In Memory of Jock Scot

Jock Scot (Photo credit: Times Newspapers, 2014)

Once upon a time in a Soho that has now almost vanished, there was a small record company called Charisma. It was home to a few old hippies, such as Genesis, and to a peculiar array of highly individual recording artists. 

This queer little label, established by a big fat geezer called Tony Stratton-Smith, not only employed the kind of eccentric characters unlikely to find work elsewhere, but, nestled away above the Marquee Club, it provided a kind of meeting place for all manner of misfits and troublemakers to hang about; including the punk, poet, and bon vivant Jock Scot who, sadly, died a few days ago, aged 63.

Although our paths crossed only very briefly in the mid-1980s and, unfortunately, I have no great anecdotes to share, I always remembered Jock with a pinch of fondness and so was genuinely sorry to hear of his passing. 

Soon, they'll be no one left alive ... 

Something About Mary

Image: Tony Sapiano / Rex 

For those of a certain generation, the name Mary Millington continues to resonate. And so I was interested to read that she - or, more accurately, one of the soft-porn comedies in which she featured - was recently commemorated with a blue plaque by English Heritage. 

Come Play With Me (1977) ran continuously for almost four years at the Moulin Cinema in Soho after its release, making it the UK's longest running film - ever!

What this astonishing fact reveals is that neither sex nor cinema is taken very seriously by the British. It's certainly difficult to imagine the French or the Americans, for example, making a blue movie that guest starred Bob Todd, Henry McGee and Irene Handl.

The former have Sylvia Kristel and the latter have Linda Lovelace. But we, for better or for worse, have Mary Millington and Suzy Mandel performing alongside Alfie Bass and Ronald Fraser in a work that is rooted more in the often grotesque and vulgar traditions of the music hall than the pornographic imagination.

Critics who fail to appreciate this and know nothing of the lost world of sleaze, showbiz and criminality that was post-War Soho - the world in which writer and director Harrison Marks made his living and was so very much at home - will never understand the queer, anarchic, almost punk character of this film.          

Thus it was entirely appropriate that Mary Millington - "fully cantilevered and gorgeous" - made her final cinematic appearance in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980); a sprawling mess of a film, safety-pinned together, which is as idiosyncratic, as vaudevillian, and at times as cringeworthy as Come Play With Me.

Afterword 

Mary Millington died, depressed and heavily in debt, of a drug overdose, aged 33, in August 1979, leaving behind her several suicide notes in which she accused the police and the tax man of hounding her. A feature-length documentary chronicling her colourful if tragic life, written and directed by her biographer Simon Sheridan, premiered in London earlier this month. 

Vajankle

 The vajankle designed and sold by Sinthetics

The vajankle - as the name suggests - is a sex toy designed for podophiles; a synthetic foot that comes complete with an inbuilt vagina. And a French pedicure. Whilst I'm sure it was developed with good intentions (i.e. to give pleasure), I think it fails for two reasons. 

Firstly, due to its almost-but-not-quite natural appearance it triggers an uncanny valley response (i.e. a feeling of revulsion). Thus the vajankle is aesthetically disturbing; it makes one think of heavy-footed zombies stumbling about or corpses lying in a morgue, rather than bare-footed beauties with dainty feet and lively little toes. 

Doubtless there are necrophiles aroused by the former and by fantasies of mutilation, but most foot fetishists love the vitality and playfulness of pretty feet as they dangle on the end of lovely legs; they wish to kiss and caress the objects of their desire, not chop them off.

Secondly, the vajankle completely misses the point of a fetish for a genuine devotee; it isn't merely a substitute for something else or a type of foreplay before the real event - i.e. genital penetration. Podophiles love feet and have no interest in sexual intercourse as traditionally conceived; they're not looking to ejaculate within a vagina, be it real or otherwise. 

In other words, they subscribe to an entirely different economy of bodies and their pleasures than those who automatically insert their penises where they've been instructed to put them. Foot fetishists, like paraphiliacs in general, want to find new uses for old organs; transforming sex into an exploratory ordeal in which, as Ballard puts it, the body becomes a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities. 

Placing a fake pussy into a rubber foot is, therefore, a banal and laughably naive gesture; both unimaginative and reactionary. There's nothing depraved or deviant about it. It's an attempt to bring the fetishist back into line by reinforcing the view that nothing is more gratifying or exciting than the membrane of a vagina (an orifice designated as the only legitimate and natural place of orgasm). 

Ultimately, what makes perverts philosophically interesting is the fact that whilst they may want to masturbate at every given opportunity, they also want to build bodies without organs and to have done with the judgement of God ...   

Thoughts on the Phrase 'Black is Beautiful'

Photo: Rachel Marquez
Model: Janica @ Best Models
rachelmarquez.com

Whiteness, of course, isn't a colour, it's a normative cultural value; an ideal we are all obliged to accept and aspire to whatever our race or ethnicity. The paler the face the better the person; not only more attractive, but more noble, more spiritual. Darkness of skin betrays darkness of soul; something base and bestial.

Such thinking, of course, which has a long and ugly history, deserves to be challenged; I absolutely support those who subscribe to a political aesthetic that promotes black pride and defiantly declares in the face of white racism that black is beautiful.

However, things become problematic when those who subscribe to such and refuse to cosmetically alter their appearance start to assert their own moral superiority, sneering at those who don't sport afros and accusing them of racial treachery.

To turn a slogan conceived as a form of self-affirmation into a weapon with which to censure others is not only a form of militant asceticism and bullying, but often also betrays sexist hypocrisy on behalf of black males who, on the one hand, voice disapproval of the millions of women who do use skin lightening products and straighten their hair, whilst, on the other hand, dating light-skinned models or marrying white women.

Sometimes, when a woman of colour bleaches her skin, she's not denying her blackness due to self-hatred and internalised racism - she's not betraying her roots - rather, she's simply making a considered choice about how she wants to look and acting with a degree of realism in the world as it is rather than as it could be, should be, and hopefully one day will be.

In a miscegenated future I would like to think no one will feel pressured to wear whiteface and pass as something or someone they're not; but neither will it be any more reprehensible or controversial for a black woman to lighten up cosmetically or surgically modify her body than it is presently for a white woman to work on her tan and have lip injections.

In a world after Michael I hope that all skin tones and facial features are seen as beautiful - be they natural or artificial (human or inhuman) - and a free spectrum of colours replaces the rigid black and white binary designed (like all such binaries) to keep us in a fixed identity.

