Notes on Jean Baudrillard's 'Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?' (Part 2: Sections VI - XII)

Cover of the paperback edition 

(Seagull Books, 2016)

  

This is a continuation of a post the first part of which can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

VI.

 

The human subject - that product of power, knowledge, and history - with its free-willing moral agency, is also, says Baudrillard, disappearing today, but leaving "its ghost behind, its narcissistic double, more or less as the Cat left its grin hovering" [27].

 

Freed from an actual subject, this ectoplasmic remnant of subjectivity is to be found everywhere today (just like sexuality, freed from the biological reality of sex, is found everywhere but in bodies); enveloping and transforming everything; remaking the world in its own image, ensuring that there's no outside, no otherness, no objective world.  

 

Consciousness has been smashed to smithereens and dispersed into "all the interstices of reality" [28] producing a smart world of interconnected systems and artificial intelligence; a digital utopia. And in such a world, who needs human subjects in the old-fashioned sense? They have become superfluous and so may as well disappear ...

 

 

VII. 

 

But again the question will be raised: have there not been some positive disappearances? Certain diseases, for example, and other threats to human health and safety. 

 

Well, yes, that's true - although it should be remembered that things we thought had gone for good often come back with a vengeance; "we know", writes Baudrillard, "that everything repressed or eliminated [...] results in a malign, viral infiltration of the social and individual body" [30-31] sooner or later.  

 

Disappearance is never the end of the matter any more than appearance is the beginning of the matter: things come and go and eternally return and life itself is nothing other than this vital game of appearance, disappearance, and reappearance [g].

 

 

VIII. 

 

Moving on, Baudrillard brings the discussion around to the image, behind which, he says, something has always and already disappeared: "And that is the source of its fascination" [32]. 

 

In other words, it's not virtual reality that excites us - is anything more boring at last? - it's the fact that behind it lies a vital dimenson of existence, albeit one that is withdrawn and concealed. It's the real - or, more precisely, the disappearance of the real - that excites everyone. 

 

(Baudrillard often seems at pains to stress the total ambiguity of his own position on this issue, which throws up paradox after paradox and "cannot, in any way, be resolved" [32].) 

 

 

IX. 

 

The destiny of the image is to make the revolutionary move from the analogical to the digital. Baudrillard thinks of this as an irresistible process which leads to a world which "no longer has need of us, nor of our representation" [34]; for when "software wins out over the eye" [37] who needs the photographer?  

 

When the photograph is liberated "from both the negative and the real world" [34], this has consequences for objects too; who needs them to be present when they can now be digitally generated (and erased) by AI? 

 

Baudrillard writes:

 

"The traditional photograph is an image produced by the world, which, thanks to the medium of film, still involves a dimension of representation. The digital image is an image that comes straight out of the screen ..." [ 37] [h] and lacks punctual exactitude. 

 

Again, for anyone who cares about the art of photography - "conceived as the convergence of the light from the object with the light from the gaze" [38] - this is not merely an advance in technology, it's a disaster; "the sophistication of the play of presence and absence, of appearance and disappearance" [38] is abolished with the arrival of the digital age. 

 

The world - "and our vision of the world" [39] - is changed forever. It seems you cannot liberate photography via digitalisation, only destroy it with violence inflicted upon the "sovereignty of images" [59], subjecting them to a single perspective.   

 

Now, non-photographers might shrug their shoulders and ask so what. But what is happening in the world of photography is "just one tiny example of what is happening on a massive scale in all fields [...] The same destiny of digitalisation looms over the world of the mind and the whole range of thought" [39-40], so philosophers had better beware too!

 

 

X. 

 

When you replace the "entire symbolic articulation of language" [40] with an endless flow of information, then there are no silences or spaces suspended between illusion and reality in which to pause and think. 

 

Just as photography is about more than the proliferation and circulation of images, thinking is about more than word processing and fact checking - and the further we advance in the direction of digitalisation the further we shall be from "the secret - and the pleasure - of both" [43]. 

 

The brain is not a type of computer. And AI is not a form of thinking and knows nothing of the intelligence of evil [i]. 

 

 

XI. 

 

Should we save silence? 

 

Obviously, as someone who has argued that silence, stillness, secrecy, and shadows should be central to the practice of occultism in an age of transparency - click here - I'm going to answer yes to this question. 

 

But I also think we should preserve the absence; i.e., the nothingness that lies at the heart of the world and which is "as essential to life as are air and wind to the flight of the dove" [j]. 

