than any other party, gaining them 37 of the 160 available seats.

A left-leaning republican party, Sinn Féin emerged in its current form during the Troubles, when it was linked to the IRA. Since the Good Friday Agreement (1998), however, they've successfully rebranded themselves as a populist movement and in 2018 they completed their transformation by announcing Mary Lou McDonald as party leader, succeeding the far more sinister figure of Gerry Adams.

However, whilst Ms McDonald might not carry the same paramilitary baggage as Adams, it might be noted that the other two main political parties in Ireland - Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil - continue to regard Sinn Féin as beyond the pale and have so far refused to consider any form of coalition with the latter.

We might also recall that Ms McDonald has also attracted criticism herself in the past; for example, for allowing her campaign office to sell IRA souvenirs and memorabilia and for speaking at a rally in Dublin in 2003 to commemorate Seán Russell -  an IRA leader with links to Nazi Germany.           

II.

I understand that, sometimes, it's strategically necessary and politically expedient to enter into alliances with the Devil himself. And the ancient proverb about the enemy of one's enemy being one's friend provides philosophical justification for such pact-making. But, even so, it's a bit shocking to discover just how far along a very slippery and dangerous slope Seán Russell was prepared to tread ...

In the summer of 1940, Russell occupied a villa outside Berlin where he was accorded every privilege possible by his Nazi hosts, including a chauffer driven car and the services of an interpreter. He was also, more significantly, given access to the Brandenberg military camp in order to study the latest techniques in sabotage and guerilla warfare. His liaison at this time was the SS officer Edmund Veesenmayer, who would later become an architect of the Final Solution in Hungary and Croatia.

It was Russell's hope that the German high command would enlist the services of the IRA to strike at British forces in Northern Ireland and on the UK mainland and that, following the planned invasion of Britain, he and his comrades would be duly rewarded. Unfortunately for him, on his return to Ireland aboard a U-boat, he suffered the rupturing of a gastric ulcer and this proved fatal. 

None of this, of course, proves that Russell was sympathetic to or in agreement with Nazi doctrine. But it should surely give us all pause for thought about the way in which romantic nationalism and political idealism can easily collapse into the black hole of fascism. At best, Russell was outrageously naive - though whether that excuses him of his active collaboration with the Nazis (who were busy at that time occupying Western Europe) is debatable.

It might also be noted that Russell wasn't the only one within the IRA supporting the Third Reich. In July of 1940 the leadership issued a joint statement declaring that German forces would be welcomed as friends and liberators should they land in Ireland. The public was assured that the Nazis had no interest in occupying the country or further frustrating the dream of independence, but merely wished to see Ireland play an active role in the new Europe.  

Worse still was the fact that the IRA's main publication - War News - began to adopt openly anti-Semitic language and expressed their satisfaction at what was happening on the Continent, as the cleansing fires of the Wehrmacht drove the Jews from Europe. Shamefully, the leaders of Sinn Féin at this time also indulged in such rhetoric, repeatedly attacking the alleged Jewish influence in Ireland.

One dreads to imagine what would have happened to Ireland's tiny Jewish community (numbering only a few thousand) had the Nazis chosen to invade the Emerald Isle and paint it black. As the Irish historian Brian Hanley notes:

"Across Europe a variety of ethnic and political groups collaborated with the Nazis in order to further their own agendas. Inevitably this meant active involvement in Nazi persecution of Jews and political opponents. It also meant becoming a part of the Nazi governmental machine. Does anyone seriously believe that the IRA would have avoided playing this role?"   

Ultimately, I don't like nationalisms of any variety: Irish, German, Scottish, Catalan ... even English. As Nietzsche pointed out, subscribing to such a politics in its vulgar modern form, is, for free spirits, profoundly mistaken; a deliberate deadening of our higher natures.    

See: Brian Hanley, "'Oh here's to Adolph Hitler" ... The IRA and the Nazis', History Ireland, Vol. 13, Issue 3 (May/June 2005): click here to read online.

Repress Nothing! In Memory of Otto Gross

Otto Gross (1877 - 1920)

Otto Gross - the maverick psychoanalyst and utopian anarchist whom radicals and exponents of free love continue to revere - died 100 years ago today: from pneumonia; aged 42; in a Berlin hospital, having been found lying in the street, starving, penniless, and half-frozen to death.

A sad and premature (arguably all-too-predictable) end to the life of a charismatic drug-addict who spent much of his adult life in and out of psychiatric institutions and who rejected all caution and restraint; a man who was even evicted from the community of bohemians at Ascona for trying to instigate orgies at which participants could openly explore their bisexual desires. [1]    

Inspired by his readings of Max Stirner, Nietzsche and Kropotkin, it's said that Gross influenced in turn many artists and writers with his neo-pagan (and proto-feminist) attempt to revalue all values, including D. H. Lawrence - which, of course, is where my interest in him comes from, rather than his relationship to Freud and Jung, who basically thought him a hopeless madman about whom the less said the better.

