Reflections on the Death of a Jewel-Encrusted Tortoise

The decadent aristocrat Des Esseintes, whose retreat into an increasingly perverse and artificial inner life is depicted with such brilliance by J-K Huysmans in the 1884 novel À rebours (a title usually translated into English as either Against the Grain or Against Nature), is - as Patrick McGuinness points out - a fictional character, but he is not pure invention:

"Among the specific models for Des Esseintes was the eccentric King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who designed an artificial forest with mechanical animals, but there were also Baudelaire himself, Edmond de Goncourt and a variety of fictional characters [...] The most obvious model, however, was Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, an aesthete and eccentric who provided the model for Proust's Baron Charlus in A la recherche du temps perdu ..."

Not only were many of the decorative elements of Des Esseintes's home based on details of Montesquiou's own, but the implausible figure of a jewel-encrusted tortoise creeping about Huysmans's novel was, outrageously, based on fact: "Montesquiou had the poor creature customized to his tastes, and when it died wrote a poem in its memory ..."

This certainly makes one read chapter four of Against Nature with a renewed fascination - and a greater sympathy - for the slow-moving beast:

"The tortoise was the result of a fancy which had occurred to him shortly before leaving Paris. Looking one day at an Oriental carpet aglow with iridescent colours [...] he had thought what a good idea it would be to place on this carpet something that would move about and be dark enough to set off these gleaming tints."  

Unfortunately, having purchased the tortoise and had it delivered to his home - and once it had been deposited on the carpet - it soon became apparent that "the negro-brown tint, the raw Sienna hue of the shell, dimmed the sheen of the carpet instead of bringing out its colours; the predominating gleams of silver had now lost nearly all their sparkle and matched the cold tones [...] along the edges of this hard, lustreless carapace".

Des Esseintes decides the only thing to do is to jazz the tortoise up a bit; to make it into a brilliant object (and artwork) in its own right; glazed in gold and encrusted with precious stones. But not just the familiar stones that vulgar people wear on their fingers; he wanted "startling and unusual gems " - both real and artificial - that, in combination, would "result in a fascinating and disconcerting harmony".

Job done - the tortoise suitably bejewelled - Des Esseintes felt perfectly happy and sat gazing at the splendid reptile as it lay "huddled in a corner of the dining room, glittering brightly in the half-light". Alas, his happiness doesn't last long as the tortoise dies: "Accustomed no doubt to a sedentary life, a modest existence spent in the shelter of its humble carapace, it had not been able to bear the dazzling luxury imposed upon it ..."

And people complain about the crushing effects of poverty!

Interestingly, there are faint echoes of this scene in Brideshead Revisited (1945), when Rex Mottram presents his fiancée Julia Flyte with a small tortoise that has her initials set in diamonds in the living shell. Unlike Des Esseintes, however, the narrator of Waugh's novel (Charles Ryder) can see that the bejewelled tortoise is slightly obscene and in poor taste.

In even poorer taste, however, is what children of my generation used to paint on the backs of pet tortoises; believing their shells to resemble the steel helmets of German soldiers, we would cheerfully decorate them with Iron Crosses and swastikas. And if there's anything more depressing than a dandified, decadent tortoise, it's a Nazified tortoise ...       

Notes

Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick, (Penguin Books, 2003). Lines quoted are from Chapter 4, pp. 40-49. 

Patrick McGuinness, 'Introduction' to Against Nature, ibid., pp. xxvii-xxviii.  

Eveleyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, (Penguin Books, 2000). The tortoise scene is in Chapter 6. 

For a related post to this one written in memory of J-K Huysmans (and his jewel-encrusted tortoise), click here. 

Reflections on an Art Controversy (With Simon Solomon)

John William Waterhouse: Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) 
Oil on canvas (132 x 197.5 cm)
Manchester City Art Gallery

I.

The controversial decision by Manchester City Art Gallery working in collaboration with Black British artist Sonia Boyce to temporarily remove the well known and - so it would seem - still much-loved painting by J. W. Waterhouse depicting the story of a handsome Greek youth, Hylas, being seduced by a group of water nymphs in that slightly pervy but rather pedestrian pre-Raphaelite manner, caused a predictable shitstorm of reaction.    

And that, apparently, was the aim; to incite discussion and challenge the contemporary relevance of a Victorian fantasy belonging to the male porno-mythic imagination.

It certainly seems to be the line that Clare Gannaway, the gallery's curator of contemporary art, is holding fast to now that Waterhouse's masterpiece is hanging back on the wall. She insists that there was never any intention to censor or permanently remove a work that some today consider offensive and even obscene; suggesting as it does that the pubescent female body exists to serve a decorative and titilating function.

I have to admit, I'm slightly skeptical about this. One can't help feeling that Gannaway and Boyce were rather hoping to test public opinion and see how far they could go, or what they could get away with. Having said that, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the arguments advanced by both women and certainly don't think that any artwork is above critical contestation (though this is probably not best served by simply removing it from view and then inviting visitors to leave post-it notes in the empty space).    

My friend, the Dublin-based poet and scholar Simon Solomon, feels rather more strongly on this issue, however, and has posted a series of remarks on the gallery's website voicing his anger and making clear his contempt for Gannaway and Boyce. Generously, he's consented to my reposting below his latest piece on this ludicrous (though vitally important) affair, written in response to Boyce's article in The Guardian defending the takedown of Waterhouse's work as part of a performance piece of her own.


II.

"In Boyce's pursed-lipped piece of historical revisionism, the Waterhouse painting depicts 'seven long-haired, topless nymphs (pubescent girls)'. Is she really this offensively reactionary or is she being paid by Manchester Art Gallery to be? They are NYMPHS! As in alluring mythic/inhuman feminine entities in mortal garb. The Victorians didn't share our paranoiac, paedo-coated modern concept of pubescent in this domain, with all of its moralistic cultural anxiety. Boyce also seems suspiciously preoccupied with their exposed breasts for reasons best known to herself (of which more below) - presumably, she would feel better if they had been depicted in bathing suits, bloomers and caps. (Or just not depicted at all.)

Boyce then attempts to make the ridiculous case that, because other galleries do not display and/or store certain artworks at certain times for different reasons, the accusations of 'censorship' in this case against Manchester Art Gallery are ill-conceived - and even tries to imply we, as mere 'visitors', are extraordinarily lucky to have been invited into the discussion at all. We are then advised that the 'dialogue' that has been engendered (a dialogue she clearly feels she must resist) is composed by hate-filled simpletons looking for 'easy soundbites', driven by 'bigotry', and is misguidedly 'polarising'. (Even though the hundreds of posts I have read on the gallery blog have been, for the most part, stirring, educated and highly articulate, as well as, yes, angry and justifiably indignant.)