 

 

XII. 

  

However else we might describe Baudrillard's thinking on the triumph of the machine, it's certainly pessimistic. 

 

Human beings, he concludes, may now be free to "operate within an integral individuality, free from all history and subjective constraints" [62], but it comes at a price: "it is clear that mankind exists only at the cost of its own death" [62]. 

 

In other words, our immortality is achieved only via our own technological disappearance and our "inscription in the digital order (the mental diaspora of the networks)" [92]. 

 

Lawrence would agree: Heidegger would agree: Byung-Chul Han would agree: and I think, ultimately, I agree too (even though I like taking snaps on my i-Phone - many of which end up here on TTA).  

 

And who knows, perhaps if we push the process of digitalisation all the way to its outer limits something surprising will happen and all that has disappeared will reappear in brutal solidity once more (just as impressionism's escape into pure light and colour gave way to post-impressionism and the return of great lumpy bodies and landscapes that made one nostalgic for mud and substance [k]).    

 

Perhaps objects will rediscover their singularity and we'll rediscover our analogue duality on the other side of digital integrity; i.e., the most radical - most demonic - element of human being that is also the most necessary and from which we derive our antagonistic vitalism.  

 

For as Zarathustra said, "'man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him'" [l].  

 

  

Notes 

 

[g] Any Heideggerians reading this might be mumbling the word Unverborgenheit to themselves at this point and I suppose that Heidegger's concept might be borrowed (and adapted) in order to discuss the appearance (disclosure) and disappearance (concealment) of beings and worlds, although Baudrillard makes no such attempt to do so.

 

[h] Later in his text, Baudrillard will describe CGI as an ultimate form of violence committed against the image; one which "puts an end even to the imagining of the image" [45]. 

 

[i] For Baudrillard, the intelligence of evil is a dualistic principle of reversability which underlies the world operating outside of moral reason and challenges the integral reality (and hegemony) of the digital world. In other words, it's a force of instability and conflict that reveals the cracks and contradictions in a system which thinks itself whole and perfect. 

 

[j] Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles, Exiles from Dialogue (Polity Press, 2007), pp. 134-35.

      This line is quoted by François L'Yvonnet in his Foreword to Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? and he reminds readers that this is a reference to (and rejection of) Kant's idea that a bird would fly even faster and higher were it free of all resistance. For L'Yvonnet, nihilism isn't the affirmation of nothingness, but the forgetting (or negating) of nothingness in order to bring everything to full presence.  

 

[k] I'm paraphrasing D. H. Lawrence writing in 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 182-217. See pp. 197-199 in particular for Lawrence's analysis of impressionism and post-impressionism. 

 

[l] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (Penguin Books, 1976), p. 330. The line comes from the section entitled 'The Convalescent', in Part 3 of Zarathustra.  

 

 

Notes on Jean Baudrillard's 'Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?' (Part 1: Sections I-V)

Seagull Books (2009)

 

 

I. 

 

Every day, one reads of yet another plant or animal facing extinction, or of natural resources rapidly being depleted [a].

 

But extinction, of course, is a natural phenomenon; just as the exhaustion of reserves is a physical process, whereas disappearance - at least in the sense that Baudrillard uses the term with reference to human beings - is something very different.    

 

For Baudrillard, just as reality vanishes into the virtual, man disappears as a result of his own idealistic transformation of the world: 

 

"The human species is doubtless the only one to have invented a specific mode of disappearance that has nothing to do with Nature's law. Perhaps even an art of disappearance." [b]   

 

II. 

 

Whilst our mode of disappearance may perhaps be an art, nevertheless the modern transformation of the world into something that can be unambiguously known, was accomplished via science and technology. 

 

It's one of those ironic things that just as we create a world of value and meaning for ourselves, a world over which we can exercise mastery with our minds and our machines, we set the stage for our own disappearance.   

 

"But doubtless we have to go back even further - as far as concepts and language. By representing things to ourselves, by naming them and conceptualising them, human beings call them into existence and at the same time hasten their doom, subtly detach them from their brute reality." [11]

 

Things - objects - do not like to be dragged into the light and subject to human analysis; it is their nature to withdraw into ontological darkness and thus retain a reality that always exceeds their relations to other objects (including us) [c].

 

The moment a thing is identified - "the moment representation and concepts take hold of it" [12] - that's the precise moment when it begins to lose its volcanic vitalism and begins its disappearance. 