Loving the Octopus

Image taken from PZ Myers' blog Pharyngula 

The strangely beautiful and beautifully strange octopus has many attractive features and erotic properties; the silky softness of its flesh, the muscular elasticity of its body, the slimy, probing tentacles that insinuate their way into every orifice (more an exotic combination of tongue and finger rather than a phallic analogue, as the biologist PZ Myers rightly points out).

But they also have a razor sharp beak in the midst of all their soft beauty and for those men in whom the fear of castration - in either a literal or a figurative sense - is a primary concern, this abruptly brings thoughts of loving the octopus to a close.

The fiction of D. H. Lawrence, however, provides us with some interesting case material by which we might further discuss this topic ...

Always highly anxious about perceived threats to his manhood - particularly the threat posed by women - Oliver Mellors tells Connie of his past sexual experiences, including with his wife, Bertha, whom he not only found difficult to pleasure, but who would mutilate his penis with her beak-like genitalia:

"'She sort of got harder and harder to bring off, and she'd sort of tear at me down there, as if it were a beak tearing at me. By God, you think a woman's soft down there ... But I tell you the old rampers have beaks between their legs, and they tear at you with it till you're sick.'"

This male fear of emasculation and the beak-like vulva (or what we might term octopussy), is also central to Lawrence's short story 'None of That!' - a rather ugly rape fantasy that (amongst other things) badly misreads Nietzsche.

Ethel Cane is a rich, white American woman with a powerful will and a pageboy haircut, who subscribes to a philosophy based upon the idea of an imaginative transcendence of physical reality and material events:

"'She said the imagination could master everything; so long, of course, as one was not shot in the head, or had an eye put out. Talking of the Mexican atrocities, and of the famous case of the raped nuns, she said it was all nonsense that a woman was broken because she had been raped. She could rise above it.'"      

Of course, Lawrence soon has Ethel disabused of this belief by staging her violent gang rape at the instigation of a nasty-sounding, fat little bull-fighter called Cuesta, with whom she's fascinated and over whom she is determined to exert her influence and thereby prove she is stronger than he.

Cuesta, however, isn't at all interested in her - apart from her money. In fact, he despises poor Ethel: "'She is an octopus, all arms and eyes ... and a lump of jelly'". He explicitly compares her cunt to a cephalopod's rostrum and asks: "'What man would put his finger into that beak? She is all soft with cruelty towards a man's member.'"
   
It's disappointing that someone who risks his life in the bull-ring should be so cowardly when confronted by an independent woman and her deep-sea sex. If he'd been more of a man, then Cuesta would have accepted her challenge and confronted his own castration complex. Instead, he can subject her only to violence at the hands of others and find contentment with beakless native girls; docile, unimaginative, and non-threatening.        


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). Lines quoted are on p. 202. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'None of That!', in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Lines quoted pp. 220 and 227. 

Ethnopluralism

Thomas Huxley's map of racial categories from 

On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind 

(London, 1870)

One of the central ideas of the so-called New Right is that of ethnopluralism - this as a radical alternative to multiculturalism and as a means of ensuring human biodiversity. Obviously, it entails an essentialist and völkisch-organic understanding of race and culture and obviously it soon leads on to calls for separatism and ethnoregionalism. 

Proponents, however, are quick to insist that ethnopluralism will result in a world of different but equal peoples living in peaceful coexistence. They vociferously deny they are racists and argue that the attempt to enforce a universal model of mankind has and will continue to result in violence as singularities that cannot be assimilated into a global world order assert their right to otherness and defend their unique identities. 

Of course, whilst ethnopluralism may have recently become a fashionable idea within certain circles, it's nothing very new. We can find it, for example, expressed in the poetry of D. H. Lawrence. In 'Future States', Lawrence imagines a time when our ideal civilization is over and the will to universalism has ceased:

"the great movement of centralising into oneness will stop 

and there will be a vivid recoil into separateness

many vivid small states, like a kaleidoscope, all colours

and all the differences given expression." 

Whilst in the following poem, 'Future War', he writes that where there is an infinite variety of people, there is no desire for conflict: "Oneness makes war, and the obsession of oneness."

I happen to think that last line is true. But it doesn't legitimize the piss-poor scribblings of Markus Willinger, nor necessarily validate the more sophisticated musings of those intellectuals on the New Right.   

See: D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 526-27. 

Brussels

Carl Court / Getty Images (2016)

As Raheem Kassam, Editor-in-Chief of Breitbart London, rightly says in the wake of the Islamist attack on Brussels earlier this week, the by now predictable and formulaic public response is not only wholly inadequate, it's also somewhat shameful and humiliating:

"Teddy bears, tears, candles, cartoons, murals, mosaics, flowers, flags, projections, hashtags, balloons, wreaths, lights, vigils, scarves ..." and Lennonesque fantasies of a world living in harmonious unity, reveal us for the saps we've become.

Tweeting sympathy with the victims and their families, or displaying solidarity by simply updating your Facebook page, isn't really enough. Kassam is right to argue for a more comprehensive and more mature response in the face of that which threatens not only European security, but Western culture itself.

I only hope that he's wrong to think that this may require the taking of direct action by a citizens militia; that our governments will, belatedly, realise what needs to be done and have the courage to do it; implementing not only a change of policy, but a revaluation of values. 

Note: those interested in reading Raheem Kassam's article of 23 March, 2016 in full can do so by clicking here.

On Sexual Apathy and the Case of Richard Hannay in The 39 Steps

Pamela looks at Hannay as she removes her stockings - 

but he only has eyes for his sandwich.

Commentators often note the frigidity of Hitchcock blondes, but it's the seeming sexual indifference of Richard Hannay, played by Robert Donat, that surprises and interests most in the famous bedroom scene from Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935).

True, he invites Pamela, played by Madeleine Carroll, to take off her skirt - an invitation she declines (I shall keep it on thank you!) - but he shows very little desire when she does decide to remove her wet stockings. His offer of assistance is more polite than pervy.

And even when his hand (fastened to hers) brushes against her legs, it does so in an involuntary and strangely limp manner that renders one of cinema's most erotically charged and kinkiest scenes strangely chaste at the same time. Ultimately, Hannay seems far more interested in his sandwich - Thank God for a bite to eat - and getting a good night's rest than in Pamela's bare limbs and feet.

Now, this could be because he's really very tired and hungry, having been on the run from foreign agents trying to kill him and policemen looking to arrest him for a murder he didn't commit for several long days.

