An Interview with Malcolm McLaren (August 1984)

After recently going through a box of treasures from the past, I came across the above photo of myself with Malcolm McLaren and a copy of a taped interview recorded in the offices of Charisma Records, above the Marquee Club at 90 Wardour Street, back in the summer of '84. 

Malcolm was signed to Charisma at this time and I acting as an assistant to his very lovely Press Officer, Lee Ellen Newman, whilst (unsuccessfully) chasing a job as a presenter on a new cable and satellite TV channel. McLaren's new album, Fans, which fused opera with contemporary urban sounds was due for release in the autumn. 

As a means of marking the fifth anniversary of his death which passed earlier this month (April 8), I thought it might be nice to post an edited transcript of this short conversation with my mentor from over thirty years ago:

J: It's been a while since we've heard from you on record, but I'm pleased to know you have a new single out at the end of the month called Madame Butterfly. Would you like to say something about this song and the ideas behind it?

M: [Laughs] Oh dear! So what d'you wanna know then?

J: Just tell me anything about the single; or tell me a bit about opera ...

M: It's marvellous, opera. Because opera is about the most irrational art form ever in the sense that it gets to your emotions better than anything else. It combines drama with music - and it's live. It's one of the most difficult things to actually record. But it wasn't that which intrigued me, so much as the actual drama created with the music in someone's voice and I chose certain stories that were obvious classics, like Madame Butterfly, because they seemed to lend a certain emotion to people now that you could construct as something very sincere and without any cynicism.

J: I'm sure Madame Butterfly is a moving story, but it all sounds a long way away from the Sex Pistols. Do you think that you've changed personally over the years - mellowed ...?

M: I don't think it's mellow. I think that what is great about opera and the story of Butterfly in particular is that it's so poignant; it's the absolute opposite to anything that's bland. Most emotions are packaged today in pop music and they don't have that kind of irrational element. That's what's so great about opera; you don't know why you're feeling what you're feeling, but it makes you cry and it makes your heart thump!
      That, combined with something black and tough and real rootsy - something I suppose that you could say is still happening in New York - is why the record is so great. It's the combination of those two forces; something tough and rootsy with something that's melodic and very majestic and full of emotion.
      When you listen in the discotheques today all you hear are lyrics that have very little meaning other than to get up and dance, or make love and have sex without any particular slant, or any real purpose. This record demonstrates that all that is, I suppose, very happy and schlocky. What's good about this record is that it doesn't have anything that schlocky in it.

J: In the past you've made some memorable videos, such as the ones for Buffalo Gals and Soweto, which are very fast and breathless. Is that how you think a good pop video should be and is that how the video for Madame Butterfly is going to be?

M: No, the video for Madame Butterfly is actually gonna be very cinematic and has no mimed playback whatsoever. I wanted to create a moment and an expression that would enhance the record and allow you to listen, rather than be bamboozled by a variety of images. I think the content is in the record and the content's in the vocals mainly. The vocals are what you want to listen to and you don't want to be completely disillusioned by seeing my face on screen and burst out laughing, so I've just opened it up to a lot of girls sitting about in a Turkish bath, waiting, and crying their eyes out.

J: Do you welcome the emergence of music TV which obviously relies on videos as much as records?

M: I don't know, I suppose it's a good thing in a way - but only if it actually has a different policy from Top of the Pops and some of the other more format programmes that exist on ordinary television. Cable is great only because perhaps it can be less censorial and allow a bit more experimentation. Also, it provides an opportunity to people who don't necessarily warrant being categorised as musicians or filmmakers. The great thing about video is that it's a technology that most people - who may be brilliant sellers of raspberries or great horse riders - can go off and use and I think cable TV may accept that more readily than the record industry or the national TV stations.
      I think what's happening today is that we're creating a very new way that people receive music and culture generally. The future really lies in technology being given to people that normally would not be able to make a record, play an instrument, or shoot a movie and that's the most exciting thing.

J: You mention the future: what else have you got lined up?

M: I'm just finishing off my commitments [laughs]. I made this record only because I was tired of making another straight ahead rock 'n' roll record. I don't think I've done too much of that, but I decided to venture into something that was, for me, badly needed; something more dramatic and emotional, more personal. The sort of record I've never made. I've either made very politically-orientated, sloganistic records - such as when I managed the Sex Pistols - or, thereafter, I started to get involved as a mercenary manager managing various pop groups and creating good antics and good visual ideas, but, at the end of the day, the delivery wasn't as profound as it should have been.
      When I finally made a record on my own, Duck Rock, that was really very much to do with ethnic music and the discovery of dance and looking at the world with the eye of rhythm. This time, I haven't thought about rhythm at all and have gone for what I would just declare emotion - it's purely emotional music.    

J: Finally Malcolm, why do you think I would make a perfect presenter on the Music Box?

M: [Laughs] Maybe because you're more daft than I think you are [laughs].
    

In Memory of Lorrie Millington (Artist, Model, Dancer, Writer)

Lorrie Millington: Artist-Model-Dancer-Writer

I first met Lorrie Millington in a tiny nightclub in the centre of Leeds city centre called Le Phonographique, famous for playing a fantastic mix of post-punk tunes by the likes of Bauhaus, The Psychedelic Furs, The Cramps, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Killing Joke, The Cure, Soft Cell, Theatre of Hate, and The Sex Gang Children. 

It was 1982 and everyone wore black clothes and eyeliner and had a penchant for the Gothic. That said, I was more often than not still dressed in tartan bondage trousers and Lorrie had her own unique look; one that made her well-known but unpopular with regulars at Le Phonographique some of whom called her 'Duck' because of her unusual dancing style. Others suspected her of being a transsexual.  

I didn't care; I thought she was beautiful and we were immediately attracted to one another. Unfortunately, we were also both very shy (she even had a slight stutter). And so it took a considerable amount of time before we plucked up the courage to speak. After our first brief conversation, she slipped me her card on which was written: 

Lorrie Millington 

Artist-Model-Dancer-Writer

I later found out her real name was Lorraine Gatford and that she was from York. She borrowed the name Millington from seventies porn star Mary Millington and had moved to Leeds to escape her mother and a boring job as a printer of some kind. As a child she had been run over and this left her with both physical and mental scars. She lived alone with just a mannequin for company called Lady Christabel and often signed the many letters and poems she sent me as the Girl in the Mystery Castle.