 

Just as, on the other hand, the moment concepts or ideas (but also fantasies, dreams, and desires) achieve their realisation, the game is up and they begin to dissolve before your very eyes. That's why one should be careful of what one wishes for ...

 

 

III. 

 

One should also be careful not to achieve one's full potential. 

 

For despite what the American psychologist Abraham Maslow and his followers teach, "what is proper to human beings is not to realise all their possibilities" [15], but, rather, recognise their limitations, celebrate their imperfections, and hold on to those negative traits that we need to exist as mortals (only God doesn't cast a shadow). 

 

Self-actualisation - driven by "an impulse to go as far as possible" [19] in the expression of all one's power and potential  - may promise a type of immortality, but this extreme endeavour results ultimately in the "virtual disappearance of the human species" [19]. 

 

In other words, the dream of defeating death and becoming immortal results in a fate that is arguably worse than death. 

 

 

IV. 

      

Having said that, Baudrillard at this point makes a sort of U-turn and suggests we might, after all, conceive of disappearance differently: "as a singular event and the object of a specific desire, the desire to no longer be there, which is not negative at all" [21]. 

 

In staging our own disappearance as a material art (beyond aesthetics), we might be able to "see what the world looks like in our absence [...] or to see, beyond the end, beyond the subject, beyond all meaning, beyond the horizon of disappearance, if there is still an occurrence of the world, an unprogrammed appearance of things" [21] [d].  

 

In other words, is it possible to see the world as it is and not as the real world (which is only ever a world of representation)?

 

It's an interesting question ... Perhaps one that only those artists who know how to "play on their disappearance, make use of it as a living form, exploit it by excess" [22] will find the answer to [e].

 

The trick, ultimately, is "to disappear before dying and instead of dying" [25]; not to artificially survive.

 

 

V. 

 

This is important: "nothing just vanishes; of everything that disappears there remain traces" [25] (my italics). 

 

Think of the Cheshire Cat, for example, "whose grin still hovers in the air after the rest of him has vanished" [25]. Or think of God - he's been dead for ages, but, his shadow, as Nietzsche says, will still be seen for thousands of years (and I wonder if mankind will ever have done with his judgement) [f].  

 

Baudrillard writes:

 

"We may thus suppose that everything that disappears - institutions, values, prohibitions, ideologies, even ideas - continues to lead a clandestine existence and exert an occult influence, as was said of the ancient gods who, in the Christian era, assumed the form of demons. Everything that disappears seeps back into our lives in infinitesimal doses, often more dangerous than the visible authority that ruled over us." 

 

That's true: we are masters at internalising everything and allowing the invisible souls of the dear departed to find a home within us; the dead they do not die and, ultimately, nothing ever disappears.   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The International Union for Conservation of Nature currently has over 47,000 species on their Red List of Threatened Species: click here. 

      The United Nations Environment Programme produced a 2024 report on the manner in which the global economy is consuming ever more natural resources, at an ever faster rate: click here.   

 

[b] Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?, trans. Chris Turner, with images by Alain Willaume (Seagull Books, 2009), p. 9. Future page references to this book will be given in the post itself.  

      This text - one of the last that Baudrillard wrote before his death in March 2007 - was originally published in French as Pourquoi tout n'a-t-il pas déjà disparu? (L'Herne, 2007). 

      When I first read this little book fifteen years ago I wasn't sure I understood it. In fact, I'm not sure I correctly understand it even now, so readers are advised that the notes assembled here may give a mistaken interpretation of (or false gloss to) Baudrillard's thinking.   

 

[c] Graham Harman has discussed this at great length and in great detail in his work; see, for example, his 2018 book Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Pelican Books). 

      I have discussed this book in a post dated 24 March 2018: click here. And for another post discussing Harman's philosophy, click here.  

 

[d] Later on, Baudrillard writes: "Have we not always had the deep-seated phantasy of a world that would go on without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absence, free of any human, all-too-human will?" [52]. 

      One thinks of Rupert Birkin's dream of a post-human world of nothing but grass and the odd hare sitting up in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920). 

 

[e] Baudrillard remains sceptical about the role that art will play. He writes:

      "Art itself in the modern period exists only on the basis of its disappearance - not just the art of making the real disappear and supplanting it with another scene, but the art of abolishing itself in the course of its practice [...] It was by doing this that it constituted an event, that it was of decisive importance. I say 'was' advisedly, for art today, though it as disappeared, doesn't know it has disappeared and [...] continues in its trajectory in a vegetative state." [22]

      The same, of course, might be said of politics today.  