Lawrence, of course, never met Gross and doesn't directly refer to him in his writings. [2] But his wife, Frieda, had had an affair with the latter in 1908 (at the same time that Gross was also involved with Frieda's sister, Else) and so a lot of his revolutionary ideas to do with politics, culture, the unconscious and human sexuality, were transmitted via her. It's almost certain that Lawrence also read Gross's letters to Frieda (which she treasured throughout her life):

"They affirmed the idea of the saving sexual relationship outside the bonds of society: they stressed how a sexually liberated woman could escape the trammels of the ordinary and be an inspiration for intellectual and striving men; they showed a passionately thinking man struggling to come to terms with the new and to escape the past. In many ways, they offered Lawrence the themes for his next eight years of writing; and (above all) they offered a way of thinking about Frieda [whom Gross regarded as the woman of the future]." [3]

Having said that, it's important to stress that Lawrence would have mistrusted (and disliked) Gross in person and to note that he soon saw through his idealism - including his sexual and political idealism.

And for us, living here in 2020, does Gross's thinking still trouble, still challenge? Or does it only bore and depress? Unfortunately, that's a question that some also ask of Lawrence ...

Notes

[1] Perhaps more interesting from a thanatological perspective, is the fact that Gross affirmed the sovereign freedom of the individual not merely in sexual terms, but also as the right to be ill and to die in a manner (and at a time) of their own choosing. He regarded neurosis and suicide as legitimate expressions of protest against a repressive social order.    

[2] Lawrence gives us a fictionalised representation of Otto Gross in his unfinished novel Mr Noon (written 1921-22); the character of Eberhard appears in Part II of the work. 

[3] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 443-44.

See also: John Turner, Cornelia Rumpf-Worthen and Ruth Jenkins, 'The Otto Gross - Frieda Weekley Correspondence: Transcribed, Translated, and Annotated', in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, (Summer, 1990), pp. 137-227. Click here to read online. 

On This Day I Complete My Fifty-Sixth Year

Richard Westall: Lord Byron (1813)

Oil on canvas (36" x 28")

National Portrait Gallery (NPG 4243)

I would describe my character as more ironic than Byronic. However, there are many things I admire about the Romantic English poet and traits which we might be said to have in common, including, for example, a fondness for animals.* 

We are also, Byron and I, astrological kin; each blessed by being born beneath the sign of Aquarius. But, like him, I'm also prone to a certain melancholy whenever another birthday rolls around and another step taken towards the Abyss: 


My days are in the yellow leaf;

The flowers and fruits of Love are gone;
The worm - the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone!**


That just about sums up how I'm feeling today ...

Still, as Byron also noted, the great object of life is to feel something, even if that something is pain or existential angst. Only when the heart is completely unmoved by anything should one consider seeking out a soldier's grave.

Notes

* Byron loved his dog, Boatswain, so much that when the latter contracted rabies, he nursed him without any thought or fear of infection and, although deep in debt at the time, he commissioned a large marble monument for Boatswain at Newstead Abbey when the dog succumbed to the disease. Byron also kept a tame bear whilst a student at Cambridge, thereby amusingly circumventing rules forbidding the keeping of pet dogs. At one point he even considered applying for a fellowship on the creature's behalf. 

** Byron, 'On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year', written on 22 January, 1824: click here to read in full on the Poetry Foundation website.  

Bad Boys (With Reference to the Cases of Johnny Strabler and George Costanza)

Two Bad Boys: Marlon Brando as Johnny Strabler 

and Jason Alexander as George Costanza

I.

Last night, on TV, they showed The Wild One (1953) - László Benedek's classic biker movie starring the impossibly beautiful Marlon Brando in an iconic role as Johnny Strabler, leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club.

When Johnny meets good-girl Kathie Bleeker (played by Mary Murphy) working at the local café-bar, he asks her out to a dance. Although she politely (somewhat coyly) turns him down, she's clearly intrigued (and excited) by Johnny's brooding personality.

In other words, Kathie digs the bad boy ...

II.

I don't know if we should classify the bad boy as a cultural archetype, stereotype or trope, but I do know that there's something in the idea that at least some women - who probably should know better - find the rebellious rogue male or romantic outlaw figure irresistibly attractive.

These women might claim to want caring, sharing boyfriends who are in touch with their feminine side and happy to help with the housework, but the evidence suggests otherwise; namely, that self-obsessed psychopaths with a cool persona and striking good looks always triumph over  the former when it comes to getting the girl.

There are many types of bad boy - including the punk, the pirate, the gangster, and the mad, bad and dangerous poet in all his Byronic splendour - but they all share a dark triad of personality traits: narcissism, thrill-seeking, and deceitfulness. I don't know if these traits have a genetic component - or if the women who find them attractive are genetically predisposed to do so - but it wouldn't suprise me if that were the case.

III.