The first time she came to visit me at the house near Kirkstall Abbey that I shared with three friends and fellow students, she galloped around the kitchen on all fours mid-dinner pretending to be a horse. Although never officially dating, we became something of an odd couple. We would spend nights listening to an Ennio Morricone soundtrack and Adam and the Ants. I found no evidence to support the rumour that she was secretly a boy.

In 1984 she suffered a severe breakdown and was committed for several weeks to High Royds psychiatric hospital. I left Leeds for London in July of this year, but we kept in touch by mail for many years after this. The last time we met was, I think, in 1988 when she was pregnant and living with a bass guitarist called Keith. 

Sadly, most of the poems and letters and pictures she sent me over the years have been destroyed. And, tragically, her health continued to deteriorate as she grew older and, about ten years ago, our correspondence terminated. 

I don't suppose her daughter, Faye, who was given up for adoption, will ever read this post, but, if so, I'd like her to know that her mother was a funny, intelligent, talented young woman who I still think of often and very fondly.  

Mario Perniola: Il sex appeal dell'inorganico

 Mario Perniola: Professor of Aesthetics,

University of Rome

It soon becomes obvious when reading Mario Perniola's Sex Appeal of the Inorganic that what he most wants is to have his cock sucked for all eternity; that is to say, in a perpetual manner in which all feeling is suspended and orgasm forever deferred. 

For where other men would simply find frustration, Perniola hopes to locate the beginning of a new and neutered sexuality that is entirely divorced from nature and freed from all metaphysical notions of telos, or vital fantasies of carnal fulfilment. He neither wants to love like an angel, nor fuck like a beast. But most of all he doesn't want to come: "To free oneself of orgasmomania," he writes, "is the first step towards the neuter, suspended and artificial sexuality of the thing" which promises to open up a world "where the difference between the sexes, form, appearance, beauty, age and race no longer matter" [3].  

Other steps towards this pornotopia without a happy-ending include: 

(1) Reading philosophy, which Perniola interestingly characterizes as a form of speculative extremism (even if it still tediously refers back to Kant and Hegel). Above all, read Heidegger; Heidegger looks for Being not in Geist (like Hegel) or in Life (like Nietzsche), but in the thing (and the thingliness of the thing) and although he never directly speaks of sexuality in his work, it is only with Heidegger "that the path of thinking and the sex appeal of the inorganic ... reveal their essential belonging together" [108].    

(2) Understanding the body in terms not of flesh, but of clothing, furniture and upholstery; "the folds of the female sex are no different from the depressions of a seat cover, the skin that runs along the rod of the male sex is similar to the covering of an arm rest" [11]. I'm not sure that's the case, but Perniola insists: "As long as we remain prisoners of the idea that living bodies excite us more than clothes, we will never escape the organicistic aestheticism that considers sexuality in terms of life" [45].
      This sounds like fetishism, but Perniola is ambiguous on the subject of fetishism; if, on the one hand, it is the category via which modernity has traditionally thought the erotics of the object, on the other hand it constitutes a grotesque and extravagant "caricature of the sex appeal of the inorganic" [53].           

(3) Recognizing that addiction to opium-based drugs, such as heroin, provides an exemplary experience in dependency "analogous to the neutral feeling of becoming thing" crucial to the development of an inorganic sexuality [14].

(4) Moving beyond the BDSM crowd; it would be very much mistaken to consider Perniola's model of impersonal sexuality in terms of a master and slave relationship and even the apathy of the Sadean libertine or the peculiar mixture of coldness and cruelty so loved by the masochist, belong to an entirely different universe.

(5) Developing a taste for cybersex and science fiction, a genre that understands more than most "how the organic and inorganic, the anthropological and technological, the natural and the artificial overlap and blend in one another" [28]. Neutral sexuality can be considered both posthuman and virtual - not in the sense of simulated reality, but, more radically, a real simulation that offers access to an ontologically different order. Perniola further advises we study vampires as well as philosophical-cyborgs; for the undead also embody the sex appeal of the inorganic and provide access to another world which is "radically different from everyday life" [77].   

(6) Listening to rock music; a sexually inorganic form of sound that has nothing to do with "the sentimental conception of music, which considers it as the expression of an emotional interiority, and from the vitalistic one which sees in it the animal cry" [65]. Schelling would understand perfectly why it is that prog rock in particular "constitutes a paradigm for the cultural operations to come" [66]. He means it man! Frank Zappa rules!

(7) Exploring plastic landscapes and appreciating architecture as an inorganic art divorced from construction that brings into question all attempts to harmonize "form and function, nature and culture, country and city" [83]. Not only can architecture be compared to tailoring, but it can be understood as an erotics; as if drifting in and out of buildings or through the city streets was a sexual act not dissimilar to strapping a tiny camera to your penis and penetrating the interior landscape of the vagina, generating "a quite different excitement to the natural one" [90].
      As well as the internal spaces of the body, Perniola also gets excited by the possibility of entering cyberspace; a new dimension opened up by computer technology that "radicalizes contemporary architectural experience". But cyberspace, albeit a "spatialized visualization of information", must not be understood as "a dematerialization or, worse, a spiritualization of reality". Rather, it's the creation of a liquid environment that allows the cybernaut who navigates it to "perceive his own real body as a sentient thing not essentially different from the sentient landscapes of electronic architectures" [91]. 

(8) Rejecting all notions of desire. But - and this is important to note - neutral sexuality is not simply a form of erotic mysticism or a tantric practice to delay orgasm in order to thereby intensify the moment of climax. And unlike Zen Buddhism which aims at a state of spiritual elevation and detachment from the world, the sex appeal of the inorganic wants to abolish the distance between man and world; to absorb the human into the realm of things. Perniola writes:

"Neutral sexuality is not a state of inertia, of reducing excitement to zero, eliminating all tensions, is not Nirvana, or Freud's death drive, and not even lethargy ... Quietism, fatalistic and defeatist renunciation, paralysis, are more indirect affirmations of desire than actual suspensions of it. The sex appeal of the inorganic is more an after-desire than a without-desire." [98-9]        

(9) Privileging hermaphroditism over androgyny; the latter, says Perniola, is "as remote as one can imagine it to be from the sex appeal of the inorganic"; a victory for the metaphysical dream of organic unity. But hermaphroditism, on the other hand, "implies the best possible way in which the characteristic of both sexes are contained in a figure, namely a man with breasts or a woman with a penis" [115]. Rather than place emphasis on unification and the harmonious co-presence of masculine and feminine elements, hermaphroditism promotes indetermination and neutralization.
      However, even hermaphroditism fails to reach the sex appeal of the inorganic. For that you need to push on far beyond the sexual dichotomy of male and female - to sexual infinity in which there are an innumerable number of sexes. The inorganic lover loves the thought of endless division and of tearing into ever smaller pieces the dress worn by his bride on their wedding night and then carefully putting together one by one the tiny shreds on her naked body:

"In the transit that goes from the cloth to the skin, and from the skin to the cloth, one can re-establish the experience of a neutral and inorganic sexuality. It is sympathetic ... with an abstract excitement that never tires of operating infinite divisions on one's own body and that of one's partner." [120]       

(10) Learning to hear the expression inclusive metawriting as "more loaded with sexual intensity than most obscene words" [126]. Because - wouldn't you know it - it's philosophically-informed literature that is the crucial "accomplice of neutral and impersonal experience" [121]. Perniola is then, like Barthes, a homotextual. But whereas the latter affirms and delights in the pleasure of the text, Perniola hates pleasure and wants to free sexuality from such vulgarity. There is nothing in pleasure, he insists, that inevitably binds it to sexuality - and particularly not to a model of sexuality that is "not content with staying natural and organic" [132].

Follow these ten steps and you too can enter the inorganic realm. But don't think that this makes you in anyway superhuman; on the contrary, it might just betray the fact you are spiritually sick or physically disabled in some manner - perhaps thanks to the fact that you've read too much philosophy or written too much poetry!

It certainly signifies you're abnormal and perverse; someone who "derives excitement from inadequate stimulation ... such as concepts, numbers, sounds, spaces, objects, writings, all things that normal people keep immersed in a functional-utilitarian boredom, or in an aesthetic-formal tedium" [144].  


Mario Perniola; The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, trans. Massimo Verdicchio, (Continuum, 2004). All page numbers supplied refer to this edition.

How Winston Wolf Lost His Bite

Harvey Keitel as Winston Wolf, courtesy of Miramax,

in a Saatchi and Saatchi ad for First Direct (2014)

There are many great performances and many unforgettable characters in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction: John Travolta as Vincent Vegas, Samuel L. Jackson as Jules, Uma Thurman as Mia ... Even Bruce Willis as Butch manages to stop smirking long enough to concentrate on his acting.

But for many fans of the film, it's Harvey Keitel as tuxedo-clad problem solver Winston Wolf who manages to steal the show. The Wolf is one of those rare characters who actually has character and is a man to whom self-respect and the respect of others clearly matters.

Unfortunately, twenty years on from the making of the movie, the same cannot be said of the now elderly actor happy to trade off past glory by prostituting Tarantino's Wolf character as part of a £40 million advertising campaign by Direct Line, one of the UK's  leading insurance companies, thereby causing no little distress amongst those of us who held him in high regard as an artist and loved his performance in the film.
        
I don't know why he did it. Presumably, not because he needed the money. Perhaps he simply thought it was a fun idea. But it's a shame. And whenever the ad comes on TV I find myself having to look away. I want to remember Winston Wolf in his prime - barking orders to gangsters and speeding off for breakfast in his silver Porsche accompanied by Monster Joe's daughter; I don't want to think of him as a silly old fool selling insurance to middle-class homeowners and guaranteeing them an instant replacement for their stolen goods.

Of course, Harvey Keitel is not the first Hollywood star to sell out and violate the memory of a beloved on-screen character and he won't be the last. But this doesn't make it any easier to accept.

One wonders what Quentin Tarantino thinks of it all ... Or am I simply being naive to ask this?

Is Strong the New Pretty ... or the Old Ugly?

 

Photo by Kate T. Parker of her daughter, Ella, aged 9, 

on the night before competing in her first triathlon.

From Strong is the New Pretty series of images.

Promoting an all-American model of athletic motherhood in a manner reminiscent of Walt Whitman, photographer Kate T. Parker is extraordinarily proud of her muscles, her fertility, and the products of her womb. 

Although not a fan of her work, a recent series of images featuring her young daughters and their friends entitled Strong is the New Pretty, did catch my attention. Parker wishes to encourage every girl to be a leader and able to run a marathon; to discover their strengths and own their power. 

But whilst I can see the aesthetic appeal of fierce-looking girls with toothless smiles, scraped knees, and messy hair - i.e. girls who don't care too much about their appearance, their personal safety, or being well-behaved - there's no need to implicitly denigrate those more delicate children who prefer to be gentle, kind, and polite. Nor is there any reason to sneer at girls who like to giggle and wear colourful dresses or choose to spend their time quietly reading in their bedrooms, avoiding sports of all kinds.        

   

Being loud, competitive, and good at ball games is fine and might indeed teach you how to rule the field. But rather than make pretty in a new less feminine fashion, being empowered as Parker imagines it might just make ugly in the old macho-fascist manner.   

Seeing with the Eyes of Angels (In Praise of Cubism)

Pablo Picasso: Girl with a Mandolin (1910)

Museum of Modern Art, New York

For Lawrence, one of the most admirable things about Cézanne was that he insisted upon the appleyness not only of the fruit itself, but of the bodies of men and women and, indeed, of all objects including inanimate ones, such as jugs or bottles of wine. That is to say, he acknowledged the thingliness of the thing and attempted to paint this (as far as possible), thereby introducing into our field of vision an ontological reality which exists independently of mind.   

This, says Lawrence, was a revolutionary move; an attempt to tear painting from its own history of idealised representation and radically differentiate it from photography which sees the world mechanically with Kodak accuracy. 

Deleuze goes further and argues that what truly great painters like Cézanne do is not simply liberate lines and colours on the canvas, but free the eye from its adherence to the organism. The eye, says Deleuze, becomes a polyvalent indeterminate organ that is capable of seeing the object-as-figure in terms of pure presence.

Having become intuitively aware of an object, an artist is able to see it all around at one and the same time and not just from a single perspective fixated on fronts and faces. Further, they allow us to effectively have eyes all over too - just like the cherubim of whom Ezekiel speaks.  

And this can't be a bad thing, surely. For as Nietzsche says, the more eyes and more various organs we have for seeing the same thing the better; for a multiple perspective enables us to form a more complete (and more objective) concept of the thing.

Clearly, Picasso and Georges Braque (inspired by Cézanne's late work) understood this and Cubism is without doubt the most significant and influential art movement of the 20th century. As John Berger says, it is almost impossible to exaggerate its importance.    