 

[f] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book III, §108. 

 

 

Part 2 of this post (sections VI-XII) can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

A Brief Note on the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

 Charlie Kirk and the man accused of his murder Tyler Robinson

  

One of the great ironies of politics today - noted by Jean Baudrillard on more than one occasion in his writings [1] - is that whilst those on the paleoconservative right claim to be Christians and to represent moral values, it is actually those on the radical left who most faithfully (and fanatically) subscribe to the moral distinction good/evil (as opposed to the non-moralistic distinction good/bad) [2].  

 

And it's because of this that whilst the former tend to think their political opponents mistaken (and possibly a little naive, foolish, or crazy), the latter are prone to believe anyone who doesn't share their worldview must be a Nazi; i.e., irredeemably evil and thus not someone with whom one can reason or debate but, rather, someone who, like Charlie Kirk, must be killed (and deserves to die) [3]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See, for example, what Baudrillard writes in his essay 'A Conjuration of Imbeciles' (1997), which can be found in The Conspiracy of Art, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Ames Hodes (Semiotext(e), 2005), pp. 30-35. 

      In brief, Baudrillard attempts to address the question of why it is "everything moral, orthodox and conformist, which was traditionally associated with the right, passed to the left?" (p. 30), whilst, on the other hand, all the political and intellectual vitality once associated with the latter has moved to the far right, allowing figures like Charlie Kirk (and his hero Donald Trump) to come to the fore and gain huge followings.

      Readers who are interested might like to see the post published on 10 November 2016 in which I discuss this: click here.     

 

[2] Nietzsche famously analysed this crucial first step in what he terms the slave revolt in morals in the first essay of the Genealogy (1887).

      Unlike those strong natures confident enough to affirm themselves as good and who only feel the need to ascribe the term bad to others as a kind of afterthought, those who identify as marginalised or victimised in some manner and who seek revenge (or what they call social justice), define themselves as good only having first demonised others as evil and by cancelling all ideas that do not fit into their moral-ideological conception of the world. 

 

[3] We see this in some of the shameful videos uploaded to social media by those who think it acceptable to openly celebrate his murder.  

      Whilst we don't yet know the suspect's motivation for shooting Kirk, investigators say there's evidence to suggest he may have been politically radicalised online and sympathetic to Antifa, a far-left movement with members who are not opposed to violent direct action.

      This evidence includes inscriptions and symbols made on unfired shell casings, one of which had lyrics from the anti-fascist resistance song 'Bella Cioa' which honours Italian partisans who fought against Nazi German occupiers during the Second World War. 

      One is almost tempted to wonder whether Robinson - despite not being Jewish - saw himself as some kind of Basterd, i.e., a member of the fictional black ops commando unit led by Lt. Aldo Raine in Quentin Tarantino's 2009 film Inglorious Basterds who were tasked with "doin' one thing, and one thing only - killin' Nazis". 

      (I'm quoting from page 19 of Tarantino's script to the film, which is available via scriptslug.com to down load as a pdf: click here.)   

 

Thoughts on The World Without Women and the Elimination of Otherness

The Dial Press (1971) [a]

I. 

 

I recently came across the above novel by the Italian writer Virgilio Martini (1903-1986); a work which, when originally published in Fascist Italy in 1936, was soon banned on the grounds of blasphemy and obscenity.  

 

It tells the story of the last woman of childbearing age on earth, after a homosexual plot to exterminate the fairer sex with a deadly virus almost succeeds. 

 

I don't know if the author was genuinely plagued by fears of a gay planet, or if he just thought this would make an amusing piece of satirical science fiction, but, either way it's a curious work that even many ardent fans of the SF genre haven't read (or even heard of). 

 

However, one person who was familiar with Martini's novel was Jean Baudrillard, who references the work in Le crime parfait (1995) [b] ...

 

 

II. 

 

For Baudrillard, the perfect crime is the murder of reality and the vital illusion of the world. 

 

But Baudrillard is not simply interested in solving this crime (in finding clues, for example, that might reveal the identity of the perpetrator); he's a philosopher, not a private detective and, ultimately, he's more concerned with what happens after the event (i.e., on the other side of the crime) than in lamenting the disappearance of the Real. 

 

It's man's entrance into the era of the Virtual that really excites his interest; an era born of the liquidation of the Real (and the referential), but which is characterised by the extermination of the Other and all forms of otherness - including the feminine principle.   