She asserts, as if it were self-evident, that 'judgment is at the heart of art'. The problem is this authoritarian statement is far from obvious. One could say - I would say - that being moved or disturbed, being ravished or silenced, is the alpha and omega of aesthetic feeling. Or falling in love with an image so hard one cannot forget it. [...] Unfortunately, for the likes of Boyce and Gannaway, classicism, monumentality, genius and mythic beauty are 'out', because art must fit modern demands for contemporary relevance, cultural inoffensiveness and whatever the #metoo generation is twittering about this week. Apparently, she also knows much more about these things than the Ancients, myth-makers and visionaries of our Western past.

There’s an ill-advised reference to Mengin's 1877 painting Sappho, in regard to which the first adjective she can tellingly find is that the subject is, once again, 'topless'. Apparently, this Sappho is not lesbian enough, among other things, for her retrospective/revisonist needs [...] and/or not evocative enough of Sappho’s cultural achievements. (The lyre that the subject is holding has apparently been overlooked by Boyce.)

What Boyce claims to celebrate is the contestability of art and its meanings. But she exposes her true agenda by telling us that the removal of the Waterhouse painting 'can' (read should) be seen in the 'context' (an hilarious irony, given her peerless deafness and blindness to Victorian context) of visitor-centred curatorial initiatives in Eindhoven and Middlesborough, in addition to conveying the spiteful and embittered reactions above that suggest people just aren’t sophisticated enough to attune themselves to her ideologically motivated cultural programme. The boot is so clearly on the other foot it’s embarrassing: a self-selecting elite - organised by fatuous/simplistic notions of binary gender, seduction and resentment of myth and history, topped off with puritanical outrage over bare-breasted images of femininity - hijacking art for politically driven ends. Against which hundreds of people, as invited, have now spoken eloquently, incisively and emphatically - not that, to read Boyce’s snookered, self-serving and bitter piece, you’d have realised this fact.

I do not wish art to be preserved in aspic and love the kind of baroque, life-loving and darkness-affirming criticism of feminist commentators such as Camille Paglia. I will also concede that Boyce makes a decent point about the modern hypocrisy of sometimes treating, say, myth differently from photography. But one reasonable claim hardly gets her off the dozens of hooks upon which she is rightly snagged.

The painting is back up ... and the egg is all over these imposters’ faces!"

Note: Simon Solomon can be contacted via simonsolomon.ink

In Memory of Joris-Karl Huysmans (and His Bejewelled Tortoise)

Caricature of J-K Huysmans (1885)

To be honest, I increasingly find that I have to be in a very particular frame of mind to read 19th-century French authors such as Joris-Karl Huysmans who are a little too Symbolist, too Decadent and too Catholic for my tastes. One really has no wish to end up at the foot of the Cross, be it inverted or upright and I find elements of his philosophy - much influenced by Schopenhauer - highly suspect; suggestive as they are of weakness, rather than a more Nietzschean pessimism of strength. 

However, as Huysmans and I share the same star sign making us astrological kin - and as today happens to be the 170th anniversary of his birth - I thought I might say something in memory of this idiosyncratic writer, notorious for writing against the grain and against nature ...

The first thing that needs to be said is that Huysmans was clever - very clever. And I'm with Eliot on this question: the essential requirement of all good writing - be it prose or poetry - is intelligence. An inspired idiot is unfortunately still an idiot and inspiration won't compensate for (or disguise) a lack of learning and quick-wittedness for long. L'éternelle bêtise de l'humanité was not surprisingly one of Huysmans's pet peeves. 

His first major publication was a collection of prose poems, Le drageoir aux épices (1874), strongly influenced by Baudelaire. This was followed by a novel, Marthe, Histoire d'une fille (1876), which brought him to the attention of Émile Zola. His next works were similar in style: realistic and rather grim depictions of life in Paris.

Again, to be honest, you'd have to have a great passion for French literature or a scholarly interest like the middle-aged protagonist of Houellebecq's Submission (2015), to bother with these books. But on the other hand, his scandalous novel of 1884, À rebours, is a must read - if only for the bejewelled tortoise in chapter four. 

And that's particularly so for lovers of Oscar Wilde; for this poisonous tale of the aristocratic aesthete Jean des Esseintes - a man who rejects both the natural order and bourgeois society and attempts to live exclusively in a perversely sensual yet highly artificial world of his own invention - greatly influenced The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).

Amusingly - though not for poor Constance - Wilde first read À rebours whilst on honeymoon in Paris and it immediately became for him what it was also for Paul Valéry and, many years later, the punk singer Richard Hell - a bible and bedside favourite.       

See:

Michel Houellebecq, Submission, trans. Lorin Stein, (William Heinemann, 2015). 

Joris-Karl Huysmans, trans. Robert Baldick, (Penguin Books, 2003).

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, (Penguin Books, 2003).

To read an excellent essay by Adam Leith Gollner on 'What Houellebecq Learned from Huysmans', in The New Yorker (12 November, 2015), click here. 

For an interesting note on À rebours and its influence on Oscar Wilde, visit the British Library website: click here. 

For a related post to this one that reflects more closely on the bejewelled tortoise, click here.

Thanks to Thom Bonneville for suggesting this post.

The Naked Truth About Unicorn Girls

Betty the naked unicorn girl 

photographed on Brighton beach by 

Ben Hopper as part of his ongoing project 

Naked with Masks

As most readers will be aware, the unicorn is a legendary creature with a single large, spiraling horn said to possess magical and medicinal powers projecting from its forehead. A symbol of purity and grace, the unicorn could be captured only by a virgin. In one of his notebooks, Leonardo informs us that, whenever the fabulous beast encounters a seated maiden, it overcomes all instinctive fear and ferocity and contentedly lays its head upon her lap.  

As many readers will not be aware, however, the unicorn girl is a contemporary urban myth. For some, she is quite simply the girl whom you always long to meet but never do; a fantasy figure who forever lies out of reach and out of your league.    

But for others - belonging to a slightly kinkier, polyamorous world - the term unicorn is a synonym for hot bi-babe. That is to say, a very good-looking young woman prepared to go down on members of either sex and come up smiling and willing also to form a threesome with a pre-existing (usually heterosexual) couple.

The danger for such bi-poly women is, of course, that they become a type of exotic pet or unicorn bae, who is vulnerable to exploitation by a couple who often wield the power and dictate the terms of the relationship very much to their own advantage; insisting, for example, that their unicorn be single and not take on any additional lovers, nor do anything that might threaten to disrupt their primary relationship, such as favouring one partner over the other.     

I would encourage any unicorns trapped in such a triangle to liberate themselves immediately and instruct those couples who attempt to control their sexual and emotional freedom to go fuck themselves.

On the Truth of Masks

A stone mask from c. 7000 BC 

Musée Bible et Terre Sainte (Paris)

I.