Surprisingly, Lawrence of all people failed to appreciate what was unfolding in the art world of his day and he dismissed Cubism along with other forms of avant-garde art that were moving towards abstraction as puerile and overly-intellectual. He simply couldn't grasp why it was that Cézanne would come to insist on the need to interpret the world geometrically, placing everything into perspective.

And for me, this is not only surprising, it's disappointing too ...

Never Mind the Bildungstreib Here's the Science

Blackmetal Kant (2007) by King of Porn 

deviantart.com

Kant famously insisted that base matter lacks spontaneity; that inorganic substance cannot spontaneously generate organic life. To think otherwise would be a logical paradox, since the essential character of non-living things is their complete inertia or lack of vital purpose. What makes living things so rare and unusual is precisely the fact that they can spontaneously self-organize thanks to the presence of a formative drive which mysteriously enlivens the material of which they are composed. Kant calls this vital force (after Blumenbach) Bildungstreib. Jane Bennett conveniently glosses the term for us:

"Bildungstreib ... names a non-material, teleological drive that imparts to matter its functional coherence, it's 'organic' quality ... Bildungstreib is what impels an undifferentiated, crude mass of matter to become an organized articulation of cooperating parts, the highest version of which is 'Man'".

To be clear, Kant does not mean by Bildungstreib something that common folk and theologians might mistakenly term a soul. For whereas a soul is a metaphysical principle that can exist even in a disembodied state, Kant's concept is always embodied and only exists in conjunction with the mechanical activities of matter and subject to the Newtonian laws of physics.

Having said that, Kant does insist that the workings of Bildungstreib can never become fully known to us; such a drive remains fundamentally inscrutable. At best, we can learn about it indirectly by studying its effects. And what these effects teach us is that this formative drive operates under an internal constraint or purposive predisposition which directs the organism towards some end goal, "thus linking its becoming to a stable order of Creation".

In other words, things become what they are meant to become; only man has a free will and can thus to some extent overcome his own determining. Thus Kant sought to make the case "not only for a qualitative gap between inorganic matter and organic life but also for a quantum leap between humans and all other organisms."  

What, then, are we to make of Kant's flirtation with vitalism and his attempt to combine teleological and mechanistic explanations of life?

Jane Bennett is obviously attracted to the notion of Bildungstreib. For her, it gestures towards the kind of inhuman and ahistorical form of agency that she needs to make her own model of vibrant matter feasible. Whilst for Kant any such drive would have to have a divine origin, Bennett thinks it "both possible and desirable to experiment with the idea of an impersonal agency integral to materiality as such". 

But for me, as for Daniel Dennett and others who happily subscribe to a mechanistic materialism and remain confident that science will eventually explain in a perfectly adequate manner how life emerges from dead matter thanks to a chemical process, vitalism is not a profound philosophical insight, but simply a failure of critical intelligence and imagination.

In fact, a new study published recently by researchers at the University of Colorado and University of Milan, hints at the spontaneous appearance of primordial DNA four billion years ago and shows how the self-organizing properties of these DNA-like molecular fragments - just a few nanometres in length - may have guided their own growth into repeating chemical chains long enough and stable enough to act as a basis for primitive life.

In other words, contrary to everything Kant and the vitalists who have followed him like to believe, these new findings provide further evidence for the non-biological origins of nucleic acids, which are the building blocks of living organisms.  


Notes

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, (Duke University Press, 2010). All lines quoted were taken from the sub-section of chapter 5 entitled Bildungstreib, pp. 65-69.

For those interested in reading at length what Kant has to say on this subject, see his Critique of Judgement (1790), available in numerous English translations, including the one by Werner Pluhar, (Hackett, 1987), cited by Jane Bennett in her text. 

For those interested in the reading more about the new scientific study I refer to above, click here.  

Vibrant Matter

Jane Bennett is a Professor of Political Theory at John Hopkins University. She is the author of several books on nature, ethics, and modernity, but it's her most recent study, Vibrant Matter (2010), that most interests as she shifts her focus from people to the role played by nonhuman forces in events (what she likes to term after Bruno Latour actants). 

In a nutshell, her book is a call for a form of material vitalism (or vital materiality) that moves beyond the work of Hans Driesch and Henri Bergson, whilst nevertheless utilizing their insights in a somewhat Deleuzean manner. Bennett attempts, in other words, to affect a re-enchantment of the world and to give to things a degree of agency and spontaneity (an uncanny combination of "delight and disturbance").

As an object-oriented philosopher, her project obviously attracts me; whether it also convinces me is another question.

For one thing, I remain profoundly hostile to and suspicious of any form of vitalism. Secondly, I don't really endorse Bennett's eco-ethical goal which is to mend the shattered concord between man and world thereby not only ensuring our survival as a species, but increasing human happiness. I can't help recalling Ray Brassier's devastating response to such soppy idealism: Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of life - and particularly not human life!

Why highlight "what is typically cast in shadow"; why advocate "the vitality of matter"; why promote "more attentive encounters between people-materialities and thing-materialities", if all you're really concerned about is reviving the humanities and saving mankind? It hardly seems worth the effort and risks falling back into the anthropocentric conceit or hubris which Bennett wants so desperately to escape. 

That said, she writes in a lucid and appealing manner and I fully support her aim of having done with judgement by reconfiguring notions of agency. And, like Bennett, I also wish to "dissipate the onto-theological binaries" that have constrained thinking for so long.

Clearly, hers is not a vitalism in the traditional sense - there's no notion of an independent life force or spiritual supplement that mysteriously animates matter - but, even so, there's a wilful element of romantic naivety in this book and a determined optimism that I simply cannot share. Her positive formulations ultimately betray her own attempt to think philosophically; i.e. in a relentlessly inhuman manner. 


See: Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, (Duke University Press, 2010). All lines quoted are taken from the Preface to this text. 

D. H. Lawrence and the Prickly Politics of Vitalism

Woodcut design by Wharton Esherick for D. H. Lawrence's 

Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine (1925)

In a notorious but often celebrated essay, 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine' (1925), Lawrence provides us with some very beautiful descriptive passages of an actual event involving a dog and the shooting of a porcupine. Unfortunately, these are followed by some very ugly didactic passages that are not merely moralizing metaphysical nonsense, but tied to a pernicious political vitalism that asserts an anthropocentric, aristocratic, and racist hierarchy of life.

Life - ha! what is life? 

One might say in philosophical agreement with Nietzsche that it's really just a form of prejudice; an extremely rare and unusual way of being dead that is grossly overvalued by the living. 