But even at the opening of the film when a mysterious beauty asks him to take her home with him, Hannay makes no attempt at seduction. Rather, he cooks her fish in a manly manner, as A. L. Kennedy puts it (non-euphemistically), and then beds down on the couch; again, more concerned with sleep than in exploiting the opportunity for a sexual liaison.

Is this chivalry, or is it a sign of something else? I don't know.

I'm going to assume however - since I hate to pathologise - that Hannay is a true gentleman and not suffering from any form of sexual dysfunction; albeit a gentleman who appears to enjoy the company of women more than bedding them and who, one suspects, if obliged to eventually make love to them looks forward most of all to lighting up a post-coital cigarette.

On Women and Fish in The 39 Steps

Lucie Mannheim as Annabella Smith and Peggy Ashcroft as Margaret

in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935)

Starring a very dashing Robert Donat as Richard Hannay and an ice-cold and elegant Madeleine Carroll as Pamela, Hitchcock's The 39 Steps is a masterclass in how to construct a compelling cinematic narrative in which melodrama seamlessly combines with screwball comedy.

Obviously, the most memorable of all scenes is that in which Pamela - whilst still handcuffed to Hannay and unsure whether he’s an innocent man desperate to clear his name, or a sadistic murderer on the run - awkwardly removes her wet stockings. It remains an unsurpassed moment of kinky delight that lovers of film and fetish have cherished for over 80 years.

However, there are two other scenes and two supporting performances that I’m also very fond of, each involving a vulnerable woman - and a fish.

The first takes place in Hannay’s London flat when he cooks a haddock for Annabella, the mysterious spy played by Lucie Mannheim, a Jewish actress forced into exile from her native Germany by the Nazis. As one who knows what it is to genuinely fear for her future and have to flee and to hide, she plays the part with real conviction and makes Hannay's ironic remark about persecution mania cruelly apt.

The second scene, which parallels and reverses elements of the above, unfolds in the crofter’s cottage. Hannay charms the young wife, Margaret, played by Peggy Ashcroft, who asks him if it’s true that all the ladies in London paint their toenails, before cooking him a fish for supper and then helping him escape from the police in the middle of the night, thus vicariously fulfilling her own desire to flee the loveless existence to which she's been doomed by marriage to an older man (played by John Laurie).

Both these women seek out and desperately require Hannay's help. They are, in a sense, as caught up in circumstances beyond their control as he is. And yet Hannay is unable to save either of them; Annabella is murdered and Margaret abandoned to a life of rural misery and domestic violence.

Only Pamela refuses to be bullied or victimised by any man. She may be dragged all over the Scottish moors by Hannay, but she never loses her sangfroid. Say what you like about Hitchcock blondes, but they're never going to allow themselves to be done up like kippers ...  

Tickets Please (On the Buses with D. H. Lawrence)

Pat Ashton as überclippie in the ITV comedy On the Buses  

Literary scholar Brian Finney cleverly identifies a loose classical parallel between Lawrence’s short story ‘Tickets Please’ and Euripides’s play, The Bacchae. But as one who wasn’t reared on ancient Greek tragedy but, rather, on 1970s British sitcoms, I have to admit that, when recently re-reading the tale, the thing that immediately came to my mind was On the Buses.

It’s not only that inspector John Thomas (or Coddy) resembles a cross between Stephen Lewis’s Blakey (sporting the same toothbrush moustache and peaked cap) and the sex-mad driver, Jack, played by Bob Grant; it’s that the girl conductors as described by Lawrence sound just like the buxom blonde clippies personified by Pat Ashton: sharp-tongued, fearless young hussies in ugly blue uniforms, with skirts up to their knees (and beyond).*

However, whereas On the Buses was often crude and vulgar, it doesn’t really belong to the pornographic imagination; it lacks the perverse aesthetic and sadomasochistic elements that crucially define the latter. Lawrence, of course, understands these elements all too well; understands them, and gleefully exploits them in his fiction.

Thus, ‘Tickets Please’ doesn’t end in bawdy farce, but eroticised violence. In a scene that Eric Stanton might have sketched, Lawrence has John Thomas get his comeuppance at the hands of half-dozen girls whom he’s recently fucked round with: Annie, Cissy, Laura, Muriel, Polly and last, but by no means least, the rather pale, but well-built and vindictive Nora.

Having lured the crumpet-loving Coddy into their staff room at the depot, the clippies give him some tea served with bread and dripping. They tease him, gently at first, then more aggressively; demanding that he choose one of them – and only one – to walk home with. He tries to laugh things off, but he’s rightly uneasy and mistrustful as they make him stand with his face to a wall, tittering excitedly behind his back:

“And suddenly, with a movement like a swift cat, Annie went forward and fetched him a box on the side of the head that sent his cap flying and himself staggering. He started round.
      But at Annie’s signal they all flew at him, slapping him, pinching him, pulling his hair, though more in fun than in spite or anger. He however saw red. His blue eyes flamed with strange fear as well as fury, and he butted through the girls to the door. It was locked. He wrenched at it. Roused, alert, the girls stood round and looked at him. He faced them, at bay. At that moment they were rather horrifying to him, as they stood in their short uniforms. He was distinctly afraid.”

John Thomas demands that they unlock the door and let him go. But things turn nastier when Annie takes off her belt and, swinging it, fetches him a “sharp blow over the head, with the buckle end”. He grabs her to try and prevent another blow, but “immediately the other girls rushed upon him, pulling and tearing and beating him” like strange, wild creatures determined to have their sport and their revenge:

“Nora had hold at the back of his collar, and was actually strangling him. Luckily the button burst. He struggled in a wild frenzy of fury and terror, almost mad terror. His tunic was simply torn off his back, his shirt-sleeves were torn away, his arms were naked.”

Finally, they get him down and then they kneel on him, with flushed faces and wild hair; their eyes glittering strangely. John Thomas lies still, beaten and at the mercy of the young women. His face was scratched and bleeding. The sight of his white, bare arms excited the girls. Polly is part hysterical, part ecstatic; when not laughing, she gives long groans and sighs. Annie slaps John Thomas and again commands him to choose one of them. And so, finally, he chooses her.

This brings the attack and the story to a close, if something of a ruined climax; for nothing is consummated. The girls let him up and then stand about uneasily, “flushed, panting, tidying their hair and their dress unconsciously”, as the bruised and battered Coddy picks up his torn clothes and absurdly puts his cap back on in a vain attempt to regain his lost authority.