The female susceptibility to bastards was very amusingly spoofed in a season eight episode of Seinfeld, when George suddenly finds himself playing the role of bad boy (which mostly consists of chewing gum). 

Elaine warns her colleague Anna (Rebecca McFarland) to keep her distance from her friend George, even though he seems harmless: "He's a bad seed. He's a horrible seed. He's one of the worst seeds I've ever seen." Of course, this immediately makes Anna interested in him.

Jerry, of course, is familiar with the syndrome and so when George expresses his surprise at being contacted out of the blue by Anna - after she has previously rebuffed his advances with extreme prejudice - he knows exactly what's going on: "Anna digs the bad boy" - much to George's bemusement ...

For George has never been the bad boy before. He likes the role, however, and intends to exploit his new (unfounded) reputation for badness, setting up a rendezvous with Anna in the park. Elaine's attempt to put an immediate stop to their relationship only makes Anna more attracted to George and soon she's wearing his Yankees jacket. 

Things only cool off when Elaine persuades Anna that, actually, George is a good and decent soul - a fine seed. Desperate to prove his bad boy credentials, George attempts to bootleg a movie. Of course, George being George, he bungles the operation and is arrested.

Worse, when the police officer shouts at him, George begins to cry and has to be comforted by Anna. Now, of course, it's really over; for girls hate cry babies as much as they love bad boys.

Watch: Seinfeld, 'The Little Kicks' (S8/E4), written by Spike Feresten, directed by Andy Ackerman (NBC, 10 October, 1996): the bad boy scenes between George and Anna can be viewed by clicking here. 

In Memory of Dollie Radford

Robert Bryden: Dollie Radford 
Woodcut (1902)

The English poet and playwright Caroline Maitland - better known as Dollie Radford - died 100 years ago today. 

I know this not because I'm a great fan of her work, which combines a conservative aesthetic with radical politics - Radford was a close friend of Eleanor Marx - but because of the D. H. Lawrence connection.

She first met the latter in the spring of 1915 and, unusually, found him to be rather sweet; "so simple and kind, touchingly childlike, and brim full of sensibility and perception".*

Responding to her warmth and generosity, Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, became firm friends with Radford. In a letter written to Dollie in January 1916, Lawrence told her that whilst her poems were exquisite, they made him feel rather sad:

"They make me think of the small birds in the twilight, whistling brief little tunes, but so clear, they seem almost like little lights in the twilight, such clear, vivid sounds."** 

Which is just about as nice a thing as Lawrence ever said to anyone ... 

Notes

* Quoted in Edward Nehls, ed. D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography (3 Vols.), (University of Wisconsin Press, 1957-59), Vol. I., p. 292.

** The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 515.

Mila is a Punk Rocker

Je ne regrette rien ...

I.

Does anyone else remember the Dead Kennedys hardcore classic 'Religious Vomit'?

It was the first track on the eight-track EP In God We Trust, Inc. and I believe it opened with the lines:

All religions make me want to throw up 

All religions make me sick

All religions make me want to throw up 
All religions suck

It's a succinct but nonetheless powerful critique of all nausea-inducing systems of belief that claim to possess a divine form of Truth and to act in the name of God.    

II.

I immediately thought of this song when reading about the case of a French teen who has been forced into hiding after remarks she made online sparked rape and death threats.

The pretty 16-year-old, known as Mila, who described Islam as a religion of hate and claimed all organised creeds made her sick, has been warned by the police not to attend her school in Southeast France and to keep a low public profile - even though, according to French law, she has done nothing wrong and so shouldn't have to restrict her freedom of movement due to the disgusting threats made by religious lunatics.  

Nor, of course, should she apologise for her remarks: freedom of speech is the freedom to offend and to blaspheme; the freedom enjoyed by Jello Biafra and the boys back in the day and which we should all cherish, protect, and insist upon as infinitely more important than the false right of hypersensitive believers not to be offended.

Play: Dead Kennedys, 'Religious Vomit', In God We Trust, Inc., (Alternative Tentacles, 1981): click here. 

Note: The DK logo is by Winston Smith

Why I Don't Like Fishnet Stockings (Or The Rocky Horror Picture Show)

Let's do the time warp again 

[No thanks]

Black fishnet stockings and tights, with their open, diamond-shaped knit, continue to be very popular with all types of women - not just goths and showgirls. They are one of those things that never quite go in or out of fashion. We might, therefore, describe them as a perennial favourite within the world of hoisery.  

Personally, however, I'm not a fan.

And that's because fishnets always remind me of Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania: nice face, shame about the legs (too chunky for my tastes). 

I've tried to break this visual association - to picture instead Marilyn Monroe wearing her fishnets in the famous 1956 photo by Milton H. Greene - but, alas, whenever I see anyone wearing them, I invariably think back to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) - a charmless vision of camp outrageousness and gothic queerness that succeeds only in making one nostalgic for the world of fixed gender roles and heteronormativity that Brad and Janet belong to.