Worn by peoples belonging to many different cultures since the very earliest of times and for a wide variety of reasons - ceremonial and practical, sacred and profane - the mask is that which is más que la cara and which seems to mock the very idea of a real face.

Indeed, it ultimately exposes the shocking truth that the human face isn't a unique natural formation, but a type of social machine that covers and overcodes the front of the head and, eventually, the entire body, thus ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance.

As Oscar Wilde knew very well: we are least ourselves when we present our grinning white face to the world and speak in our own name; it is only when we put on a mask and dare to disguise the self we have been given, that we find the courage to speak with free anonymity.      

II.

Like Wilde, Nietzsche also asserts the philosophical profundity of masks and says that every artist recognises the need to wear such. Indeed, the greatest of men often don monstrous masks in order to best inscribe themselves in the memories, dreams and affections of humanity.    

And of course, beautiful women too are lovers of the mask. Indeed, there are some women who, no matter how carefully you attempt to look beneath their surface, have no natural depth or interior truth but are purely their facades.

Men who love these seductive creatures of veiled appearance and cosmetic disguise, are fated to seek their souls or uncover their nakedness in vain. Yet, it is precisely such women who are often best able to (fetishistically) arouse male desire. 

Remember: after the orgy, the masked ball ...

Maschalagnia: Brief Notes on Armpit Fetishism

Sammy-Lee Smith (aka Fruit Salad) 

Photo: Ben Hopper from the Natural Beauty series

Both sexes have scent glands in their underarm region. But women have a greater number and produce a more enticing aroma - or range of aromas - as far as the heterosexual male nose is concerned. 

One such nose belonged to the 19th-century French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. He noted that brunettes and dark-haired girls have an audacious scent which, unfortunately, can sometimes prove fatiguing. Redheads, on the other hand, have a sharp, fierce smell; whilst in blondes, the armpits can be as heady as a sweet wine. 

Huysmans also tells us that - whatever their coloring - les femmes de Paris tend to have something acidic about them; something suggestive of ammonia or chlorine. In contrast, the bodies of honest country women aromatically convey something of wild duck cooked with olives and shallots. 

Whether this makes one hungry for love or simply hungry, I suppose depends on one's disposition. But there are certainly individuals who desire not only a hearty home-cooked meal, but to sniff, lick, kiss and ultimately fuck the armpits of their beloved (this latter activity is known as axillism).         

If some men prefer a smooth, hairless armpit (as they do a smooth, hairless pussy), the genuine devotee of this particular partialism always prefers an unshaven haven and a strong, pungent fragrance.

Thankfully, European women - in contrast to their Anglo-American sisters - have long understood that body hair and body odor play a powerful role within human sexuality at its filthiest and most inhuman. And they don't mind if you wipe it on the curtains.   


See: Joris-Karl Huysmans, 'The Armpit', in Parisian Sketches, trans. Brendan King, (Dedalus, 2004), pp. 126-28.

And see also the feature by Ellen Scott in the Metro (8 Aug 2017) on Ben Hopper's stunning Natural Beauty project which attempts to normalise the fact of female underarm hair: click here.

Yellow Fever (Notes on the Politics of Asian Girl Fetish)

Bérénice Lim Marloe as Sévérine 

There's something about Asian girls. They're cute. They're smart. 

They have a kind of thing going on.

A friend asked who was my favourite Bond Girl ...

When I replied it was the character Sévérine, portrayed by the beautiful French actress Bérénice Marloe in the 2012 film Skyfall, she smiled and said that this exposed my Asian Girl Fetish (Marloe's father is of Cambodian and Chinese descent) and that this in turn indicated I had politically suspect views and subscribed to a number of pernicious racial and sexual stereotypes.

This may or may not be true, but it kind of made me wish I'd answered differently - although if, for example, I'd named Britt Ekland as Mary Goodnight in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), couldn't this be said to reveal my Nordic Girl Fetish and indicate subscription to an equal number of stereotypes, perhaps even more pernicious and politically suspect in character ...?          

However, happy to play along, I asked what she meant. And she explained that many men who identify as members of the so-called alt-right have a particular penchant for dating women of SE Asian origin, despite their fantasies of white supremacy and purity of blood.

Not surprisingly, this topic has caused heated debate on various white nationalist and neo-Nazi websites and demonstrates to many commentators that there's an amusing level of erotico-ideological confusion within the alt-right world. But, as Audrea Lim points out, there is, actually, no real contradiction in this Asian fetish when one realises how it arises at the intersection of two popular racial myths:

"First is the idea of the 'model minority,' in which Asian-Americans are painted as all hard-working, high-achieving and sufficiently well-behaved to assimilate. If Asians are the model minority [...] then perhaps that opens the door to acceptance from white supremacists.

      The second myth is that of the subservient, hypersexual Asian woman."

For many misogynysts, across the political spectrum, the sad fact is that most white women are - thanks to feminism - simply too much trouble; i.e., too unwilling to serve and to pleasure their menfolk. Asian girls, in contrast, are so much more amenable - and - whisper it - far more uninhibited in the bedroom. This idea - deeply ingrained within the pornographic imagination - has its roots in America's post-war experiences in the bars and brothels of Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

Thus it is that the alt-right Asian fetish combines these ideas and "highlights a tension within the project of white supremacism as America grows more diverse [...] The new, ugly truth? Maintaining white power may require some compromises on white purity".

May require, indeed, sleeping with the enemy ...

See: Audrea Lim, 'The Alt-Right's Asian Fetish', New York Times (Jan 6, 2018): click here to read online.

On the Inspiration of Touch: An Afterword on the Question of Delicacy in a Molecular Age

The beautifully delicate structure of graphene

Image by AlexanderAIUS on Wikipedia

Someone wrote to say how much they enjoyed the recent post on the Lawrentian notions of touch and tenderness and to agree on the need for delicacy and lightness of hand. But I fear that they have a rather more utopian understanding of these things than I do and thus misconstrue my position. 

To be clear: I'm attempting to problematise Lawrence's work and would agree with Steven Connor that delicacy isn't the ideal binary opposite of grasping or rough-handling. In other words, it's not an entirely innocent form of contact, nor is it completely free from the exercise of power within the world. Further - and this might rather offend some Lawrentians - the term delicacy might even be said to refer to a form of touch that is more mental (more abstract) than other heavier, less refined forms of tactile sensation; a form of touch-in-the-head.

Conner notes:

"Delicacy involves work on a scale that makes it a matter of mind, work that approaches the condition of weightlessness [...] work that seems untouched by human hand [...] work that refines the idea of work."

If weightlessness is one of the defining features of delicacy, so too does it involve "the apprehension of altered scale". To touch something delicate in a delicate manner, is ultimately to draw closer to the invisible world of the tiny object which can be viewed only through a microscope. This has become increasingly true in an age of molecular science, quantum mechanics and nanotechnology. For what is more delicate, for example, than a sheet of graphene; a carbon allotrope consisting of but a single layer of atoms prettily arranged in a hexagonal lattice?