Lawrence, however, offers a very different definition: life is that which "moves in circles of power and of vividness, and each circle of life only maintains its orbit upon the subjection of some lower circle." And this vital truth, as Lawrence imagines it, is not something to lament, nor seek to challenge or reform. On the contrary, the only thing to do "is to realise what is is higher, and what is lower, in the cycles of existence"  and accept this as a law of creation.

That said, it might still reasonably be asked what is meant by higher and how might we correctly assign each life-form its proper place within a natural order of rank? Again, Lawrence is extremely forthright in his answer (despite the fact that his logic is tautologous): by higher he means more vividly alive. And each life-form earns its own place within a natural order of rank by out competing and, indeed, often devouring, the lesser lives below it. He writes: 

"In the cycles of existence, this is the test. From the lowest form of existence to the highest, the test question is: Can thy neighbour finally overcome thee? If he can, then he belongs to a higher cycle of existence. This is the truth behind the survival of the fittest."

Lawrence then conveniently lists some examples of higher and lower forms drawn from his own hierarchy of vividness in terms of species and race:

"Life is more vivid in the dandelion than in the green fern, or than in a palm tree.
Life is more vivid in a snake than in a butterfly.
Life is more vivid in a wren than in an alligator.
Life is more vivid in a cat than in an ostrich.
Life is more vivid in the Mexican who drives the wagon, than in the two horses [who pull the wagon].

Life is more vivid in me, than in the Mexican who drives the wagon for me."

Obviously, the final assertion is for most readers today the most controversial and offensive; but Lawrence insists that the subjugation and exploitation of one race by another (his own) is another inescapable law of nature and existence. Or, if you prefer, an inexorable law of life based upon a fourth dimensional form of ontological energy which he terms vitality (the determining factor in the struggle for existence).

What, really, are we to make of all this?

I think it shows how a philosophy of vitalism can very easily lend itself to a highly undesirable form of politics. Of course, this needn't always be the case - one thinks of Hans Driesch's principled resistance to the Nazi attempt to co-opt his idea of entelechy - but, unfortunately, it very often seems to be the case that vitalism + pessimism + romanticism = fascism.   

The political theorist Jane Bennett, who has developed her own model of vital materialism, addresses this problematic issue with a reassuring degree of sensitive intelligence and insight. She writes:

"I do not think that there is any direct relationship between, on the one hand, a set of ontological assumptions about life ... and, on the other, a politics; no particular ethics or politics follow inevitably from a metaphysics. But the hierarchical logic of God-Man-Nature implied in a vitalism of soul easily transitions into a political image of a hierarchy of social classes or even civilizations."
 
Thus, if like Lawrence you believe that life is radically different from (and irreducible to) matter; that human life is qualitatively different than all other forms of life; that this human uniqueness indicates a divine origin or special relationship with the gods; and there's a natural order of existence with yourself at the top, then you will probably also be tempted to flirt with the kind of politics that wages war in the name of the highest idealism in order to fulfil some form of national, cultural, or racial destiny.    

My advice is - when it comes to politics - never trust a hippie, never trust a poet, and never trust a vitalist.


Notes

D. H. Lawrence; 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 347-63.

Jane Bennett; Vibrant Matter, (Duke University Press, 2010), p. 84. And see sub-section of chapter 6 entitled 'A Natural Order of Rank' , pp. 86-89 which is particularly pertinent to this discussion.

D. H. Lawrence and the Idea of Sacrifice

In a short series of related poems Lawrence explored the idea of sacrifice. 

Initially, he seems quite keen: the sacrifice of an animal in what he thinks of as the splendid pagan manner is an act of vital necessity to which he enthusiastically lends his support:

"... blood of the lower life must be shed

for the feeding and strengthening of the handsomer, fuller life."

This is an active practice of sacrifice that is about affirming mortal existence and giving thanks to the gods; it is not about atoning for sin (a concept Lawrence explicitly repudiates), or seeking to appease a God who forever sits in judgement upon us:

"There is no such thing as sin.

There is only life and anti-life.

And sacrifice is the law of life which enacts

that little lives must be eaten up into the dance and splendour

of bigger lives, with due reverence and acknowledgement."

But, unfortunately, this old, pre-Christian idea of sacrifice as life affirmation has given way to one that invariably takes place within the shadow of the Cross and is fatally tied to disastrous notions of self-sacrifice, joy in suffering, and martyrdom. Lawrence wants nothing to do with these things. Self-sacrifice, he writes, is an ethically objectionable and mistaken idea - particularly when it involves the slaying of what is best in us:

"It cannot be anything but wrong to sacrifice

good, healthy, natural feelings, instincts, passions or desires ..."

In other words, to sacrifice what Nietzsche would term our innocence is the vilest cowardice:

"But what we may sacrifice, if we call it sacrifice, from the self,

are all the obstructions to life, self-importance, self-conceit, egoistic self-will ..."

Lawrence develops this theme in a later verse:

"Oh slay, not the best bright proud life that is in you, that can be happy,

but the craven, the cowardly, the creeping you, that can only be unhappy ..."

"Oh sacrifice, not that which is noble and generous and spontaneous in humanity

but that which is mean and base and squalid and degenerate ..."

If we learn how to shed those things which poison the blood - rather than our blood itself - then we might perhaps find a way to live beyond good and evil and free from bad conscience. And that would make a pleasant (and profound) change would it not ...

Notes

See the following four poems by D. H. Lawrence: 'Self-Sacrifice', 'Shedding of blood', 'The old idea of sacrifice' and 'Self-sacrifice'. They can be found in The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Vol. I, pp. 585-87. The lines quoted are taken from these verses.  

On the Crucifixion of Sebastian Horsley

Naturally, at Easter, one's thoughts turn to the Cross and the crucifixion of Sebastian Horsley, the Soho Kristos ...

In 2000, Horsley flew to the Philippines, accompanied by fellow-artist Sarah Lucas and the photographer Dennis Morris. Having decided that he wished to paint scenes of the Crucifixion, but only ever really able to paint what he himself had experienced directly, Horsley was heading for the small village of San Pedro Cutud, outside of San Fernando, in the province of Pampagna.    

Here, during Holy Week, locals hold an annual orgy of self-flagellation and mortification of the flesh, culminating in several devotees being willingly lashed to crosses with nails driven through their hands and feet in imitation of Christ. Officially, the Church does not approve, but the local tourist industry has no qualms about promoting the event (retailers selling religious nick-knacks alongside cans of Coke).   