As someone once said, Rocky is ultimately an excuse for straight people to cross dress and pretend to be a little bit queer for the night: they don't want to be it, just dream it ...

Play: 'Sweet Transvestite' from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, (dir. Jim Sharman, 1975), performed by Tim Curry: click here.

Birkin's Cat (Notes on Sexual Politics and Feline Philosophy in Women in Love)

Portrait Gray Tabby Cat

Photograph by Maika 777

fineartamerica.com

I.

I wasn't surprised to discover that Rupert Birkin owned a grey tabby cat. Is there anything more noble, after all, than a young male cat with long legs and a slim back?

What was surprising, however, was to discover that Birkin based his sexual politics and philosophical thinking on star equilibrium as much upon observations of Mino the cat as upon his (mis)reading of Nietzsche.

Thus, when watching Mino amorously interact with a stray she-cat that has wandered into the garden from the woods, Birkin can't help metaphysically musing on gender relations and the need for superfine stability, even if this requires cruelty and, ultimately, the submission of the female to the male ... 


II.  

"The young cat trotted lordly down the path, waving his tail. He was an ordinary tabby with white paws, a slender young gentleman. A crouching, fluffy, brownish-grey cat was stealing up the side of the fence. The Mino walked statelily up to her, with manly nonchalance. She crouched before him and pressed herself on the ground in humility, a fluffy soft outcast, looking up at him with wild eyes that were green and lovely as great jewels. He looked casually down on her. So she crept a few inches further, proceeding on her way to the back door, crouching in a wonderful soft, self-obliterating manner, and moving like a shadow.
      He, going statlily on his slim legs, walked after her, then suddenly, for pure excess, he gave her a light cuff with his paw on the side of the face. She ran off a few steps, like a blown leaf along the ground, then crouched unobtrusively, in submissive, wild patience. The Mino pretended to take no notice of her. He blinked his eyes superbly at the landscape. In a minute she drew herself together and moved softly, a fleecy brown-grey shadow, a few paces forward. She began to quicken her pace, in a moment she would be gone like a dream, when the young grey lord sprang before her, and gave her a light handsome cuff. She subsided at once, submissively."    

"The eyes of the stray cat flared round for a moment, like great green fires staring at Birkin. Then she had rushed in a soft swift rush, half way down the garden. There she paused to look round. The Mino turned his face in pure superiority to his master, and slowly closed his eyes, standing in statuesque young perfection. The wild cat's round, green, wondering eyes were staring all the while like uncanny fires. Then again, like a shadow, she slid towards the kitchen.
      In a lovely springing leap, like a wind, the Mino was upon her, and had boxed her twice, very definitely, with a white, delicate fist. She sank and slid back, unquestioning. He walked after her, and cuffed her once or twice, leisurely, with sudden little blows of his magic white paws."

- D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love

III.

Ursula, who happens to be watching this alongside Birkin, is angry and upset at the male cat's use of violence to bully the female, as she perceives it. Birkin, amused by her indignation, tries to explain that this is a normal part of feline intimacy and, it's true of course, that feline sexual behaviour does involve a certain amount of unpleasantness (spraying, fighting, biting, etc.).*

Ursula, however, is unconvinced and continues to insist that Mino is a bully - like all males. This clearly irritates Birkin, who replies:

"'He is not a bully. He is only insisting to the poor stray that she shall acknowledge him as a sort of fate, her own fate: because you can see she is fluffy and promiscuous as the wind. I am with him entirely. He wants superfine stability."  

Which, I suppose, is one way of putting it and one possible explanation. Though it could just be that Mino wants to penetrate the she-cat and that his male dignity and higher understanding are but fanciful notions belonging to Birkin. That's certainly what Ursula thinks: "'Oh it makes me so cross, this assumption of male superiority! And it is such a lie! One wouldn't mind if there were any justification for it.'"

Clearly, Birkin thinks there is some justification for it - and that it is neither a sadistic lust for cruelty nor a naked will to power, describing the latter as base and petty, even though, clearly, his reading of Nietzsche - like Lawrence's own - is a poor and selective one at best.

For Birkin, Mino's behaviour - and, presumably, male sexual behaviour in general - can best be thought of as a desire to impose upon female chaos masculine order and thus bring about a state of "transcendent and abiding rapport" between the sexes that benefits them both. Paradise is a state of pure equilibrium in which each party is a star balanced in conjunction.

And that, for Birkin, is what love is all about - fulfilment, not individual or personal freedom: "'Love is a direction which excludes all other directions. It's a freedom together, if you like." Ideal love and ideal freedom, he says, ultimately result in chaos and nihilism.

But, again, Ursula isn't having any of it: "'I don't trust you when you drag the stars in,' she said."

Notes

* Things probably aren't helped - speaking from the female cat's point of view - by the fact that the male has a barbed penis and that penetration therefore causes a certain amount of discomfort (although I'm not sure it's fair to describe the male cat's penis as a horrifying engine of pain, as one feminist commentator described it). Upon withdrawl, these keratinised penile spines rake the walls of the she-cats vagina, removing the semen of love rivals and helping to trigger ovulation. 