The fact is, power is not simply "mitigated in delicacy" and we are obliged - like it or not - to recognise that "our world is one in which delicacy itself has become a modality of power." In a crucial passage, Connor writes:

"Sensitivity used to be at the opposite end of the scale from power, which needed to make itself blunt and insensible to maintain its power. The rise of biopower means that power involves, no longer the brute manipulation of life, but insinuation into it, infiltration and manipulation of the miniscule balances that maintain systems.
      Power used to be applied. That is to say, it needed to be brought up against its object, which would either resist, buckle, or be displaced by the pressure. Such meetings, impressions or collisions take place on the outside of things [...] Now, it is not that there are no comings together, no bearings down, no adversity any more. It is that it is no longer quite clear where the outside of things is to be found. In the age of interface which is now upon us [...] everything is at once inside and outside everything else."      

In other words, there is now a promiscuous and paradoxical intermingling of all bodies, all objects, large and small. And delicacy is just a more subtle form of violation; a method of overcoming the natural reticence and resistance of the Other. For serious readers of Lawrence, this means they must perform a radical reappraisal of the ethics and erotics of (phallic) tenderness. Simply put, the world of Lady Chatterley is long lost and the lightness of her lover's touch can no longer be so clearly distinguished from the hand that wields power.

See: Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, (Cornell University Press, 2004). Lines quoted are on pp. 267, 268, 280 and 281.

Note: those interested in reading the post to which this forms an afterword can click here.

On the Inspiration of Touch

Michelangelo: Detail from Creazione di Adamo (c. 1512) 

What Tommy Dukes refers to as the inspiration of touch is an idea that continues to fascinate and intrigue. For if we must still think of the soul, then let us think of it not as some kind of immortal essence located in a mysterious region of the body, but, rather, as something that exists momentarily in the contacts formed between a body and its external environment.

In other words, the soul is a flash of interchange between objects and not an an intrinsic quality belonging to either. This is illustrated, for example, in Michelangelo's famous fresco, The Creation of Adam (c. 1512) - at least as I interpret it.

For rather than conceive of Adam as a useless lump of clay just waiting to be animated by the all-powerful index finger of God's paternal right hand, I prefer to imagine inspiration is born between the two as entities who unfold into being within a democracy of touch. Unequal as objects perhaps, but equally objects nevertheless upon a flat ontological playing field.

It's often pointed out that, as a matter of fact, the two hands don't actually touch. But that's ok. What counts is the active reaching out of fingertips and that magical space and spark created between them that we might think of as the shimmer of possibility that lies betwixt things and forever beyond the grasp of any single entity.   

And what also counts, as Steven Connor rightly indicates, is the delicacy of the shared touch; it has to have a certain lightness and softeness. People with greedy, heavy hands who believe they must grab life by the throat and tear open the flower bud are essentially soulless. Connor writes:

"Delicate and subtle things have a life of their own, and call, not for grasping or prodding or palpation, but for caress [...] for in the caress, there is an approach or address to another skin capable of sensation, capable of its own experience of the borderline between thought and feeling. To caress an object in the world is to treat it as though it possessed such a sensitive skin."

Arguably, another word for this sensuous, subtle form of touch is tenderness - a term privileged by D. H. Lawrence in his late works and elaborated into a provocative ethic that encapsulates his ideal of blissful bodily interaction that is free from any will to dominance or exploitation. One might hold the other, but, at the same time, one must hold back from holding the other too tightly. 

It is interesting to note how the French philosopher Michel Serres develops this notion of reserve in his work, suggesting that humanity - in the best sense of the word - is defined not by its power to manipulate and destroy, but by its ability to show self-restraint and recognise limits. To exceed limits and to seek to exercise control over others - to refuse either to let them go or let them be - is to fall into a fatal form of ego imperialism (à la Clifford Chatterley).      

See:

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

D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, (Cornell University Press, 2004). Lines quoted are on pp. 262-63. 

 
Michel Serres, The Troubador of Knowledge, trans. Sheila Farier Glaser and William Paulson, (University of Michigan Press, 1997). 

Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley, (Continuum, 2008). 

Note: to read an afterword to this post that develops the idea of delicacy and problematises Lawrence's notions of touch and tenderness, please click here.

On the Myth of Maternal Impression (with Reference to the Case of Joseph Merrick)

Joseph Merrick (aka the Elephant Man) 

Photo from c.1889

I remember being amused by the suggestion made in David Lynch's mawkish and moralizing movie The Elephant Man (1980), that Merrick's unfortunate condition may have been caused by his mother having been frightened by a rampaging elephant during her pregnancy. 

At the time, I thought this was just a cinematic fantasy, or a typical piece of Hollywood hokum. But I eventually discovered that the folklorish idea of maternal impression (or what is sometimes referred to with the German term Versehen) is a genuine - though long-discredited - theory of inheritance from a world before genetic science. It was particularly popular in the 18th century.

Basically, this superstitious concept rests on the belief that a powerful mental stimulus experienced by a woman-with-child could produce an impression on the gestating fetus, thus causing the newborn baby to be marked in some manner. Or as my friend Simon Solomon would say, a psychic disturbance or trauma is realised on the physical plane as some kind of birth defect or congenital disorder (thus demonstrating that mind and imagination shape matter). 

Whilst we now know that this is essentially nonsense - that a woman frightened by a cat is extremely unlikely to give birth to a child with whiskers - there is of course evidence to suggest that physical or psychological illness in the mother can affect the fetus in adverse ways, as can the consumption of alcohol or the smoking of cigarettes, for example.

So, ladies, don't over do it on the vino when pregnant and lay off the fags; but, please, don't worry too much about any perverse longings, being attacked by monsters, or coming into direct contact with animal skins ...   

Golden Girls (with Reference to the Case of Jill Masterson)

Shirley Eaton as Jill Masterson in Goldfinger (1964) 

looking burnished and beautiful 

For many skin fetishists, epidermal eroticisation involves marking the surface of the body; with a tattoo needle, for example. Others look to impose more serious abrasions, lesions, or lacerations and delight in scabs and scar tissue. But there are also those individuals who hate any blemish or disfigurement and dream of a perfectly smooth, gleaming skin designed to produce a reassuring fantasy of impenetrability and becoming-inorganic.

Sometimes the latter achieve this fascinating look with latex or tight leather clothing. But it's perhaps best accomplished with the use of metallic body paint that displays the flesh in the manner of a precious object whilst, at the same time, immaterialising it by reducing the physical body "to the spill and shimmer of light across a surface". 