This re-enactment of the Passion, has been going on for many years. Pseudo-martyrs tend to be young Filipino men hoping to experience the divine and produce some sort miraculous effect. Foreign participants were banned after a Japanese man marketed footage of himself being crucified as a sadomasochistic porn video. However, after months of negotiation (and payment of a significant fee) it was agreed that Horsley would be able to stage his own private ceremony.    

The hope was to heighten his artistic sensibilities via extreme suffering. In the event, however, he passed out from the intense and overwhelming degree of pain. Worse, the small platform supporting his feet broke, as did the straps around his wrists and arms supporting some of his weight, and Horsley, dramatically - if also somewhat embarrassingly - fell from the cross! (The malicious act of a God in whom he didn't believe but was happy nevertheless to mock, as Horsley reasoned afterwards.)

Some of the villagers ran away screaming; Sarah Lucas fainted; and Dennis Morris continued to snap pictures as anxious officials attempted to resurrect the artist, lying pale and unconscious, but strangely serene, as if a figure in a painting by Caravaggio. Afterwards, Horsley by his own admission felt humiliated and full of a sense of failure. Soon, however, this was replaced with a sense of quiet pride.

An exhibition of new works based on the event opened in the summer of 2002 and film footage shot by Sarah Lucas, entitled Crucifixion, was screened at the ICA in June of that year. The British press, unsurprisingly, were less than impressed:  'Art Freak Crucifies Himself', screamed the front page of the News of the World. Perhaps more surprisingly - and certainly more disappointingly - the art world was also distinctly cool (and sometimes sneering) in its reception.

Horsley, as ever, puts a brave face on this in his disarming and often highly amusing memoir, Dandy in the Underworld (2007):  "Jesus was crucified to save humanity. I had been crucified to save my career. Neither of us had much success."


Note: For those interested, Crucifixion can be viewed (in two parts) on YouTube by clicking here and here. 

Mono No Aware (Japanese Aesthetics Contra Teutonic Angst)

Birds and Flowers of Spring and Summer

One of a pair of six-fold screens by Kano Eino, 

Suntory Museum of Art, Tokyo

The Japanese have a very lovely term for the poignancy of passing time and the mixture of joy and sadness experienced when one reflects upon the transient nature of existence: mono no aware. 

Often translated as the pathos of things, it's more, I think, than simply an awareness of impermanence or a sensitivity to ephemera. It's also an aestheticized form of the ontological anxiety that for Heidegger characterized Dasein - i.e., the certain knowledge that everything dies and that all being is therefore a being-towards-death. 

But it would be precisely this aestheticization of onto-anxiety that would be problematic for the German philosopher. For according to Heidegger, our essential task as human beings is to accept the inevitability of death, affirm its necessity, and strive to retain the authenticity of our own passing and we don't do this by transforming Angst into a kind of genteel reflection on things in the shadow of their future absence.      

And so, whilst for the eighteenth century scholar and poet Motoori Norinaga mono no aware heightens our appreciation of beauty and enables us to comprehend the singing of the birds and the silence of the snake, this, for Heidegger, is not merely sentimental and besides the point, but risks inauthenticity. 

That is to say, mono no aware fails to profoundly disturb or discomfort; it lacks the weight of almost unbearable fatality that the Germans are so insistent upon. Thus, whilst it makes us smile wistfully and go 'Ah ...' with a knowing sigh, it doesn't fill us with a sense dread at the monstrous and inhuman nature of existence; it doesn't make us want to scream when confronted by the truth of extinction and non-being.

In the end, I suppose, one has to make a choice here: does one want to picnic beneath the cherry blossom, or brood amongst the pine needles; does one want to develop a practice of joy before death, or a custom of fear and trembling?

I know which I'd rather do ...   

On the Pleasure of Queer Nostalgia

The face and body of British glamour model Kate-Anne Cooper arouse a queer kind of nostalgia for a lost world of vintage porn, wherein women weren't shaved, pierced, tattooed, cosmetically-enhanced, or airbrushed into digital perfection; when they looked softer, hairier, uglier, and their cunts, although more threatening, were nonetheless full of life and the promise of a blissful return to nature. 

Probably she knows this: for her hair and make-up suggest a deliberate retro styling designed to trigger this wistful erotic longing not just for the girls of the late sixties and seventies, but for the period itself in all of its popular cultural manifestations.

Time, which is often cruel, is kind in this regard; it adds charm and a certain element of pathos to days and things gone by. It allows us to remember our own past fondly and to sentimentally gloss hardcore events and the grim material facts that historians and social theorists often choose to emphasise.

In doing this, we sacrifice critical complexity. But we gain pleasure. And that's not something we should have to apologise for; least of all to those who would eliminate all forms of fun from life and tie intellectual language exclusively to an endless series of moralizing imperatives.

Alien Spring

Alien Spring  (2015)

To me, all flowering plants look decidedly alien: by which I don't mean extraterrestrial, so much as completely other or inhuman. That is certainly what I meant when I captioned the above photograph Alien Spring and sent it to a number of friends. I wasn't making a point about the environmental danger posed by invasive species; nor, indeed, was I offering a covert remark about UK immigration policy!

What anyway - since the subject has arisen - is the threat level to indigenous flora presented by non-native plants that have found a way to root and bloom in this green and pleasant land? 

Well, according to recent research carried out by researchers at the University of York, the answer is pretty minimal (if not actually negligible). Where alien species thrive, so too do the local plants; where they don't, neither do the latter. And so Nigel Farage can rest easy in his bed at night, happy in the knowledge that no delicate British flower is being driven towards extinction by overly-competitive newcomers (even if they make up 20% of species recorded in 2007).

The fact is that, unlike invasive animal species, plants seem to get along just fine growing side-by-side in chaotic harmony. Thus whilst eco-nationalists will always object to foreign plants growing on British soil and fantasise about a more natural state of affairs in some imaginary past, we can turn a deaf ear towards them and offer up instead three cheers for biodiversity whilst looking forward to an alien spring.  

Psychasthenia

Cover of the 1930 pamphlet produced by Georges Bataille and others 
in response to André Breton's attack upon them in the 
Second Surrealist Manifesto (1929)

The more I read about that castrated old lion and false revolutionary André Breton, the more I dislike him. Not loving love as a moral absolute and not believing that the marvellous can exist separately from the morbid and the monstrous, means I can't possibly embrace his concept of surrealism either.

Does this mean that I too suffer, like Bataille, from a form of decadence or that which Breton, with his clinical background, delighted in identifying as psychasthenia (a mental disorder characterized by irrational phobias, obsessions, anxieties and, apparently, a love of flies)? 