‘Tickets Please’ is then a classic piece of Lawrentian kinkiness, involving explicit elements of dominance, submission, and fetishistic fantasy wherein a previously powerful and cocksure male is assaulted, stripped and humiliated by fully-clothed – indeed uniformed – young women filled with supernatural strength and sexual malice.

As the song says: There's always gay life on the buses / You'll find it thrilling when you ride / And you can get it on the buses / Upstairs or down inside.**


Notes and References

D. H. Lawrence, 'Tickets Please', in England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 34-45. All lines are quoted from this version of the text.

* I'm aware of course that Lawrence's story concerns a group of East Midlands tram girls, not London bus conductresses.

** Lyrics for the theme song to the film, On the Buses (dir. Harry Booth, 1971), were written by Roger Ferris. For those interested in hearing this charming ditty in full, please click here.

Dancing Barefoot (with Reference to the Case of Alice Howells)

From Zarathustra to Patti Smith, there has long been a perverse fascination with the thought of young women dancing barefoot and defying the Spirit of Gravity. One evening, for example, when the former was walking through the forest with his disciples, he came upon a group of girls dancing together in a meadow. When, upon realising that they have been discovered, they cease their movements, Zarathustra approaches them in a friendly manner and implores them to continue:

'Please, I beg you, do not stop, you nimble creatures! I'm no killjoy who looks upon you with an evil eye; no enemy to divine dancing, or to girls' feet with fair ankles.'

I've no doubt, therefore, that had he lived and retained his sanity, Nietzsche would have enthusiastically supported the barefoot dance movement of the early twentieth century, which not only challenged received ideas of what constitutes classical dance, but also wider notions of social decorum. For bare feet had long been regarded as obscene within Western culture, no matter how passionately the advocates for such made reference to the ancient world or the enlightened practices of the Far East.

Indeed, for many Edwardians any form of public nakedness remained profoundly shocking and when Maud Allan performed her barefoot Dance of the Seven Veils in 1908, it scandalised London theatre goers. Critics regarded her as the embodiment of uninhibited sexuality and, as such, a threat to public decency. But it would take another dancer, Isadora Duncan, to really shake things up, however. Duncan, a feminist and self-declared communist, revolutionized dance and liberated the naked female foot; divorcing the latter from perceptions of obscenity and linking it instead to ideas of freedom, innocence, and natural harmony.

Finally, we come to the (fictional) case of Alice Howells, a young widow in D. H. Lawrence's short story, 'The Blue Moccasins' (1928), who seduces a married man, Percy Barlow, by dancing barefoot before him on stage in a play entitled The Shoes of Shagpat.

In the play, writes Lawrence:

"Alice was the wife of the grey-bearded old Caliph, but she captured the love of the young Ali, otherwise Percy, and the whole business was the attempt of these two to evade Caliph and negro-eunuchs and ancient crones, and get into each other's arms."

In her role as Leila, Alice wears white gauze Turkish trousers and a silver veil. She also wears a pair of blue moccasins that belong to Mrs Barlow (and which have been borrowed without permission): "The blue shoes were very important: for while the sweet Leila wore them, the gallant Ali was to know there was danger. But when she took them off, he might approach her."           

Seeing Mrs Barlow sitting in the front row, so calmly superior, suddenly let loose a devil in Alice Howells: "All her limbs went suave and molten, as her young sex, long pent up, flooded even to her finger-tips Her voice was strange, even to herself, with its long, plaintive notes. She felt all her movements soft and fluid, she felt herself like living liquid. And it was lovely."

Lawrence continues:

"Alice's business, as the lovely Leila , was to be seductive to the rather heavy Percy. And seductive she was. In two minutes, she had him spell-bound. He saw nothing of the audience. A faint, fascinated grin came on to his face, as he acted up to the young woman in the Turkish trousers. ... And when, at the end of Act I, the lovely Leila kicked off the blue moccasins, saying: 'Away, shoes of bondage, shoes of sorrow!' - and danced a little dance all alone, barefoot, in her Turkish trousers, in front of her fascinated hero, his smile was so spell-bound that everybody else was spell-bound too."

Apart from the outraged wife, obviously, whose indignation knew no bounds. Unfortunately, she has to sit throughout Act II, as the imaginary love scenes between Percy and Alice become ever more nakedly shameful. As the second Act comes to its climax, Leila again kicks off her shoes of bondage and flies barefoot into the arms of Ali: "And if ever a man was gone in sheer desire, it was Percy, as he pressed the woman's lithe form against his body ..."       

Not surprisingly, Mrs Barlow doesn't stay for the third Act. By then, however, it is too late: her husband's podophilia has got the better of him and he's crucially transferred his allegiance to Alice. Leaning down, backstage during the interval, "he drew off one of the grey shoes she had on, caressing her foot with the slip of his hand over its slim, bare shape".


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Blue Moccasins', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 165-79. All lines quoted are from this edition. 

Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1969), see 'The Dance Song' in Part Two of this work. Note that the line spoken by Zarathustra as it appears here is a paraphrase rather than an accurate quotation. 

Identity is the Crisis Can't You See

Cover of the English translation by David Schreiber 

(Arktos, London, 2013) 

Markus Willinger's Die identitäre Generation is not so much a book as a pamphlet, to paraphrase Larry David discussing Jason Alexander's equally flimsy (but doubtless more profound and challenging) text, Acting Without Acting. 

Either way - book or pamphlet - it's probably one of the most badly written works ever published; certainly the worst I've had the misfortune to read in a long, long time. If this is the best that a graduate student of history and politics from the University of Stuttgart and darling of the alternative Right can muster, then (a) the German education system is in trouble and (b) the identitarian movement is even more ideologically vacuous than one might have imagined.  

Willinger disingenuously claims his work is not a manifesto, but this is precisely what it is; a succinct and clear declaration of his views on what's wrong in Europe today, who's to blame - the soixante-huitards - and what future changes should be made. What the work doesn't do - despite what it says on the back-cover blurb - is move seamlessly between radical politics and existential philosophy. Nor does it set out its arguments (such as they are) in a poetic fashion.

Rather, it remains stuck in a reactionary rut and relies upon the ugly, prosaic and völkisch-organic language of fascism, or what Victor Klemperer characterized as the lingua tertii imperii. A standardized and stereotypical language which lacks all nuance and loveliness, all subtlety or sophistication; a language that forever speaks with one tone: loud, monotonous, and threatening - like the barking of an Alsatian dog.         