 

Describing the novel's central idea as a terrifying allegory for what we ourselves are now experiencing, Baudrillard predicts that, as in Martini's novel, "no science will be able to protect us" [111] from the fate that awaits us: 

 

"Though, for the moment, this virus does not affect the biological reproduction of the species, it affects an even more fundamental function, that of the symbolic reproduction of the other, favouring, rather, a cloned, asexual reproduction of the species-less individual. For to be deprived of the other is to be deprived of sex, and to be deprived of sex is to be deprived of symbolic belonging to any species whatsoever." [112] 

 

It's this idea of "a world given over entirely to the selfsame" [112] that is truly terrifying. 

 

It might mark the end of alienation, but, whereas in the past many saw this as an ideal goal, today "we can see that alienation protected us from something worse: from the definitive loss of the other, from the expropriation of the other by the same" [112].

Why's that so dreadful? 

 

Well, because to be dispossessed of the other results in an irrevocable and fatal destabilisation of the self. 

 

Think of what happens, for example, when the lamb lies down with the wolf; Christians might believe that to neutralise predators will bring about a future of universal peace and safety, in which even natural adversaries live in harmony (see Isaiah 11:6-9), but Baudrillard recognises that this results only in a tragic destiny for both animals. 

 

And it's the same for us:

 

"The best strategy for bringing about someone's ruin is to eliminate everything which threatens him, thus causing him to lose all his defences, and it is this strategy we are applying to ourselves. By eliminating the other in all its forms (illness, death, negativity, violence, strangeness), not to mention racial and [sexual] differences, by eliminating all singularities in order to radiate total positivity, we are eliminating ourselves." [113] 

  

 

Notes

 

[a] This first English edition was translated by Emile Capouya; dustjacket by Paul Bacon. The original Italian edition of Martini's novel - Il mondo senza donne - was published in 1936.

 

[b] See Jean Baudrillard, 'The Laying Off of Desire', in The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner  (Verso, 1996), pp. 111-114. Page references to this work will be given directly in the post.   

 

Screened Out: The D. H. Lawrence Birthday Post (2025)

D. H. Lawrence Screened Out 

(SA/2025)

 

Sat at home, surrounded by screens, I am no longer anywhere, but rather everywhere in the world at once, 

in the midst of a universal banality. - Jean Baudrillard 

  

We are surrounded - some might say imprisoned - on all sides by screens. Screens upon which the entire world is flattened and made immediately present, so that what was once separate and distinct is now merged and made the same; "distance is abolished in all things" [1].

And this process of digital nihilism means that when a meeting is held online in real time, it is stripped "of its historical dimension" [2] and no longer made available to memory. Participants are immersed not in the event itself, but in the image of the event in all its seductive fluidity. 

  

The danger is that at a certain level of immersion, we lose ourselves as flesh and blood beings; our corporeality is effectively screened out and we are rendered null and void; just smiling faces and talking heads on a screen (although, of course, even these smiles and voices are merely machine generated representations) [3].   

 

Ultimately, staring at a screen - no matter what it is you watch or who it is you listen to - only teaches you one thing: and that's how to stare at a screen. There is no possibility of discovering anything new online. The internet "merely simulates a free mental space [...] of freedom and discovery" [4] whilst operating on known elements and established codes of meaning. 

    

And, before you realise it - so comforting is it to be online where every question has an answer and there is no Other - your whole life has zoomed by in a game of "closed-circuit interactivity" [5] and one finally sees that the technology which promised to give us everything, has, in fact, deprived us of more than we'll ever know.     

 

 

II. 

 

Now, because all of the above is quite literally true - and not merely of vague philosophical interest - imagine my astonishment when, a few days ago, I received an email from Prof. Adam Parkes, Chair of the Co-ordinating Committee of International Lawrence Conferences, inviting me to join a Zoom meeting in order to share ideas for a conference in 2030 to mark the centenary of Lawrence's death.  

 

He signed off the email by writing: I look forward to seeing you on screen ...! 

 

Notes

 

[1] Jean Baudrillard, 'Screened Out', in Screened Out, trans. Chris Turner (Verso, 2002), p. 176.   

 

[2] Ibid. 

 

[3] In an extraordinarily prescient essay written in late 1929, D. H. Lawrence wrote: 

      "The amazing move into abstraction on the part of the whole of humanity [...] means we loathe the physical element [...] We don't want to look at flesh-and-blood people - we want to watch their shadows on a screen. We don't want to hear their actual voices: only transmitted through a machine."