See: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), Ch. XIII, pp. 148-152.

D. H. Lawrence: A Tale of Two Kitties

I. The Death of Mrs Nickie Ben

For cat lovers, there's a very distressing scene early on in D. H. Lawrence's first novel, The White Peacock (1911). Cyril, the narrator of the story, and his sister, Lettie, are out walking in the woods and fields surrounding the local reservoir, when the latter suddenly lets out a cry:

"On the bank before us lay a black cat, both hind-paws torn and bloody in a trap. It had no doubt been bounding forward after its prey when it was caught. It was gaunt and wild; no wonder it frightened the poor lapwings into cheeping hysteria. It glared at us fiercely, growling low."

Whilst Lettie stands looking on and lamenting the cruelty of man, Cyril takes action:

"I wrapped my cap and Lettie's scarf over my hands and bent to open the trap. The cat struck with her teeth, tearing the cloth convulsively. When it was free, it sprang away with one bound, and fell, panting, watching us."

This is no anonymous stray cat, however. This is a creature known to Cyril: Mrs Nickie Ben, who belongs at Strelley Mill, the home of his friend George Saxton. And so he wraps the poor creature in his jacket and carries her there. 

Unfortunately, however, she is too badly injured to be saved, one of her paws having been broken: "We laid the poor brute on the rug, and gave it warm milk. It drank very little, being too feeble." Even the presence of her mate, another fine-looking black cat, doesn't rouse her. And besides, he seems indifferent to her suffering: 

"Mr Nickie Benn looked, shrugged his sleek shoulders, and walked away with high steps. There was a general feminine outcry on masculine callousness."

George decides to put the cat out of her misery. His preferred method of doing so - and the quickest - is to "'swing her round and knock her head against the wall'", but Lettie protests. And so he decides to drown her: "We watched him morbidly, as he took a length of twine and fastened a noose round the animal's neck [...]"

George smiles as he walks to the garden pond and then drops "the poor writhing cat into the water, saying 'Goodbye, Mrs Nickie Ben'". Vile deed done, he hauls the cat out, amused by the grotesque character of the corpse.

He then buries her in a shallow grave, commenting to Cyril and Lettie: "'I had to drown her, out of mercy [...] If the poor old cat had made a prettier corpse, you'd have thrown violets on her.'"

II. Lady Chatterley's Pussy

Interestingly, there's another black cat who also comes to a sticky end in Lawrence's final novel. In chapter six of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Connie goes for a walk in the woods - as she often did on one of her bad days. The sound of a gun shot nearby startles her out of her vague indifference to her surroundings.

Going to investigate, she hears the sound of a man's voice, followed by the sound of a child sobbing. The thought that someone might be ill-treating the latter rouses Connie's anger: "She strode surging down the wet drive, her sullen resentment uppermost. She felt just prepared to make a scene."

It was the keeper - Mellors - and a little girl, wearing a purple coat and moleskin cap. The latter was crying, to the irritation of the former: "'Ah, shut it up, tha false little bitch!' came the man's angry voice", though, not surprisingly, this only  made the child wail louder. 

Connie marches up to them, with her dark blue eyes blazing, demanding to know what's going on. He salutes her ladyship, but with a faint smile all too like a sneer on his face and he tells her - in broad vernacular - that she'd best ask the child, not him, what the problem is. And so Connie turns to the "ruddy, black-haired thing of nine or ten", saying: "'What' is it, dear?'" with conventionalised sweetness of tone.

     

The child, however, continues to sob; violently, but also self-consciously. In the end, Connie bribes her with a sixpence. This placates the brat and enables her to speak: "'It's the - it's the - pussy!'"

It turns out that the keeper - her father - has shot a poaching cat: a big black cat, that now lies stretched out and bleeding amongst the bramble. Connie is repulsed by the sight and she turns on her soon-to-be lover and tells him it's no wonder the child was upset.

She tries to further reassure the child (whilst secretly disliking the spoilt, false little female), before escorting her home to her grandmother, leaving Mellors to dispose of the dead moggie in a manner undisclosed.


III.

Whether these two scenes reveal anything of import about Lawrence's views on black cats, cruelty, and sexual politics is debatable.

But what they do demonstrate is that there's more than one way to kill a cat and that underlying all of Lawrence's fiction is not so much a naive or innocent vitalism, but a fascination with violence and death and the part these things play in life as a general economy of the whole. In other words, Lawrence's philosophy is a form of tragic pessimism - but a pessimism of strength.   

 

See:

D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 12-13.

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 58-59.

Further Reflections on a Black Cat

Gino Severini: The Black Cat (1910-11)
Oil on canvas (54.4 x 73 cm)

Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Black Cat (1843) not only influenced many other writers, but also those working within the visual arts, including, for example, the Italian Futurist Gino Severini, whose painting above was included in the first Futurist exhibition, held in Paris, in 1912. 