It's certainly not the German used by Goethe, Heine, or Rilke. It makes a noise, yes, and it continues to pass the word along along, but it creates no sense of communion as George Steiner would say. Willinger gives us dead metaphors and ready-made slogans in place of ideas; his writing lacks vitality, style, and, above all, humour. It does, however, successfully mix common vulgarity and prejudice with high flights of romantic twaddle and fatal amounts of saccharine pathos.

The pamphlet-manifesto is divided into forty-one chapters and a brief Preface in which Willinger writes of a (prepare to yawn) crisis of the European spirit, which he blames on the post-War generation and their corrupt theories that have "determined the social discourse ... and dominated all the dialogues"[80] for the last fifty years or so.

Speaking on behalf of his own generation, born shortly before the Millennium, Willinger demands a return to fixed identities, real values, and traditional family life; a return which will, apparently, mean an end to boredom and loneliness - as well as to the twin evils of multiculturalism and feminism. For the "perpetual, deep resentment" [25] that Willinger openly admits to feeling and which shapes his thinking, expresses itself not only in the form of  racism, but also misogyny and homophobia.

And thus, it's not only the artists and intellectuals associated with May 1968 (the month and year of my own birth) who are to blame for making poor Markus feel so bad about himself and his life, it's also the immigrants (particularly the Muslims), the abortionists, the queers, the perverts and the scowling feminists ... Oh, and it's also the Americans and the big corporations who have "inflicted countless and terrible wounds on our planet" [74] with their irresponsible greed (like every good Nazi, Willing is a romantic anti-capitalist at heart who adores Nature and values every tree and every mountain as sacred).

Not that he wants to "damn and demonize" [46] anybody of course. He just wants the above to learn how to be a little bit more like him; that is to say, someone ready to die for the one great thing that provides a final refuge ...LOVE! In this world of pain and sorrow, writes Willinger, the highest goal and greatest happiness is to find true love.

But of course, as much as Willinger may talk of love and want to receive such, like all men of ressentiment he doesn't know how to give love. And so he quickly recoils back into hate and the language of violence, fantasizing about life not in the bedroom, but the barracks: "If there is any masculinity, honour, and camaraderie today, the credit is due, above all, to the hard training that men received in the army." [85]

Not surprisingly, therefore, Willinger wants a return to compulsory military service, so that all young men might be taught how to obey orders, how to fight, and how to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Perhaps they'll also be taught how to recognise real beauty: for although Willinger concedes that "there is no accounting for taste and every attempt at defining a definitive aesthetic standard is inherently impossible" [93], he knows good art when he sees it - "the sort that stands in unity with the natural world, the sort that radiates pride and glory, that represents something real and in which we can find meaning" [94].

Not modern art, obviously, which is formless and fragmented. And stomach turning.   

Finally, bringing his manifesto to a close, Willinger calls for brave, passionate action. And weapons. He promises that a final verdict will shortly be passed upon people like me who are responsible for the downfall of mankind and the ruin of the world; nihilists who knowingly destroy everything holy and fight against everything natural; queers for whom the concept of identity is a crisis in and of itself.

To be honest, one rather hopes it'll be a death sentence, if only so one never has to read any more of his appalling books ...  

Barefoot in Bloomsbury (The Case of Virginia Bodoin)

Agnes Ayres: the American actress best known for 

her role in The Sheik (1921) alongside Valentino 

I have to confess that I rather like the sound of Virginia Bodoin, a character in one of D. H. Lawrence’s short stories.

And what I like most about this woman of thirty is not just that she is a bit odd and elvish with a very slight squint in one of her brown eyes, or that her hair was a natural tangle of curls – though for me these traits are attractive enough in themselves – but more, it’s that she carelessly undermines her own attempts at appearing prim and proper due to a quality which Lawrence describes as sluttishness.

And this quality is nowhere more apparent than in her feet: true, they were elegant; it wasn’t that. Rather it was the fact that she simply couldn’t resist kicking her shoes off at every opportunity, be it indoors or outdoors, even if this meant going barefoot, or displaying a hole in her expensive stockings.

There was, writes Lawrence, “a touch of gamine in her very feet, a certain sluttishness that wouldn’t let them stay properly in nice proper shoes”. This was the fetishistic secret of her charm and helped make her popular with men, two of whom, Henry and Adrian, fall madly in love with her. She was so stylish and had such a lovely, rather low but whimsical voice that enchanted the male soul. And yet she was ever so slightly queer and just a tiny bit sluttish.

How disappointing, therefore, that Lawrence sees fit to marry this intelligent, independent, thoroughly modern woman off to the Turkish Delight; an Armenian not only twice her age, but a fat patriarchal figure who, although happy to trade in the West and adapt himself to the commercial world therein, retains a traditional and tribal mentality.

Arnault loves Virginia, but he essentially thinks her a lost child who needs protecting; to be caressed and cared for – and fattened up! He also recognises her as someone who can help smooth his way into English society and provide him with a swanky London apartment. Thus, for multifarious reasons, he didn’t want merely to fuck Virginia: he wanted also to marry her and to “make himself master of her”.

Again, it seems to me a real shame that Lawrence should suggest that the only way for a girl to escape from a wilful mother - and from becoming a wilful woman in turn - is to give way to destiny and submit to male power and authority; to become, as Mrs Bodoin contemptuously puts it, the harem type ready to take up the veil once more and no longer be burdened with freedom.

One is almost tempted to regard this as a Lawrentian form of slut shaming ...  

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Mother and Daughter', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. by Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Lines quoted on pp. 105 and 118.

Luis Quiles and the Transparency of Evil

Louis Quiles: self portrait and Twitter profile picture

twitter.com/perterpunk 

The work of Spanish artist Luis Quiles brilliantly reveals what Baudrillard describes as evil.

That is to say, that which belongs to the order not of morality, but of invisibility; that which is usually concealed and circulates in secret; that which, despite the best efforts of our society to deny its existence, eventually shines through (thus Baudrillard's notion of the transpiring of evil).

We like to think that our idealism has triumphed in a world unified by technology and illuminated by the light of reason; that the good, the true, and the beautiful are now the supreme values and we should therefore all be wearing a permanently happy face.

Un/fortunately, however, evil remains within our society and, indeed, it continues to provide the indispensable energy needed to drive it forward. 18th-century Anglo-Dutch philosopher and political economist, Bernard Mandeville, was right when he asserted, scandalously at the time, that society operates and advances on the basis of its vices, not its virtues or positive qualities.

Quiles, I think, recognizes this - recognizes, that is to say, that corruption has a vital function within the world - even if, as a liberal humanist, he finds it difficult to countenance greed, violence, exploitation, and hatred. Thus the terrible tension and ambiguity within his images. They clearly satirize the pornographic character of contemporary culture and consumer capitalism, yet nevertheless they are complicit with it.