Maybe. 

But anyone who has read Nietzsche knows that these things are advantageous traits in an artist or philosopher (that whilst strength preserves, only sickness advances). Indeed, better death, as Deleuze says, than the good health we have been given and which is so valued by the bourgeois. 

And better even Bataille's excremental philosophy than Breton's angelic surrealism that is ultimately suited only to mystics, poets, and idealists.       

Everything Ends in Shit

Salvador Dali: The Lugubrious Game (1929)

Unlike Bataille, obsessed with making an all-out assault upon human dignity and aesthetics in the name of a base materialism, I don't feel compelled as a thinker to become-porcine and to dig deep into forms of heterogeneous matter with my snout in order to uproot everything with repugnant voracity.

I don't even want to toss rose petals like the Marquis de Sade into a madhouse latrine. In other words, I'm not what André Breton would describe as an excremental philosopher.

But, having said that, one is obliged to concede that everything ends in shit; life terminating as a shipwreck in the nauseous.       

The Ghost of Alexander McQueen

Jellyfish ensemble and Armadillo shoes, Plato's Atlantis, (SS10)

Model Polina Kasina. Photo © Lauren Greenfield/INSTITUTE

 

The ghost of Alexander McQueen will continue to haunt the British fashion industry for decades to come, as the current exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum evidences. Savage Beauty is the first major retrospective of McQueen's work to be presented in Europe, but it certainly won't be the last. 

Why? Because he was a fucking genius whose clothes didn't simply make heads turn, but spin with a mixture of astonishment and repulsion until sick and dizzy with disconcerted pleasure. Quite literally, one feels overawed by his designs and many of the dresses displayed are as difficult to view as they would be to wear and as they undoubtedly were to create and manufacture. 

The devil is in the detail, they say, and McQueen's clothes are so detailed that their exquisite beauty and fine craftsmanship doesn't disguise their malevolent and sinister qualities. All fashion designers attempt to give style to the body and this, of necessity, involves an element of cruelty. But McQueen takes this further than anyone; his dark romanticism and gothic queerness occasionally hint at a brutal and austere futuristic even fascist aesthetic, rather than a playful fetishism or an ironic sado-masochism. 

McQueen wanted the women who wore his clothes to look powerful and terrifying; like alien beings from another time and another world. He wasn't interested in simply provoking tabloid outrage or scandalising the middle-classes; rather, he wanted to instill elements of fear in the human heart in the hope it might beat a little faster. 

Notes

I have chosen an image from McQueen's Plato's Atlantis collection (SS10), not because I think it's his best work, but it was his final collection, presented just before his death in February of that year. Inspired not only by the myth of Atlantis, but also Darwin's theory of evolution, it featured fabulous footwear; including the infamous Armadillo shoes. Click here to see the catwalk show.

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty runs at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) from 14 March - 2 August 2015. For further information, including ticket prices and opening times, visit the Victoria and Albert Museum website (click here).     

Panchira

Panchira by dw817 on deviantart.com

Panchira is a Japanese term for what is doubtless a universal practice; looking up the skirts of young women in the hope of glimpsing what perverts always like to term panties.

Because panchira is a well-established convention within comics, cartoons, and other aspects of popular culture, generations of Japanese men are reared to regard the fetishistic obsession with female undergarments as perfectly natural; they are normalised, in other words, into a pornified worldview that encourages the belief that it is an acceptable and harmless pastime to sneak a peek or take a snapshot up the skirt of any woman in a public space, with or without her consent.

Ironically for a practice that is often regarded as a national sport, the phenomenon of panchira in contemporary Japanese society can probably be traced back to its Westernization following American occupation at the end of the Second World War. As elsewhere, during the fifties and sixties there was a relaxing of taboos as new ideas and fashions began to circulate.

One crucial catalyst to the emerging craze of panchira seems to have been the release of the Billy Wilder movie The Seven Year Itch (1955). The iconic scene in which Marilyn Monroe has trouble with her skirt as she stands on a subway grate, excited the pornographic imagination of the Japanese public even more than the rest of the world. The practice of scoring a glimpse up young women's skirts became extremely popular at this time and many magazines ran articles advising men of the best places where they might view panties.   

What, then, are we to think of this? Obviously, panchira can be analysed psychologically as a form of voyeurism and - from a feminist critical perspective - as an example of what is termed the imperial male gaze (an immobilizing glance by which a woman is both sexually objectified and fixed in place).

But could it not alternatively be argued that it is the male subject who is effectively seduced and made helpless (almost idiotic) before a panty-clad crotch: that panchira thus results in a revenge of the object ...?         

Upskirting with Francis Ponge

Photo of Lindsay Lohan, by Terry Richardson 

(Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles, 2012)

It's no great revelation that Frenchmen like to look up the skirts of pretty young girls; France, after all, is the country that gave us The Swing, the cancan, and the story of Melody Nelson being knocked off her bicycle.

Even so, it came as something of a surprise to discover prose poet Francis Ponge comparing the pleasure of viewing a frilly white carnation to that of glimpsing a pair of fine-cut lace knickers worn by a maid who attends to her linens. 

Ponge goes on to add - and here one is uncertain whether he refers to the flowers or the undergarments - that they continually emit the sort of distinct perfume that threatens such pleasure that one is brought to the verge of a violent spasm (such as a sneeze or an orgasm). 

And so we observe how panty-fetishism is a complex phenomenon involving not just the eyes, but also the nose - even if some snobby psychologists like to insist it's not a true paraphilia.   

    

Downblouse and Upskirt (Get a Good Look Costanza?)

 Seinfeld S4/17: The Shoes. Click here to view scene.

 

Downblousing and upskirting are both examples of pornified voyeurism that illustrate perfectly the objectifying nature of the male gaze. Both have blossomed in an age of smart phones, the internet, and rape culture, yet they continue to rank very differently on a scale of perviness.  

For when a man looks down a young woman's blouse it is in the hope of glimpsing breasts; a healthy, heterosexual desire for female flesh. If not quite the done thing within polite society, downblousing is nevertheless regarded as natural and relatively harmless behaviour; something we might even characterize as a bit of good clean fun and place within a comic context.      

But when a man looks up a girl's skirt it's in the hope of seeing her underwear; what excites is not the flesh per se and it's for this reason that upskirting is regarded as truly deviant behaviour - fetishistic, unwholesome, indecent, etc.    