This is illustrated in the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger (dir. Guy Hamilton), in which the character Jill Masterson, played by Shirley Eaton, is given the kiss of death by Mr Goldfinger, the man with the Midas touch. Seeing her, lying naked on a bed and gilded from head to toe, is one of cinema's most astonishing (and kinkiest) moments.

Amusingly, Bond pseudo-scientifically explains to his superiors that Miss Masterson died of skin suffocation and that this has been known to happen to cabaret dancers with a penchant for performing nude apart from a coat of paint: 'It's alright so long as you leave a small bare patch at the base of the spine to allow the skin to breathe.'

Even more amusing is the fact that the filmmakers seemed to believe their own claptrap and decided to be better safe than sorry by leaving a patch of Miss Eaton's abdomen ungilded. Today, there are still many people who genuinely believe that she risked (or even lost) her life filming this scene. It's an urban legend which, according to Steven Connor, testifies "to a willingness to believe in the skin's capacity to drown or suffocate in its own waste products, to which gold, the radiance of the body, can always revert".

For Connor is convinced that the secret pleasure of fetishistically painting a woman in metallic gold or silver paint is a scatological one rooted in the "extreme ambivalence of images than conjoin the radiance of a skin that is all aura and effulgence with the suggestion of faecal daubing, thus either lifting faeces into the condition of light or lowering light into shit".

Personally, I'm not entirely convinced by this (psychoanalytic) line of argument. I think that the thrill of becoming-mineral and hardening into pure objectivity and brilliant exteriority is far beyond this Freudian game of Gold und Scheiße.


See: Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, (Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 53, 176-77. 

Lily and the Brontës

The Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, West Yorkshire 

with Lily Cole (inset)

As a member of the D. H. Lawrence Society, the recent fuss concerning the appointment of the very lovely model and actress Lily Cole to a prominent role within the forthcoming bicentenary celebrations for Emily Brontë, has, technically, nothing to do with me. What the Brontë Society choose to do (or not to do) is entirely a matter for trustees to decide (although one would like to think they also consider the views of ordinary members, which is not, regrettably, always the case within literary societies).

However, as someone who cares a good deal about Emily - her novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), has been discussed on this blog on several occasions [click here, for example, or here] - and as someone who hates snobbery and bigotry, I feel that I should say something ...      

Miss Cole, who first graced the cover of Vogue aged 16 and who was also named as Model of the Year in 2004 by the British Fashion Awards, is not just a pretty face. She has 'A' levels (at A grade) in English, Politics, and Philosophy. And she graduated from Cambridge in 2011 with a double first in the History of Art. She has since shown herself to be a canny entrepreneur with a strong social conscience; along with (rather predictable) humanitarian and environmental involvements, she's a founder of impossible.com a social network and gift economy website.

So, as I say, not just a pretty face ...

In fact, I would've thought she'd make an ideal creative partner to any literary society and can't see why her appointment has been criticised in some quarters. To describe it as an insult to the memory of Emily Brontë, is, ironically, to bring shame upon the latter's name. This isn't merely a triumph for the modern obsession with celebrity or an attempt to be trendy. For Cole wasn't chosen because she once modelled for many of the top fashion houses, or once acted on-screen alongside Heath Ledger - but because she's clearly a strong, independent, intelligent, and talented young woman, just like one of the Brontë sisters.           

Nick Holland's decision to quit the Brontë Society in staged outrage is up to him. He might be an expert on all things Brontë, but his presumptuous claim to possess superior insight into what Emily might think about Miss Cole's appointment is simply ludicrous and reveals his own resentment towards those whose fame and success is greater than his own rather than any mediumistic abilities.

Miss Cole's considered response to Holland's provocative nastiness and rank stupidity proves that the Brontë Society have made a smart move in enlisting her and allowing him to leave. I'm only sorry the D. H. Lawrence Society didn't first attempt to enlist Lily as a member and representative. 

Readers interested in joining the Brontë Society should visit their website: click here. 

Readers interested in joining the D. H. Lawrence Society should visit their website: click here.

There's an Insulting Stereotype For That

The British Gas campaign that encourages consumers to rely upon local tradesmen - whatever the job - rather than attempt to fix things themselves, is probably the most irritating and offensive ad on TV at the moment. 

It opens in a store with some poor bloke holding a plunger, filthy from head to toe, clearly having tried - and failed - to clear a blockage in his plumbing system. The other people queuing at the till look on disapprovingly as the young woman serving - Sarah - informs him with a suppressed smirk: "There's a local hero for that." He glances at her with impotent rage, knowing full well that, whilst she's obviously a complete cunt, there's nothing he can do or say. 

In the second scene, another unfortunate fellow is in the shower, having trouble with the water control; as he presses a button, the bathroom lights go out. A woman - presumably his wife or girlfriend - carries on brushing her teeth at the sink in the dark with superior indifference, whilst also smugly reminding him: "There's a local hero for that."

In the third scene, an attractive woman sits having dinner in someone's flat. She's dressed as if on a date, wearing her favourite little black dress and there are wine glasses on the table. But her useless boyfriend is struggling to flush the toilet - clearly having broken the handle. Like Sarah, she pulls a knowing face before sliding her smart phone to him under the bathroom door, saying: "There's a local hero for that."

Later, in a scene that returns us to the above apartment, we finally see one of these local heroes. And, surprise, surprise, he's one of those friendly, helpful black characters that advertisers and TV executives love. Not so much a magical negro - for he's not there to impart ancient tribal wisdom - more a house nigger who can be trusted to fix things and provide service with a smile, before letting himself out the door and exiting the white-bread lifestyle into which he's been temporarily inserted. 
        

In brief, we have 30 seconds of insulting bullshit: thank you British Gas.  

To watch the British Gas 'Local Heroes' ad on YouTube, click here.   

Notes on the Case of Peter Hitchens Versus Lady C.

Peter Hitchens (2017) by 65c56 
deviantart.com

I.

Not for the first time when reading an essay, article or - as in this case - a book review by the Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens, one is left feeling exhausted and a bit bewildered; not quite knowing how or where to begin fashioning a response. And not entirely convinced it's even worth the effort. For Hitchens is a man of firm moral conviction and thus extremely confident as well as forthright in his beliefs. He knows what he thinks and he thinks what he knows is true. 

However, as the book subjected to Mr Hitchens's ire happens to be Lady Chatterley's Lover, I feel obliged as a member of the D. H. Lawrence Society to try and say something - even though, in my view, the best and most powerfully argued defence of the novel was supplied by the author himself and I would strongly recommend those interested in the work to also read Lawrence's 1929 essay, A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'.  

Having said that, here are a few thoughts of my own in response to the Hitchens review which appears in the latest edition of the American Christian and conservative journal First Things ...


II.