A friend of mine compared the images to those of English graffiti-artist Banksy. But, at their best, the comic-book style pictures by this young, Barcelona-based artist are almost as unbearable to look at - their content as profoundly troubling - as the so-called Black Paintings produced by Goya during the final period of his life. They're that good; they're that appalling.


Note: the above picture, as well as many other works, can be found on Luis Quiles's Facebook page by clicking here.
 

Deborah de Robertis: The Naked Truth

Deborah de Robertis (self-portrait, 2014)

Deborah de Robertis is someone I'm very fond of. For not only does she have a lovely face, but she provocatively blurs the lines between art, performance, criticism and flagrant self-promotion. Of course, she’s not unique in this by any means, but she does it with rather more style and chutzpah than most.

In May 2014, for example, wearing a beautiful gold sequin dress, she entered the Musée d’Orsay and posed in front of Courbet’s obscene masterpiece, L’Origine du monde, displaying her own sex and silently challenging passersby to gaze into what the artist does not dare to reveal in his painting; the concealed eye or black hole of the vagina that lies beyond the fleshy lips of the labia; the sticky abyss which stares into those who foolishly stare into it; the zero point where philosophers and insects lose their way.

De Robertis thus seductively turns the tables upon those who would not only objectify the female body, but render it passive via its representation. She seems to say: ‘You want to see a cunt? Here’s a cunt!’ knowing full well that the museum authorities will rush to cover it up just as the news media will censor their own images in their coverage of the story (whilst nevertheless hypocritically reproducing Courbet’s 1866 oil painting of Joanna Hiffernan’s nether regions).

Then, in January of this year, de Robertis repeated her stunt; though this time she stripped naked in front of Manet’s celebrated (but equally controversial) Olympia and ended up in a police cell for two days (held for indecent exposure), as well as the in the international press once more. Stretched out on the museum floor, she adopted the same confident and unabashed pose as the reclining nude in the 1865 portrait.

Unlike the latter, however, she had a miniature camera strapped to her head in order to record those who came to voyeuristically gaze at her. In interviews afterwards, de Robertis explained that her aim was to bring Olympia to life and reverse the usual relationship between model and viewing public; to extract what Baudrillard famously described as the revenge of the object.

For these twin operations of vulva activism (or what the brave women of Femen term sextremism), I salute her. Torpedophiles who are interested in seeing footage of the events should click here (Origin of the World) and here (Olympia).

Lady Chatterley's Daughter

Cover of Lady Chatterley's Daughter, ed. Lawrence Lariar, 

(Popular Library, 1960)

At the end of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Connie is carrying a child of unknown sex. But, of course, within the pornographic imagination, it has to be a girl; a daughter who will inherit her mother's desire for unlicensed pleasure and sexual freedom; a Lawrentian nymphet who would make Nabokov smile.

For the pornographic imagination unfolds within a universe in which, as Susan Sontag points out, everything is conceived as an opportunity to fuck and everyone is allowed (and encouraged) to screw everyone else. This is what makes it a total universe; one with "the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fed into it, reducing everything into the one negotiable currency of the erotic imperative".

The dream, ultimately, is of a pornotopia in which there are no fixed distinctions between the sexes and no inhibitions can be allowed to endure. Gender, for example, is fluid; something to be performed and perverted. And taboos surrounding things such as incest are simply another means to intensify pleasure and multiply the possibilities of sexual exchange.

Whether the incestuous fantasy of the hot milf and her even hotter daughter was one of Lawrence's, I don't know. Probably not: for Lawrence relates incest to idealism and he is keen to reject and overcome the latter. For Lawrence, incest is just another example of what he terms sex-in-the-head. He writes:

"Finding himself in a sort of emotional cul-de-sac, man proceeds to deduce from his given emotional and passional premises conclusions which are not emotional or passional at all, but just logical, abstract, ideal."

Thus, incest is a logical deduction of human reason, filtered through the pornographic imagination. If at first it rouses deep instinctive opposition, this can soon be eroded or persuaded away. But this motivizing of the passional sphere by idealism is, for Lawrence, the great danger facing us today; "the death of all spontaneous, creative life, and the substituting of the mechanical principle".

However, Lawrence also says that we have no choice but to fulfil these ideals in their extremity. In other words, the pornographic nihilism of our culture cannot be ignored, reversed, or transcended; it can only be consummated.

But note, this doesn't mean spending all day surfing internet porn; it means, rather, rediscovering something of the pristine unconscious - and for this we still need our really great artists and poets.


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 

D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Chapter 2, 'The Incest Motive and Idealism'. 

Susan Sontag, 'The Pornographic Imagination', essay in Styles of Radical Will, (Penguin Books, 2009).
 

On Loving Enemies and Hating Friends

The poet and translator Simon Solomon

(mon meilleur ami et meilleur adversaire)

The philosopher, says Zarathustra, must not only be able to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.

The first part of this proposition obviously echoes the Christian imperative, but Nietzsche doesn’t mean by it what Jesus meant. For he’s not thinking in terms of forgiveness and reconciliation and peace on earth. Rather, he wants the lover of wisdom to recognise the vital need for enmity.

Unlike Hegel, therefore, he’s not positing difference only so he might then dream of synthesis. Dionysus versus the Crucified is not a dialectical opposition; the pathos of distance between terms is real and needs, if anything, to be furthered - not closed or even bridged.

But across this gulf that separates, antagonists should respect and even revere one another and know that they find their best strength in the struggle between them; to desire the extermination of one’s enemies, to think of them in vicious moral terms as evil, is profoundly mistaken and a sign of ressentiment. The noble human being always finds in their adversary something to honour (and to love), not despise and fear.

As for the second part of this proposition, Nietzsche is simply alerting us to the danger of those who love us for who we are, rather than for what we might become; for those who follow us on social media and like what we do and say, rather than challenge it; those who want the best for us, rather than wish us a life of hardship, conflict and worthy enemies.

In sum, for Nietzsche, one’s best friend and one’s greatest opponent is often one and the same person. (Oh, Simon, what would I do without you?)

Pussy (A Post for International Women's Day)

The term pussy has several meanings and can be used in a variety of ways; some innocent, some insulting, some vulgar. But what most interests is why this word should have become such a popular euphemism for female genitalia, thereby establishing an erotico-symbolic relationship between cats and cunts; small, soft, furry, carnivorous creatures on the one hand – and domestic pets that like to be stroked on the other.