      See 'Men Must Work and Women as Well', in Late Essays and Articles, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 283. 

 

[4] Baudrillard, Screened Out ... p. 179. 

 

[5] Ibid. 

 

 

For a related post to this one entitled 'Zoom: What Would D. H. Lawrence Do?' (23 Jan 2021), please click here.    

 

And for a much earlier discussion of Lawrence's reaction to the silver screen, see the post entitled 'At the Pictures with D. H. Lawrence' (13 June 2013): click here. 

 

 

This post is for David Brock and all the other rogue Lawrentians who refuse to have their thinking screened and reject the ecstasy of communication.  

 

Reflections on Genocide in Fairyland

Stephen Alexander (1994) [1]

 

'It is time to speak of the fairies. In order to escape from the intrepid melancholy 

of expectation, it is time to create new worlds.' [2]

 

I. 

 

My friend Jennifer has written a fairy tale about a young woman and an enchanted fish. 

 

Reading it reminded me that, once upon a time, I too wrote a short collection of tales to which I gave the title Genocide in Fairyland ... 

 

 

II. 

 

Motivated by my deep green ecological concerns, my enthusiastic reading of Jack Zipes, and my love for the stories of Angela Carter - not to mention my abiding hatred of Disney - I decided, in the words of Borges, that it was time to speak of the fairies in order not simply to create new worlds of the imagination, but voice support for this world and the creatures that inhabit it. 

 

And so, I set about writing a collection of stories (numbering eight in all) and an introduction that began:

 

"Fairies symbolise the frailty of the flesh as well as the beauty and magic of the natural world. Their plight dramatises the struggle of peoples the world over to retain a traditional way of life when confronted by modernity (i.e., the world of money and machines). 

      Further, the destruction of Fairyland parallels the destruction of our own environment and our ability to dream and envision a different way of relating to one another and to the Earth."  

 

And concluded: 

 

"What I've attempted with this short collection of stories is not new; the fairy tale has long lent itself as a genre to those interested in political issues and philosophical concerns to do with identity, otherness, sexuality, interspecies relations, etc. 

      Unlike realist narratives that attempt to tell it as it is, or didactic moral fables that instruct us how it should be, folk and fairy tales, at their best - which is to say, at their most violent, most anarchic, most crude, and most comical - give a glimpse of how things might have been (once upon a time), or could possibly be (in a time to come that is already now/here)."

 

Genocide in Fairyland, then, was a book of dysfunctional creatures in a disenchanted land. Little people looking, just like the rest of us, to build up new little habitats and have new little hopes (no matter how many skies have fallen) [3].    

       

 

III.       

 

Unfortunately, I don't have copies of the eight stories (nor do I have the rejection letters from the handful of publishers I sent a proposal to) [4]. 

 

However, I do have short outlines of each tale that expose my thinking at the time and which I would like to share here:  

 

 

Come Not with Kisses 

 

A tale set in the land of the Great White Swan concerning a young princess's attempt to preserve an egg entrusted to her by a dying swan and which, she is told, contains the future. 

      Discovered by her swan-hating soon-to-be husband attending to the bird, the princess in a moment of panic hides the egg in the safest place she can think of, inserting it into her vagina. 

      Time passes: her wedding to Prince Renée goes ahead as planned, but all the while she thinks of the swan and his promise that he would one day return to her. Shortly after their honeymoon, she announces her pregnancy and he is delighted with the news. 

      However, he has a surpise awaiting him: 

 

"Won't it be strange, when the nurse brings the new

- born infant 

to the proud father, and shows its little, webbed 

greenish feet 

made to smite the waters behind it?" [5]

 

 

The Tower of Love 

 

We all know that, in the name of love, there was once a king who locked his only daugter in a tower without a door on the day she began to menstruate, so that she would never wed and be lost to him.

      The princess, however, had other ideas and let down her long hair, thereby allowing any passing stranger to climb up to her room in the tower, should he so please. 

      Less well known, however, was that in the fomer Soviet Union tales were told of a group of female inmates in a high security prison who, in order to be transferred to jails with less brutal conditions, would impregnate themselves with sperm obtained from the single male prisoner confined below. 

      Using a long piece of thread, they would lower a condom to him from their cell window and sing a song of encouragement as he jerked off into it. Once he had finished, they would then retrieve the condom and attempt to self-inseminate. 