But perhaps the most interesting work drawing inspiration from Poe's disturbing tale of alcoholism, animal cruelty, and domestic violence, is the 1934 film, The Black Cat,* directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi (the first of eight films to pair the gruesome twosome).

Actually, despite listing Poe's name in the credits, Peter Ruric's screenplay (based on Ulmer's scenario) has no resemblance to the narrative events of Poe's story and the film gets its real inspiration from the life of Aleister Crowley, particularly Karloff's character, Hjalmer Poelzig, a mad Austrian architect with a penchant for chess and black cats, who comes to a grisly end shackled to an embalming rack and skinned alive. 
 
Although it was a box office hit, the film didn't much impress the critics upon its original release, who mostly found it, in the words of one reviewer, more foolish than horrible.

However, Ulmer's movie is now recognised as a bizarre and stylish masterpiece; one that unfolds with the crazy logic of a nightmare and brilliantly develops the psychological horror genre with its creepy atmosphere, sinister soundtrack and an emphasis on the darker (more perverse) elements of the human psyche; including the propensity for incest, sacrifice, necrophilia, and devil worship.

Click here for the trailer

Notes

* Not to be confused with the 1941 film also entitled The Black Cat, dir. Albert S. Rogell and starring Basil Rathbone, which also claims to have been inspired by Poe's short story and also features Lugosi in a cameo role.  

Readers might be interested in a sister post to this one, Reflections on a Black Cat (In Memory of Pluto): click here. 

This post is for Anna, the Italian dental nurse.

Reflections on a Black Cat (In Memory of Pluto)

She is a very fine Cat; a very fine Cat indeed!  
Photo: SA / 2020

I.

Ever since she first wandered into the house and, subsequently, my affection, this beautiful black cat has brought something greater than good luck or prosperity; something that might even be described as a form of solace.

Indeed, I'm now of the view that angels have whiskers rather than wings. Or that even shape-shifting demons can bring us comfort and companionship in times of great distress, far exceeding the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere man.

II.

Of course, I'm not the first to have noticed this, or to have a particular fondness for satanic black cats. Samuel Johnson, for example, was very attached to his feline companion, Hodge, and Edgar Allan Poe also owned a sable-furred familiar, which he described as "one of the most remarkable black cats in the world - and that is saying much; for it will be remembered that black cats are all of them witches".*

Poe also wrote a very disturbing short story entitled 'The Black Cat' (1843), featuring a pussy called Pluto; "a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree", who sadly has the misfortune of having a drunken madman for an owner ...**

One night, the latter - who is also the narrator of the tale - comes home pissed out of his head as always, and takes umbrage at the fact that the cat is avoiding him. He tries to grab hold of the terrified creature, but the latter bites him. And so the man takes out a knife and, with the kind of sadistic cruelty that shamefully characterises humanity, cuts out one of the cat's eyes:

"The fury of a demon [had] possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame [...] I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity."

From that moment on, the animal understandably flees in terror at his master's approach. At first, the man, who, prior to this incident, had been very close to his cat - "Pluto was my favorite pet and playmate. I alone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about the house" - feels deep remorse and regrets his cruelty. But this feeling gives way to irritation and a spirit of perverseness:

"Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?" 
 
Thus, one day, in cold blood, he takes poor Pluto into the garden and hangs him from a tree; tears streaming from his eyes, and with the bitterest remorse eating at his heart; "because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin - a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it [...] even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God."

Strangely, that same night his house catches fire, forcing the man and his wife to flee. Returning the next day to examine the smoking ruins, he discovers an image of a gigantic cat with a rope around its neck imprinted on the single wall still standing.

Poe could, I think, have ended the story here. But he doesn't. Continuing the tale, the narrator tells us how, some time later, still feeling guilty and beginning to miss Pluto, he adopts a similar looking cat - it even has an eye missing. However, he soon regrets doing so, as the animal merely amplifies his feelings of guilt and bad conscience:

"I soon found a dislike to it arising within me. This was just the reverse of what I had anticipated; but - I know not how or why it was - its evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed. By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred. I avoided the creature; a certain sense of shame, and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventing me from physically abusing it. I did not, for some weeks, strike, or otherwise violently ill use it; but gradually - very gradually - I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odious presence, as from the breath of a pestilence."

Then, one day, the cat gets under his feet causing him to nearly fall down the cellar stairs. Enraged, the man grabs an axe with the intention of killing Pluto 2. He is stopped from doing so by his wife - which is good for the cat, but bad for the woman, as, in vexed frustration and possessed by evil thoughts, he vents his murderous rage on her instead, burying the axe deep in her brain: "She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan."

He decides to conceal the body behind a brick wall in the cellar - "as the monks of the middle ages are recorded to have walled up their victims" -  rather than bury it in the garden, for example, and run the risk of being seen by nosy neighbours.