The etymological origin of the word is uncertain; it may simply have derived from a sound used to attract a cat: Here puss, puss, puss! But, by the 17th century, pussy was commonly being used to refer to young women as well as moggies and by the following century it specifically directed us towards their sex organs.

Unsurprisingly, many women now regard pussy as derogatory, demeaning and dehumanising, rather than an affectionate term of endearment. But there are other women who use it quite happily and in preference to any of the other slang terms for vagina. Indeed, some even wear knickers with kittens printed on.

Personally, it’s not a word I’m entirely comfortable with. Not only is it a little too coy for my tastes, but it also lends itself too readily to double entendre and I don’t much like sexual innuendo (whilst conceding that it's long been a crucial component of bawdy humour, from the Barrison Sisters to Mrs. Slocombe). Nor do I see any need to disguise or apologise for biology; there’s nothing shameful about female bodies and the word cunt seems to me much more honest.

Having said that, feminist punk collective Pussy Riot have managed to cleverly invest the word with a new dynamism and militancy, rightly realising that this provocative combination of terms creates a powerful ambiguity and tension. Iggy Azalea’s inspired rap anthem, Pussy, has also helped to revalue the term.

Ultimately, however it’s referred to, we should all learn to love the vagina, celebrate labia pride, and support vulva activism. For where would we be - male or female - without that which Courbet rightly recognised as the Origin of the World ...?

Thanks to Kiranjit Kaur for supplying the image for this post and for her insight on the topic. 

Ephebophilia (with Reference to the Cases of Adam Johnson and Will Brangwen)

Adam Johnson at Bradford Crown Court / Christopher Gable as 
Will Brangwen in The Rainbow (dir. Ken Russell, 1989)

The case of footballer Adam Johnson, 28, who has just been convicted of grooming and touching up a 15-year-old girl - and who is now facing what the judge warns will be a substantial prison sentence - is an interesting example of how times have changed.

For whilst his actions may have raised a few eyebrows in the not-too-distant past, I very much doubt he would have been prosecuted, let alone found guilty of a serious crime and portrayed by the media as some kind of monster of depravity.  

Obviously, as the law stands, the girl is a minor and cannot give consent to sexual activity. Johnson knew this. But does sending her inappropriate texts, kissing her in the back of his car and putting his hand down her pants, really deserve to be punished with a minimum of five years jail time? Johnson was undoubtedly devious, arrogant, and stupid. But he didn't violently assault the young woman; her claim that he forced her to perform fellatio on him was rejected by the jury. 

Interestingly, the case makes one think back to an incident in The Rainbow involving Will Brangwen, also aged 28 at the time, and a young girl he meets at a variety theatre on a Saturday night out in Nottingham away from his wife, Anna, from whom he feels increasingly estranged. Lawrence writes:

"In the Empire one evening he sat next to two girls. He was aware of the one beside him. She was rather small, common, with a fresh complexion and an upper lip that lifted from her teeth, so that, when she was not conscious, her mouth was slightly open and her lips pressed outwards in a kind of blind appeal. ...
      A gleam lit up in him: should he begin with her? Should he begin with her to live the other, the unadmitted life of his desire? Why not? He had always been so good. Save for his wife, he was a virgin. And why, when all women were different? Why, when he would only live once? He wanted the other life. His own life was barren, not enough. He wanted the other.
      Her open mouth, showing the small, irregular, white teeth, appealed to him. It was open and ready. It was so vulnerable. Why should he not go in and enjoy what was there? The slim arm that went down so still and motionless to the lap, it was pretty. She would be small, he would be able almost to hold her in his two hands. She would be small, almost like a child, and pretty. Her childishness whetted him keenly. She would he helpless between his hands."

Clearly, from this pervy-pornographic description, the nameless girl is young - perhaps she too might only be fifteen, who knows?

Brangwen strikes up conversation, making her blush even as she flashes a smile at him with her eyes. Her nervousness and vulnerability "pricked him with a pleasant sensation ... she was so young and palpitating". He is determined to press home his advantage and exert his power as an older man. After the show, Brangwen convinces the girl to abandon her friend and come with him for a coffee. Lawrence writes:

"The friend was gone into the darkness. He turned with his girl to the tea-shop. They talked all the time. He made his sentences in sheer, almost muscular pleasure of exercising himself with her. He was looking at her all the time, perceiving her, appreciating her, finding her out, gratifying himself with her. He could see distinct attractions in her; her eyebrows, with their particular curve, gave him keen aesthetic pleasure. Later on he would see her bright, pellucid eyes, like shallow water, and know those. And there remained the open, exposed mouth, red and vulnerable. That he reserved as yet. And all the while his eyes were on the girl, estimating and handling with pleasure her young softness. About the girl herself, who or what she was, he cared nothing, he was quite unaware that she was anybody. She was just the sensual object of his attention."

Again, this description makes more than a little uncomfortable; Lawrence stresses the calculating and coercive aspects of seduction. Brangwen sounds predatory. It is not inconceivable that he might attempt to rape the girl if he doesn't get his way with a combination of small-talk and sweet-talk:

"He was alert in every sense and fibre, and yet quite sure and steady, and lit up, as if transfused. He had a free sensation of walking in his own darkness, not in anybody else’s world at all. He was purely a world to himself, he had nothing to do with any general consciousness. Just his own senses were supreme. All the rest was external, insignificant, leaving him alone with this girl whom he wanted to absorb, whose properties he wanted to absorb into his own senses. He did not care about her, except that he wanted to overcome her resistance, to have her in his power, fully and exhaustively to enjoy her."

Brangwen puts his arm around the girl and pulls her close. He leads her along darkened streets and into the park, where he begins to grope her. She doesn't consent to this, but neither does she protest. Rather, she stays silent and inscrutable; obediently doing what he asks of her. Brangwen is happy with her silence and passivity. He doesn't want to know her personally; "he only wanted to discover her. And through her clothing, what absolute beauty he touched ... his hands ... so subtly, so seekingly, so finely and desirously searching her out".