Hitchens opens with a story of the sixth earl of Craven, appalled by the decision taken in a London criminal court on November 2nd, 1960, to permit the unexpurgated publication of Lawrence's final and most controversial novel. It marked the end of the world as he knew it and his soul howled with pain.

In a sense, it's a faint echo of this angst-ridden, slightly hysterical scream that echoes throughout all of Hitchens's writings, including this latest review. He says the novel is risible, but it doesn't seem to provoke much laughter of any description in Hitchens - even of a nervous kind. Above all, one senses fear. And Hitchens is right to find the book dangerous and threatening at some level. For like Nietzsche, Lawrence is calling for a revaluation of all values and not simply sexual liberation. The democracy of touch that the work invokes - a kind of immanent utopia - is undoubtedly not the future that Hitchens dreams of.   

Indeed, even as a youth, Hitchens wasn't taken with Lawrence: "By the time I was first introduced to Lawrence’s writing in the late 1960s, compelled at school to study Sons and Lovers, his heavy, portentous style was fast slipping out of fashion." 

This is a surprising remark. For one might've imagined that Hitchens - a man once described by James Silver in The Guardian as "the Mail on Sunday's fulminator-in-chief" whose columns contain "molten Old Testament fury" - would rather like elements of portent and prophecy. And it's difficult to imagine Hitchens caring about the dictates of fashion, eagerly pursuing all the latest literary fads and trends as he pulls his frilly nylon panties right up tight, but there you go! His views are reactionary, but never square.


III.

As for the trial of Lady C., Hitchens seems to believe things were rigged from the start. That there was "scarcely a chance" of the jury deciding that the novel should remain banned, "and almost everyone involved knew it". I don't know if that's true. And I don't really care. For ultimately the right decision was reached. Not because the work has redeeming social and literary value, but because ancient obscenity laws drawn up by those grey ones whom Lawrence terms censor-morons brought greater shame upon us as a people than their abolition. 

I suspect that saying this is enough for Hitchens to lump me in with all those liberals, libertines, and libertarians whom he so despises, even though, for the record, I don't think of myself as any of the above. Nor do I live in a square, paint in a circle, or love in a triangle; there's absolutely nothing Bloomsbury about me. Or Fabian socialist. Like Lawrence, I grew up in a working-class community and if I speak up for him and his writing it's for reasons other than those imagined by Hitchens. It's not because I'm a sandal-wearing vegetarian, naturist or health nut; it's because I feel a sense of solidarity with Lawrence and regard his enemies as my enemies.    


IV.

Hitchens describes Lady Chatterley's Lover as a "frankly rather terrible book". And, interestingly, many of Lawrence's own followers seem to agree; often acting as if a little embarrassed by it. But a novel isn't a fixed object. It's a literary machine that invites you to enter the space that it opens up and invest it with external forces; to send it zooming in new and unexpected directions. Indeed, one is tempted to suggest that there are no bad books per se, only poor - by which I mean lazy, reactive and judgemental - readings.

And, despite Hitchens insisting that Katherine Anne Porter's 1960 essay on the novel is a supremely honest and courageous reading, I'd place 'A Wreath for the Gamekeeper' in this poverty-stricken category. For all it boils down to ultimately is a superior woman shaking her head in condescending despair over poor Lawrence and his artistic inferiority in comparison to the real literary greats, like Tolstoy, James, and Joyce. And the novel itself ... well, that is nothing but the fevered day-dream of a dying man, or "the product of a once-fine author's sad decline", as Hitchens puts it with a little more compassion.    

As Nietzsche taught, however, whilst strength preserves, it is only through sickness that cultures develop and that we as a species advance. Thus, even if true - even if Lady C. is the product of a diseased imagination and a body corrupt with tuberculosis - we need these works for what they paradoxically teach us of the greater health.  


V.

Eventually, even Hitchens has to admit that the book does, in fact, contain "some moving and thoughtful passages [...] though they are mostly about the industrial ravaging and gouging of the English countryside and the wretched consumer society coming into being after World War I." However, as he then notes: "The idea that these miseries might be redeemed by adulterous sex in an old hut on an army blanket, by twining wildflowers in one’s pubic hair, or by capering naked in the rain is far-fetched."

This, I think, living as we do after the orgy, is hard to deny. Also difficult to deny is that Lady Chatterley's Lover contains "blots and scabs of anti-Semitism", as well as troubling elements of racial bigotry, sexism, misogyny and lesbophobia. But, again, it's Lawrence himself who teaches that the proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it and not merely use these things in order to judge a work and condemn an author. And, to be fair to Hitchens - although he clearly has no interest in saving this particular tale - by offering us a far more sympathetic reading of Sir Clifford than Lawrence encouraged, he invites an interesting reappraisal of the work (one that I have myself also considered: click here).       


VI

Finally, we come to the 'night of sensual passion'. Hitchens seems as baffled by the redemptive possibilities assigned to anal sex within Lady C. as he is perplexed by the importance given to red trousers. But that's because he's ignorant of the wider body of Lawrence's work and fundamentally hostile to the philosophical project of which it's part. Which is fair enough; he isn't and doesn't pretend to be a Lawrence scholar. But it does rather lessen the force and validity of his criticism.

For Hitchens, like Freud, "shame and hypocrisy" are crucial social components; they protect, he says, the boundary "between normal, respectable life and the sordid and dirty". Lawrence disagrees. Not because he desires the latter or despises the former, but because he sees the possibility of a new innocence that lies beyond such a false dichotomy, or what Marcuse terms the fatal dialectic of civilization. 

I'm sorry that Mr Hitchens didn't find a way to enjoy this novel; find a way, that is, to impose his own abrasions upon its surface. And I'm sorry that, unable to ban it or to burn it, he seems determined to foreclose the text and its pleasure with his intransigent moral conformism, his political and social conservatism, and his refusal to allow his body to pursue its own happiness just for once. Despite this, rather perversely perhaps, I retain a fair deal of respect and admiration for Peter (as I do for his much-missed brother, Christopher): May the peace that comes of fucking be upon him.       

See: 

Peter Hitchens, 'Chatterley on Trial', First Things (Feb 2018): click here to read online. 

Katherine Anne Porter, 'A Wreath for the Gamekeeper', Encounter (Feb 1960): click here to read online.

Note that whilst Hitchens was reviewing the 2017 Macmillan edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, the standard text is the Cambridge University Press edition, 1983, ed. Michael Squires, which also includes Lawrence's 1929 essay A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' that I mention above. 

Schlegel's Hedgehog

German poet, literary critic and philosopher, Friedrich Schlegel, was, like other romantics, a big fan of the fragment.

In an oft-cited section of his Athenäums-fragmente (1798), he asserts that, if it is to be distinctive in form and purpose like a tiny work of art, then the fragment "has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog" [206].