Unfortunately, in his haste to dispose of the body, he accidently entombs the cat and when the police come to investigate the woman's reported disappearance and search his house ... Well, you can guess what happens: a loud, inhuman wailing - "half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell" - gives the game away. Tearing down the wall, the police discover the rotting corpse of the wife and the howling black cat sitting atop the body. 

Poe's tale, then, is in part a revenge fable; the revenge of the feline object. And the narrator not only deserves his fate on the gallows, but to be denied his place in heaven which, as Robert A. Heinlein once remarked, is determined by how we behave toward cats here on earth ...


Notes

* Edgar Allan Poe, 'Instinct Versus Reason - A Black Cat', in Alexander's Weekly Messenger, vol. 4, number 5, (Jan 29, 1840), p. 2. Click here to read online.

** 'The Black Cat' was first published in the August 19, 1843, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. It can be found in vol. 2 of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven Edition) and read online courtesy of Project Guttenberg: click here. 

For further reflections on the figure of the black cat, click here. 

Shoes Please (My Favourite Mission: Impossible Moment)

I wouldn't describe myself as a fan of Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible film series: I wouldn't, for example, queue up at the cinema to see one. But I'd probably watch if shown on TV, in much the same way as I'd always watch a Bond movie, without ever really being interested in the stories or characters, or excited by the action sequences and stunts.

Ultimately, guns and gadgets - as well as endless car chases and large explosions - mean nothing to me. And, as much as I enjoyed Simon Pegg's performances in Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007), I could do without him providing comic relief as the IMF's most unlikely (and perhaps most irritating) field agent Benji Dunn.         

What I do admire about the films, however, are the high production values and, of course, the iconic theme music, based on Lalo Schifrin's original version for the TV series (1966-73). I also like those queer little moments that are more memorable than the scenes within which they're embedded.

For example, in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015), the fifth installment in the series, there's an assassination scene set at the Vienna State Opera which ends with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) fleeing across the rooftop accompanied by an undercover MI6 agent, Ilsa Faust, played by the sublimely beautiful Anglo-Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson.

In order to facilitate their escape, she asks Hunt to take off her shoes. It's a simple and practical request, but it's also by far the most captivating and erotically charged moment in the entire film; one that nicely follows on from an earlier scene, set in a torture chamber, where she and Hunt meet for the first time and he compliments her on her footwear (which she has removed in anticipation of trouble).

Apparently, the idea of Ilsa removing her shoes was Cruise's. I don't know what that tells us (if anything) about him, or what he imagined the gesture might indicate to audiences in the context of the film, but, as a podophile and shoe fetishist, I'm grateful for it.*  

* Note: I suppose it's meant to indicate her trust in and sexual attraction to Hunt. As a rule, when a woman instructs you to remove her shoes and points her naked foot in your face she is inviting you to kiss her instep and admire the length of her legs. 

See: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, (dir. Christopher McQuarrie, 2015). The 'shoes please' incident on the roof of the Vienna State Opera, with Cruise and Ferguson, can be viewed on YouTube by clicking here.

The Man at Number 6 Meets Constantine Cavafy

Cavafy by Lorenzo Mattotti 

The New Yorker (March 16, 2009)

My next-door neighbour - the man at number 6 - came from another land, across another sea. He did so, presumably, in the expectation of finding another city - a better city - in which to make a home and raise a family. 

He's ended up, however, here on Harold Hill and living in a two-up, two-down former council house; which must feel cramped when you not only have a wife and two young children, but your in-laws and a dog to accommodate. 

And so, he's decided to singlehandedly rebuild the house; extend the kitchen, convert the loft, add a front porch and a new drive, etc. This has meant two years of drilling, hammering, and cement mixing; i.e., two years of noise and dust and having to look out onto what was once a pleasantly overgrown back garden but is now a building site-cum-rubbish dump: Wherever I direct my gaze, the ruins are all I see.

I suppose, if it makes him happy to spend all his free time toiling away and aspiring towards not only a bigger and better home, but a bigger and better life, that's really up to him. Personally, I have no such desire or ambition and don't hope for elsewhere. I'm tempted to tell him that no matter what improvements he makes to the house he remains the man at number 6, with the same wife, kids, and in-laws:

'Tis the same streets in which he'll walk the dog. 
The same district in which he'll grow old;
and inside the same house he'll turn grey. 

Ultimately, if within your own small corner you can't learn to be content, then you'll never be happy anywhere in the world ...

See: C. P. Cavafy, 'The City', Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, (Princeton University Press, 1975): click here. 

Obviously, I'm riffing on this poem in this post and sampling lines from it. Readers should note, however, that I relied upon a new translation of the work by Maria Thanassa (2020) and not the one to which I link here.

There Will Always Be a Moon Over Baotou

Rare-earth waste discharged into Baotou's toxic lake

ChinaFotoPress / Getty Images

I.