      As the prison guards were deeply religious - despite years of communism - they regarded any pregnancies that resulted as miraculous events.  

 

Curdled Milk 

 

This is the story of a simple-minded giant accused of inappropriate conduct when playing with a group of children. What concerns here is exactly what concerned Michel Foucault with reference to the 1867 case of Charles Jouy in the village of Lapcourt, France:      

      

"The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become [...] the object not only of collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration." [6]

 

 

Home Sweet Home (Revenge of the Unhappy House-Spirit)

 

A house-spirit is a bit like a hob; very hairy, but fully clothed and a wee bit more human looking. Usually, a house-spirit will live on the top shelf above the stove, where it is nice and warm and he can enjoy the smell of the cooking. 

      In the middle of the night, long after the people of the house have retired to their beds, a house-spirit will clean and tidy up the kitchen and help himself to some milk and cheese. The house-spirit also regards child minding as one of his duties and the thing he likes to do above all else is to rock a baby in its cradle.   

      But where does a house-spirit fit into a fitted kitchen? Into a world of dish-washers and microwaves and baby monitors and disinfectants that kill 99.9% of all known germs? 

      The answer, of course, is that he doesn't. 

      Angry and plunged into depression, the house-spirit in this story decides to extract a terrible revenge upon the modern couple who have robbed his life of purpose and the tale develops into a tragic one involving domestic violence and cot-death.  

 

 

Night of the Moon-Beam Folk

 

This is the story of the moon-beam folk and their revenge upon modern city-dwellers, whom they blame for polluting the clean fresh air that they provide [7]. 

      As the latter sleep in their beds in rooms kept artificially warm in winter and artificially cool in summer, the moon-beam folk visit and weave a web of moon-beams across their faces, covering their mouths and nostrils, and thereby ensuring that they go on breathing the same stale air all night long and wake feeling drowsy and fatigued. 

      Aware of his own increasing lack-lustreness, Jack sets out to discover its cause. Medical science providing no satisfactory answer, he consults a gypsy woman from the old country, and it is she who tells him of the moon-beam folk and how he might appease them.               

 

 

Hob

 

Acculturation refers to the way in which one group of people is obliged by another group of people - usually dominant, but not necessarily superior - to assimilate and surrender their beliefs, habits, customs etc. Often this is done in the name of some grand ideal, such as material and moral progress,

      Loosely based on the story of the Yanomami - the so-called fierce people of the Amazon rainforest bordering Venezuela and Brazil - this is the tale of the Hob; a horrible, ungodly, unwashed, uneducated race of hairy little people living in the last great forest of Fairyland. 

         

     

When Jack Went Back Up the Beanstalk

 

The story of Jack - the poor boy who, with only a handful of beans, makes good by slaying a giant - is the quintessential English folk tale. 

      But surely it's wrong to steal and murder; even if one is stealing from and murdering a being regarded as a cannibalistic monster or ogre ...? And surely there are social consequences of rewarding such a youth as Jack - lazy, dishonest, violent - with wealth and celebrity ...?  

      In this tale, I pick up Jack's story several years after his initial adventure and reimagine what happened atop the beanstalk. 

 

 

Bait 

 

One of the more shameful methods employed by hunters to trap and kill wolves was to tie a female dog in heat to a tree in the forest and then wait for a male wolf to pick up her scent, locate her position, then mount her. Once inside the dog, and having ejaculated, the wolf's penis swells up and is gripped by the contracting muscles of the female dog's vagina (effectively acting as a plug to trap the semen). 

      This results in what is known as a copulatory bond (or breeding tie), locking the the two animals together for a period up to 30 minutes and, during this time, the hunter will come out from his hide and club the defenceless wolf to death.   

      With this in mind, here is my version of La Belle et la Bête, involving a cruel hunter who plans to use his own adolescent daughter as bait in order to trap and kill the Beast. Unfortunately for him, however, Beauty falls in love with the Beast after discovering that she rather enjoys his sexual embrace and so the two of them turn the tables on her father and it is he who falls victim to them.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Proposed design for book cover incorporating a black and white version of William Blake's frontispiece for Songs of Experience (1794).   

 

[2] Jorge Luis Borges with Margarita Guerrero, Book of Imaginary Beings, trans.  Norman Thomas di Giovanni (E.P. Dutton, 1969).

 

[3] The last line borrows from the famous opening passage to D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) - a passage which may well have influenced my thinking more than any other passage in any other novel.    