Further, it must maintain itself in prickly opposition even to those fragments in close vicinity to which it might otherwise seem in some kind of relation, thereby reflecting Schlegel's view that the world is made up of isolated objects within a chaotic universality of infinite possibilities and perspectives.  

As someone who is also passionate about fragmentary writing - more due to my background in modernism and postmodernism, rather than romanticism - I feel obliged to say something about this; particularly as I feel there's something fundamentally false about Schlegel's view.

Firstly, whilst hedgehogs might lead relatively solitary lives and can, of course, roll into a tight spiky ball for defensive purposes, they are no more isolated from the surrounding world than any other creature; if they were, they'd die. So, if nothing else, the above Igel analogy doesn't hold water as far as any self-respecting naturalist would be concerned.

Secondly, whilst I concede that objects are always at some level withdrawn and don't exist purely in terms of their external relations, for me the beauty of the fragment is that it (potentially) contains all things within it on the one hand, whilst being forever open ended on the other. Indeed, I would say the perfect fragment always inconclusively concludes in an elliptic manner with a set of three dots and that they only really sparkle, like stars in a constellation, by becoming part of a new (intertextual) practice of some kind. 

Ultimately, the fragment is that which allows language to discover its own ephemeral destiny. They appear, but before we can hardly even begin to make sense of them they shoot lines of flight towards the horizon of their own disappearance, showing a beautiful indifference towards their own origin, their own end, or their own Schlegelian self-perfection as an enclosed work of art.

Each thing - be it fragment or hedgehog - streams in what D. H. Lawrence terms an intertwining flux of relations and the business of art is reveal and expand these relations, not isolate itself from the circumambient universe. The only way we might discover some kind of salvation (or belonging) is to accomplish a pure (or quick) relationship between ourselves and other objects of all description and for me it's fragmented or aphoristic writing which, as a literary genre, best facilitates this. 

Note: I am grateful to Thomas Bonneville for encouraging me to read Schlegel and write this post.

Further Reflections on the Porcupine Dilemma - A Guest Post by Simon Solomon

The metal porcupine on Freud’s desk in the study 

of his Hampstead home, now the Freud Museum. 

Photo: Nick Cunard.

In his sublime essay 'The Porcupine's Illusion', the prickly-named George Prochnik (great-grandson of James Jackson Putnam) claims that, 'when it came to his own liaison with America, Freud yearned for the warmth and communal support America promised, but then felt needled and otherwise violated in consequence of whatever proximity he did attain'.

On Prochnik's reading, Freud's apparent repression of his debt to Schopenhauer - only admitting in 1925 to having come to the philosopher 'very late in life', despite thrice name-checking him in 'Interpretation of Dreams' (1900) and Schopenhauer's theory of the will being widely regarded as prefiguring the psychoanalytic concepts of repression itself, the death-drive and the centrality of sexuality to psychic life - was motivated by Freud's scientific ambition to purge psychoanalysis of its merely philosophical contours.

An undertaking which, if true, backfired with spectacular irony, since Freud's sole public recognition in his lifetime came from the award of the Goethe Prize for services to literature. In this context, Freud's Schopenhauer complex 'became one of distance and propinquity. How much influence was required to prevent one's pen from freezing, and how much would result in one being stabbed full of holes by the writerly quills of intellectual predecessors?' Here, the porcupine problem takes on the lustre of an inter-generational Bloomian anxiety concerning how well one can bear the stab to one's pretensions of originality.

Noting that, as a rule, 'it may be said that a man's sociability stands very nearly in inverse ratio to his intellectual value: to say that "so and so" is very unsociable, is almost tantamount to saying he is a man of great capacity', Schopenhauer strikingly posited a negative correlation between the hunger for closeness and human intelligence. One endowed with sufficient intellectual warmth in himself - an interesting concept in itself when thinking types in Western culture tend to be seen as cool and remote, while emotional people are viewed as warm - would have sharply curtailed inter-animate needs, so that the heat of thought might be conceived of as a kind of libidino-cerebral surplus, a vector to the inhuman. Or, those who seem like cold fish may be always already the hottest properties ...

On his reportedly arduous hike from Putnam's mountain cabin that he was sharing with Ferenczi and Jung, the porcupine to which Freud was led by two sailor-suited young women turned out to be a fly-blown, reeking corpse. His spiny mythos would be incarnated in an over-determined rodent, death irrupting into life, as though the ambivalent truth of humanity's barbed love arises where Eros and Thanatos collide.

This would surely be enough of a psychologically sobering denouement all by itself. But the still more resonant afterword, as Prochnik vividly recollects, relates to the bronze porcupine gifted to Freud by Putnam, which can now be found on permanent display at the Freud Museum in London, where Freud died in 1939. As he attests - and in some weird and wonderful metamorphosis that pierces the skin and makes the soul sing - its quills, when rippled by the fingers, emit a 'melodic, harp-like sound'.

Our painful proximity, which implies the interpenetration of vitality and oblivion, yields to poetic music.

Notes

George Prochnik, 'The Porcupine Illusion', Cabinet, Issue 26 (Summer 2007): click here.

Simon Solomon (aka Dr Simon Thomas) is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and currently serves as managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He can be contacted via simonsolomon.ink

Simon appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm. 

To read my own take on Schopenhauer, Freud and the porcupine dilemma, click here. 

Reflections on the Porcupine Dilemma

Freud's metal porcupine (12 x 16 x 8 cm) 
Image Credit: Freud Museum (London)

In a series of reflections published in 1851, the German philosopher Schopenhauer discussed (amongst numerous other topics) the prickly question of human intimacy by making reference to the predicament faced by the Stachelschwein.

In brief, the so-called porcupine dilemma is this: it might be preferable to move closer to others of your own kind and advantageous to share body heat when the weather outside is frightful, but, if you're covered in sharp spines, then it's not so easy to do so without (unintentionally) causing or receiving serious injury.

And whilst people are not porcupines and lack quills, we nevertheless find it just as problematic getting up close and personal with others - no matter how desperate we may be to do so. In the end, the best individuals can hope for is a compromised form of relationship that calls for caution on both sides if they are to avoid mutual harm. We can smile at one another but never really touch, obliged as we are to always keep a safe distance.

This - as Freud later realised - helps to explain our frustrated sense of social isolation and why sexual relations so often end in tears. We are driven by inner needs and external conditions to seek out others, but quickly discover just how intolerable these others are thanks to the many disagreeable qualities and natural defence mechanisms they possess. The best that anyone might hope for, concludes Schopenhauer (pessimistically), is that they can generate their own heat and thus remain entirely self-sufficient; thereby avoiding the risk of either pricking or being pricked by other people.

Freud - as indicated above and who has as interesting and as close a relationship to Schopenhauer as he does to Nietzsche - exploited this tale of the porcupine in his own psychoanalytic work, directly referencing it in a key section of his 1921 text Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. 