Inner Mongolia is a godforsaken, autonomous region of Northern China. It's rich in the kind of resources that the entire world craves; coal, natural gas, and rare-earth elements. Its largest city, Baotou, used to be famous for its deer; now it's mostly known for its steel production, its mines and, of course, its toxic lake which is so inhospitable that not even algae can grow there. 

Officially, the latter is known as the Baotou Tailings Dam and it lies about 20km outside the city. Owned by Baotou Steel, it contains the hellish waste from rare-earth refineries. In 2016, even the Chinese authorities finally had to admit that farmland in the surrounding area had been seriously contaminated, with dire health consequences for the people unfortunate enough to live there.


II.

I recalled this story when listening to someone speaking on the benefits of clean, green energy generated by wind farms. She probably also advocates for solar power with a similar degree of eco-enthusiasm, but I got the impression that her real love was for those giant, sexy steel towers with their fibre-glass blades a-whirring.

She didn't mention the birds and bats that are sliced and diced by those very same blades; nor did she mention the inconvenient truth that, despite many wealthy nations voluntarily despoiling their countryside and coastal areas by erecting monstrous turbines, wind power still makes almost zero contribution to global energy supplies (most renewable energy in fact comes from what some trendy types like to term traditional biomass, but which most of us still refer to as wood).

The problem, as Matt Ridley points out, is not that the wind turbines are inefficient machines; actually, they're marvels of engineering. But, unfortunately, there's a limit to how much power they can produce and their effectiveness is ultimately determined by the wind itself; a fluctuating stream of low-density energy that mankind gave up using long ago, for the simple reason that it's not very reliable or very good.

Oh, and she certainly didn't mention problems to do with resource consumption and environmental impacts - such as the toxic and radioactive pollution generated on a massive scale by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets used in the turbines. If you want to know just how filthy clean energy really is, ask the poor people of Baotou!  

Alas, that's not all - it gets worse for those who love chasing windmills:

"Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. [...] Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of 'clean' renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.

A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you're talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year [...] just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That's about half the EU's hard coal–mining output."

My aim in writing this post is not to lend support to the fracking industry or argue for the building of new nuclear power stations. I simply wish to acknowledge the futility of thinking that wind power can make a significant - and wholly innocent - contribution to world energy supply, as many environmentalists seem to believe.

Not only is this naive and mistaken, but, to quote Ridley once more, it's "counterproductive as a climate policy" and results ultimately in toxic lakes and deformed babies.

See: Matt Ridley, 'Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy', The Spectator (13 May 2017): click here. 

See also: Tim Maughan, 'The dystopian lake filled by the world's tech lust', (2 April 2015) on the BBC website: click here. 

Rise of the Xenobots

Image credit: Menno Van Dijk / Getty Images

One of the things that D. H. Lawrence disliked about machines was what he termed their iron insentience.

But such a charge becomes increasingly irrelevant in an age of artificially intelligent cyborgs, silicone sex dolls, and newly created xenobots - i.e., living machines, built by researchers in the United States, using stem cells obtained from African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis).

Beings that, whilst not spawned in the usual manner, are nevertheless organisms composed of biological tissue and not the inanimate and imbecile devices that Lawrence knew, assembled in factories from metal and plastic and held together with nuts and bolts.

Not only are they capable of independent movement, but, when damaged, xenobots can heal their own wounds. Once they have completed their task and the energy in their cells runs out, they die and decay just like other biodegradable objects (including ourselves). Their unique properties suggest xenobots may, in the future, have numerous applications in medicine and in helping safeguard the environment.

The xenobots, which are currently less than a millimetre long, are designed by an evolutionary algorithm on a supercomputer. The program generates random three dimensional forms and then tests each design in a virtual environment. The best are then used to create further designs, so that in this way the xenobots might be said to evolve.

The scientists involved patiently waited for the 100th generation before then selecting a handful of designs to produce in the lab, using tweezers and other tiny tools to sculpt early-stage skin and cardiac cells harvested from frog embryos. The resulting xenobots were placed in dishes of water to keep them alive and where they could be observed gaily swimming about.

The plan is to eventually not only make them bigger, but more complex; to build xenobots with blood vessels and sensory cells, for example, using mammalian tissue so that they can survive on dry land. Of course, once you create new organisms who can experience pain and possess rudimentary cogntive ability (i.e., have nervous systems and tiny brains), then there are obviously ethical issues to be addressed.

Indeed, there are doubtless people reading this now who will be worrying - perhaps not unreasonably - about rapid and profound advances in bio-technology. But that's a discussion for another day. For now, it's just fascinating to consider the implications of man inventing machines that now generate new life forms, throwing the binary oppositions that are usually invoked by vitalists like Lawrence into confusion and disarray. 

See: Sam Kriegman, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin, and Josh Bongard, 'A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (Jan 2020): click here.

Thanks to Thomas Bonneville for bringing this research to my attention.