Thus it is that most viewers laugh when George Costanza stares down the blouse of a fifteen year-old in an episode of Seinfeld and don't see it as an assault by a middle-aged man upon the dignity of a minor, nor a sordid invasion of her privacy. 

Would they feel quite as amused, however, had George been caught staring at her crotch rather than her cleavage?      

When D. H. Lawrence Met G. I. Jane

I wouldn't say that American action movie G. I. Jane (1997) is a great film, even though in Ridley Scott it undoubtedly has a great director. A box office success, it wasn't quite as much of a blockbuster as hoped for by the producers who had stumped up a $50,000,000 budget.  

Nor would I say that the star of the film, Demi Moore, is a great actress. Nevertheless, she's a better actress than many people wish to believe and undeserving of the Golden Raspberry Award for her performance as Lieutenant Jordan O'Neil.

What I would say, however, is that her G. I. Jane co-star Viggo Mortensen is not only a very fine actor, but also one of the most interesting figures in Hollywood. A poet, publisher, musician, photographer and painter - as well as a charismatic screen presence - Mortensen has given some excellent performances, particularly under the direction of David Cronenberg.

But what I really like about him is the fact that he was the one who suggested to Ridley Scott that his enigmatic and violent character, Command Master Chief John James Urgayle, would be made more interesting to an audience were his brutality offset by a love of literature - particularly D. H. Lawrence's poetry!

Thus it was that Urgayle recites the following lines to his new recruits:

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

At the end of the film, by which time O'Neil has proved she's not a lesbian, survived her training ordeal, and displayed real courage and ability under fire as a Navy SEAL, we see her leafing through a Penguin edition of Lawrence's Selected Poems that has been left in her locker. O' Neil reads the above verse with tears in her eyes, whilst Urgayle looks on affectionately. 

Her copy of the text, already annotated and well-thumbed, is doubtless Urgayle's own. But the book itself belonged to Mortensen and was not merely a prop bought for the scene. And that, for a Lawrentian, is pleasing to discover. 

Notes

Lawrence's verse, entitled 'Self-Pity', can be found in The Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, (Penguin Books, 1977), p. 467, or in Volume I of the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence's Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (CUP, 2013), p. 405.

To view on YouTube the recital of Lawrence's poem by Master Chief Urgayle (as played by Viggo Mortensen) click here. To see the touching final scene of G. I. Jane click here.  

Give a Girl the Right Shoes ...

Photo by Mario Testino for Vogue

Mario Testino's stunning photograph of Suki Waterhouse, Cara Delevigne, and Georgia May Jagger in the new edition of Vogue (April 2015) obviously owes a great deal to Antonio Canova's sculpture The Three Graces, in which the beautiful young daughters of Zeus are shown huddled together in naked embrace.

What excites most about Testino's photograph, however, is not the obvious sexual allure of the models but the fabulous faux-fur heel sandals they're wearing, designed by Sophia Webster for Shrimps (SS15), the playful fashion label created by Hannah Weiland.

Miss Webster, a graduate of the London College of Fashion and the Royal College of Art, presented her first collection of footwear in SS13, after having worked as a design assistant to Nicholas Kirkwood. She has rightly been recognised within the British fashion industry as a genius and received several prestigious awards for developing a unique but nonetheless commercially viable aesthetic that, like Canova's sculpture or Testino's picture, combines beauty, charm, and joy in a modern, sophisticated, slightly subversive manner that one is almost tempted to term neon-classical.

As Marilyn Monroe famously said: Give a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world.      
 

The Conspiracy against the Human Race

Hippocampus Press, (2011)

Thomas Ligotti is a contemporary American writer of supernatural horror with philosophical pretensions. He is often described as a cult author, which is a way of saying that he is little known and little read, but much loved by those few who are familiar with him and his work.

For the record, I'm not one of these. And, having just finished reading his first full-length work of non-fiction which comes with an admittedly intriguing title and somewhat creepy cover, I'm not about to become a Ligotti fanboy in the foreseeable future. 

The Conspiracy against the Human Race is pessimistic, nihilistic, and anti-natalist. Unfortunately, it's also badly written. His one big idea, which is repeated and capitalised throughout the book - that life is MALIGNANTLY USELESS - may very well be true, but there are far worse and more shocking things than this; such as producing books that are MIND-NUMBINGLY TEDIOUS.   
 
Ray Brassier should, in my view, be embarrassed to have provided even the briefest of brief forewords; one that attempts to fig-leaf over the obvious shortcomings of the book by suggesting that Ligotti, thanks to his status as an artist, is liberated from the conventional demands placed upon a writer of critical theory and unencumbered by the "cringing deference towards social utility that straightjackets most professional philosophers" [10].

This is just bluster and it disappoints almost as much as the text that follows. As for Brassier's hyperbolic claim that Ligotti "sets out what is perhaps the most sustained challenge yet to the intellectual blackmail that would oblige us [humanity] to be eternally grateful for a 'gift' [life] we never invited", this is saved from being laughable only by strategic use of the qualifying adverb perhaps.

Having said all this, there is one passage in the final chapter of Ligotti's book with which I fully agree; a thanatological dismissal of that most overrated faculty called upon by poets and others of whom we should always be suspicious:

"Without death - meaning without our consciousness of death - no story of supernatural horror would ever have been written, nor would any other artistic representation of human life have been created for that matter. It is always there, if only between the lines or brushstrokes, or conspicuously by its absence. It is a terrific stimulus to that which is at once one of our greatest weapons and greatest weaknesses - imagination. Our minds are always on the verge of exploding with thoughts and images as we ceaselessly pound the pavement of our world. Both our most exquisite cogitations and pour worst cognitive drivel announce our primal torment: We cannot linger in the stillness of nature's vacuity. And so we have imagination to beguile us. A misbegotten hatchling of consciousness, a birth defect of our species, imagination is often revered as a sign of vigor in our make-up. But it is really just a psychic overcompensation for our impotence as beings." [218].  

On The Horror of Living in the Moment

I used to celebrate the idea of living in the moment. That is to say, of enjoying the very nowness of time with neither memory of the past, nor anticipation of days to come.

But now, having witnessed how Alzheimer's traps and isolates a person precisely in a perpetual present, I know that this is actually a petrifying prospect. One might become innocent, in a Nietzschean sense of the term (i.e. as a concept closely tied to forgetfulness), but one becomes less than human rather than overhuman and increasingly without world, as Heidegger would say.

In other words, to live in the moment is to inexorably turn to stone ...