The girl acquiesces and seems also to be enjoying the experience: "In utter sensual delight she clenched her knees, her thighs, her loins together." She accepts his kisses and her mouth becomes bold and assured, rather than helpless and unguarded. But as Brangwen becomes ever more forceful, with a "sudden horrible movement she ruptured the state that contained them both", pushing him away and telling him to stop with a frightened cry. Lawrence eventually brings this long scene to a climax:

"She came back to him, but trembling, reservedly this time.
      Her cry had given him gratification. But he knew he had been too sudden for her. He was now careful. For a while he merely sheltered her. ... He wanted to persist, to begin again, to lead up to the point where he had let himself go on her, and then manage more carefully, successfully. ...
      He sheltered her, and soothed her, and caressed her, and kissed her, and again began to come nearer, nearer. He gathered himself together. Even if he did not take her, he would make her relax, he would fuse away her resistance. So softly, softly, with infinite caressiveness he kissed her, and the whole of his being seemed to fondle her. Till, at the verge, swooning at the breaking point, there came from her a beaten, inarticulate, moaning cry:
      'Don’t - oh, don’t!'
      His veins fused with extreme voluptuousness. For a moment he almost lost control of himself, and continued automatically. But there was a moment of inaction, of cold suspension. He was not going to take her. He drew her to him and soothed her, and caressed her. But the pure zest had gone. She struggled to herself and realised he was not going to take her. And then, at the very last moment, when his fondling had come near again, his hot living desire despising her, against his cold sensual desire, she broke violently away from him.
      'Don’t,' she cried, harsh now with hatred, and she flung her hand across and hit him violently."

Brangwen reacts to this with suave irony and gives her a cruel smile. The girl had escaped, says Lawrence - adding with a rapist's logic: "But she hated him for her escape more than for her danger."

Afterwards, Will Brangwen "caught a train and went home", back to his wife and children, just as if nothing had happened. Indifferent and happy to lie. Just like Adam Johnson.

   
See: D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 210-17. 

See also Howard J. Booth's essay "'At Last to Newness': D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow and the Dream of a Better World", in the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, Vol. 4, Number 1 (2015), pp. 19-44. Booth's suggestion in a footnote that Will Brangwen has a sexual fascination with childhood directly inspired this post.  

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Lady Chatterley's Lover and the Pornographic Imagination

Poster for the English language version of  
L'Amant de lady Chatterley 
(dir. Marc Allégret, 1955)

Although Lawrence often writes about pornography in pathological terms - as the grey disease of sex-hatred coupled with the yellow disease of dirt lust - he also reluctantly admits that what is obscene to one person is the laughter of genius to another. 

Lawrence thus problematizes and pluralizes the concept in a manner that anticipates Susan Sontag who, forty years later, will argue that any discussion of the subject must begin by acknowledging that there are at least three pornographies; the socio-historical, the psycho-sexual, and, lastly, a minor but interesting modality or convention within the arts.

It's the latter, particularly as it operates within the field of literature, which Sontag examines with her customary intelligence and sophistication, but it's not what I want to discuss here. For I'm not really concerned with showing what it is that makes Lady Chatterley's Lover a legitimate work of art. Rather, I'm interested in how the novel evolved within the contemporary cultural imagination, which is not only pornographic but popular and postmodern in character.

In other words, what fascinates is not the novel's reception or status amongst a handful of scholars, critics, and readers still genuinely interested in Lawrence's uniquely powerful attempt to explore extreme forms of human consciousness and erotic obsession, but the manner in which the book and its famous pair of lovers have become, for the majority of people, ludicrous; two stock characters defined by their organs, rutting in the woods for all eternity.     

Lawrence may have wanted men and women to be able to think sex fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly, but, after the orgy, most people simply can't take sex, art, or porn seriously. They smile at the idea that there might lie within these things either some great truth or mortal danger. Indeed, even in Lawrence's own time he was aware that the younger generation would, lacking what he terms real feeling, find Lady Chatterley's Lover old-fashioned, its phallic language, laughable.

And so one suspects that Lawrence anticipated what would befall him and his work and that, in a sense, he offered the figures of Connie and Mellors to fate and circumstance; knowing they'd secure immortality within the pornographic imagination, even as they were repeatedly and sometimes grotesquely transformed within it.  


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity' and 'À Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover', in À Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Other Essays, (Penguin Books, 1961). 

Susan Sontag, 'The Pornographic Imagination', in Styles of Radical Will, (Penguin Books, 2009). 

Dementia: From Bad to Verse

People who leave the obscure and try to define 

whatever it is that goes on in their heads, are pigs.

 
Living Words is a therapeutic arts organisation, created in 2007 by the writer Susanna Howard, which works with people - like my mother - who are dealing with dementia and the accompanying loss of speech skills and other neuro-cognitive functions.

The belief is that even the most delirious babbling should be regarded as valid expression and that by recording and faithfully transcribing what is said, you might produce a form of poetry in which the truth of madness, as well as the inner world of the person, is revealed. This, says Howard, is her great mission.

Of course, as she admits, the process involves editing. But, Howard insists, there is nothing added and no meddling; the meaning of the text is present in the utterance of the speaker and simply allowed to shine forth on the page with transparent authenticity.

I am, of course, extremely skeptical about all this - to say the least.

It's not that I think it impossible to establish a dialogue with those who can but stammer imperfect words and noises without fixed syntax, or the recognised logic of language. And I certainly don't wish to abandon anyone to silent oblivion, if they still desperately desire to communicate (although, having said that, I must admit to finding something beautiful in the total silence of the object).

Rather, my main concern is that there's a real danger in the Living Words project of subscribing to the romantic myth of madness; particularly in relation to the (equally romantic) myths of art and creative genius. Howard is profoundly mistaken in believing that every single word or sound that falls from a madman's lips is worthy of respect and only needs to be sculpted by an artist-in-residence in order to produce poetry and truth.

For as Foucault was at pains to point out in the conclusion to his history of insanity in the Age of Reason, whilst the madness of Nietzsche, or Van Gogh, or Artaud belongs to their work, their work does not belong to madness. That is to say, madness is precisely the absence of art and its annihilation; "the point where it becomes impossible and where it must fall silent ..."

Foucault continues:

"Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition ... it draws the exterior edge, the line of dissolution, the contour against the void. ... Madness is no longer the space of indecision through which it was possible to glimpse the original truth of the work of art, but the decision beyond which this truth ceases irrevocably ..."

And - let's be honest here - the Living Words team are not dealing with figures such as Nietzsche, Van Gogh, and Artaud; the poets they encounter in the various hospitals and care homes have very little of any philosophical interest or artistic merit to contribute, be they sane, senile, or somewhere in between.

Of course, not that this really matters: Toute l'écriture est de la cochonnerie.


Notes

Michel Foucault; Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard, (Tavistock Publications, 1987). Lines quoted are on p. 287. 

Those interested in knowing more about the Living Words project should click here to visit their website.

Many thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting this topic.