In fact, if the story has become widely known in the English-speaking world - where it is commonly termed the hedgehog's dilemma - it is largely because of Freud's reading, rather than familiarity with the original text by Schopenhauer, who is today a shamefully neglected thinker, but to whom we owe a great deal.      

Notes

The metal porcupine pictured above was a memento of Freud's trip to the USA in 1909. Thought to have been given to him by the American neurologist James Jackson Putnam, Freud kept the handsome beast with its razor sharp quills on his desk for the rest of his life. 

See: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. II, translated and edited by Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway, (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ch. 31, Section 396. 

For further reflections on this question, by Simon Solomon, click here. 

Hedgehogs Versus HS2

Hedgehog: Photo by Gillian Day 

According to the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, the hedgehog - a once familiar creature found in parks and gardens all over the UK, but now in serious decline due to destruction of habitat - is a secretive animal that gives nothing away and likes to keep itself to itself.

We wonder, he says, what a hedgehog has to hide; why it refuses to share its knowledge of the undergrowth; why it so distrusts mankind:   

We forget the god
Under this crown of thorns.
We forget that never again
Will a god trust in the world.

And whether we choose to think of the prickly otherness of the hedgehog in terms of divinity or in the natural language of species difference, the fact is this shy little nocturnal slug-eater is right to distrust (and despise) humanity.

For despite our pretended love for all things bright and beautiful / all creatures great and small, we laugh as they are killed beneath the wheels of our vehicles, happily concrete over the spaces in which they used to find food and shelter, and watch with savage indifference as they are pushed into extinction.   

Thus it is that a House of Lords Select Committee recently ruled in favour of HS2's proposal to build a lorry park in an area that is home to the last remaining hedgehog stronghold in London. There are thought to be between 20 and 25 adults living in the Regent's Park site (right next to the Zoo) and they produced a litter of 17 young in the autumn of 2017.

But the HS2 bosses don't care. And neither do the politicians who don't want any disruption to their £57 billion rail network. Alternative options were given very little serious consideration and so the future of this long established population has been unnecessarily compromised in the name of progress, profit, and improved transport links.       

Shame on all those involved in this decision ...

Notes

Paul Muldoon, 'Hedgehog', Poems 1968-1998, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). Click here to read on the Poetry Foundation website.

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

On the Scintillation of Being

Sagus93: Every man and every woman is a star (2014)

(Acrylic on canvas 140 x 70 cm)

sagus93.com 

Every man and every woman is a star, says Crowley in The Book of the Law (1:3) and I suppose by this he references the singular nature of human being; the fact that, at the very last, one is not only unique, but also isolate and alone, beyond love or any personal relationship.

That's certainly how I've always understood the remark, in a very Birkinesque manner. But perhaps we might consider the idea of astro-ontology - or what Baudrillard refers to as the scintillation of being - in a bit more detail ...   

People like to think of stars as luminous objects reliably twinkling in the night sky. Look up, and there they are! But it's worth remembering that most of the individual stars in the universe - including all of the stars outside our own galaxy - are invisible to the eye, even when we gaze into space through powerful telescopes.

And, strange as it may seem, our own sun also retains something of its invisibility or, if you like, essential darkness ...

Count Dionys, the initiated occultist of D. H. Lawrence's novella The Ladybird (1923), teaches that true fire is invisible; that it burns with its back to us and is therefore always hidden from view. The golden light of the sun is, he says, only epiphenomenal; "the glancing aside of the real original fire".

This being so, continues the Count, even the sun is black: "It is only his jacket of dust that makes him visible. [...] And the true sunbeams coming towards us flow darkly, a moving darkness of the genuine fire. The sun is dark, the sunshine flowing to us is dark. And light is only the inside-turning away of the sun's directness that was coming to us."

He concludes that we have, therefore, a mistaken understanding of the world - and of love. That just as the "true living world of fire is dark", so too true love is "a throbbing together in darkness" and not something luminous or fully visible. What he terms white love is only an ideal surface effect. 

I don't know if this constitutes good science (I suspect not). But it nicely anticipates those object-oriented forms of philosophy which are full of strange speculations of this nature and concerned with the play of reality and the essential illusion of the world.

If nothing else, it's always amusing to think what follows from the fact that light from the stars can continue to shine for billions of years after they have disappeared from the heavens (that things - including people - are never quite what they seem).


See:

Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law, (Red Wheel/Weiser, 1976). Or click here to read online.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Ladybird', in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 1992). 

The above work by Lawrence can also be read online thanks to Project Gutenberg Australia: click here.

When I Play With My Cat ... (Notes Towards a Feline Philosophy)

Come, beautiful puss, press close to my loving heart;

Retract your claws,  

Let me gaze into your crystal-metallic eyes.

Philosophers - particularly French philosophers - have always loved cats. And so it's not surprising to discover that Derrida had a feline companion named Logos; or that the only pussy Foucault enjoyed petting was an all black cat called Insanity.

Rather more surprising is that Deleuze has also been pictured with a moggie on his lap (name unknown). Because although Deleuze wrote extensively about becoming-animal he was not a big pet lover. Indeed, he once said that anyone displaying affection towards a four-legged friend is a fool.

Perhaps it was his daughter, Émilie, who persuaded him to get  a cat, thus enabling her father to discover that, despite having been domesticated for thousands of years, cats are not as oedipalised as he feared; that, unlike dogs, they fully retain their sovereignty and otherness (you can never really know a cat - the idea of familiarity is a piece of human conceit). 

David Wood writes: "Each cat is a singular being - a pulsing centre of the universe - with this colour eyes, this length and density of fur, this palate of preferences, habits and dispositions." They might let you stroke them, but you can never really touch them; they might let you look into their eyes, but they remain creatures who escape our gaze.

As Montaigne famously mused, when it comes to the question of people and cats, who is ultimately playing with whom?

In other words, cats have the ability to make us doubt our own superiority and to question the privileged position in the world we have accorded ourselves as a species. Dogs make men feel like kings, but cats expose our nakedness and vulnerability - as Derrida discovered when his cat wandered into the bathroom one morning.      

Perhaps this is why so many people fear and hate cats, believing like the famous 18th-century French naturalist and ailurophobe Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon that they possess an innate malice and a perverse disposition. I'm not saying this is mistaken; rather, I'm saying this - in addition to their uncanniness and supple beauty - is precisely what makes cats so fascinating and admirable.     

See: David Wood, 'If a cat could talk', essay in the digital magazine Aeon (24 July 2013): click here. 

Readers interested in Derrida's naked encounter with his cat should see: The Animal That Therefore I Am, (Fordham University Press, 2008).  

Note: the lines beneath the photos of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault with their cats are translated from Baudelaire's poem Le chat. Click here to read the original verse in full online.