 

[4] And nor, sadly, do I have the letter from Tony Juniper, then at Friends of the Earth, who agreed to write a foreword to the book, after I had promised that a percentage of any monies that it might make from sales would be donated to FoE and/or other green organisations and causes.  

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Won't it be Strange -?, Pansies (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1929), p. 23. 

 

[6] Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Pengun Books, 1998), p. 31. 

      Probably I would be a little more cautious about writing this tale today, in light of what we now know concerning Foucault and the sexual exploitation of minors. See the post dated 9 January 2021 in which I discuss this problematic issue with reference to Foucault and Gabriel Matzneff: click here. 

      And see the post of 11 June 2021 on child sexual abuse accomodation syndrome with reference to the case of Norman Douglas and Eric Wolton: click here.     

 

[7] A tale inspired by a scene in D. H. Lawrence's novella St. Mawr (1925); see p. 108 of the Cambridge University Press edition - published as St. Mawr and Other Stories - ed. Brian Finney (1983). 

 

 

Theoscatology in Nietzsche and Lawrence

Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence Skibidi Toilet style [1]

  

 

I. 

 

Philosophers, eh? The shit that sometimes comes out of their mouths!

 

Take Nietzsche, for example; did he really say that men must defecate in order to become divine?

 

Sort of. 

 

Only he wasn't talking about the discharging of faeces from the body, so much as the elimination of sin - i.e., spiritual rather than biological waste; the toxic consequence of bad conscience rather than the semi-solid remains of last night's dinner.  

 

That becomes clear if we look at what he writes in an unpublished note from late 1883:

 

Many things about man are not very godly: whenever a person excretes faeces, how can he be a god then? But it is even worse regarding the other faeces we call sin: man still surely wants to retain this, and not excrete it. Now however, I must believe it: a person can be a god and still excrete faeces. Thus I teach you, excrete your faeces and become gods. [2]

 

 

II.

 

Like Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence is also concerned in his theoscatological musings with the elimination of certain adverse emotions. Our great task, he says, is to liberate the mind from its "fear of the body and the body's potencies" [3], before we fall ever further into madness [4].

 

Both authors, in other words, are concerned with the collapse of the primary instincts and the way in which internalised cruelty produces a moral subject [5]. And both wish for man to elevate himself by accepting those things which make us ashamed: 

 

"If we are ashamed, instead of covering the shame with a veil, let us accept the thing which makes us ashamed, understand it and be at one with it. If we shrink from some sickening issue of ourselves, instead of recoiling [...] let us go down into ourselves, enter the hell of corruption and putresence, and rise again, not fouled, but fulfilled and free." [6] 

 

This may involve an act of anal sex [7], or it may simply involve building a less hysterical relationship with language - particularly the so-called obscene words that cause us embarrassment; i.e., all the old words "that belong to the body below the navel" [8].

   

Lawrence continues:

 

"Myself, I am mystified at this horror over a mere word, a plain simple word that stands for a plain simple thing. 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God and the Word was with God.' If that is true, then we are very far from the beginning. [...] Because today, if you suggest that the word arse was in the beginning and was God and was with God, you will just be put in prison at once. [...] Now that sort of thing is idiotic and humiliating. Whoever the god was that made us, he made us complete. He didn't stop at the navel, and leave the rest to the devil. [...] If the Word is God [...] then you can't suddenly say that all the words which belong below the navel are obscene. The word arse is as much god as the word face. It must be so, otherwise you cut your god off at the waist." [9] 

  

Notes

 

[1] Skibidi Toilet is a machinima web series created by Alexey Gerasimov in 2023 and released via his YouTube channel, DaFuq!?Boom! Featuring toilet bowls with human heads emerging, it has become hugely popular amongst the kids of Generation Alpha.

 

[2] See The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche Volume 14: Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Summer 1882–Winter 1883/84), trans. Paul S. Loeb and David F. Tinsley, ed. Alan D. Schrift and Duncan Large (Stanford University Press, 2019). 

      Or, if one wishes to check the original German text, see KSA 10:635-37:23. 

      Richard Perkins discusses this fragment in his essay 'An Innocent Little Story: Nietzsche and Jesus in Allegorical Conjunction', Nietzsche Studien Volume 26, Issue 1 (1997), pp. 361-383. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 309. 

 

[4] Lawrence famously attacks Swift for making his mistress Celia feel terrible about her own natural functions, including defecating. See the post entitled 'Celia Shits! Notes on Jonathan Swift's The Lady's Dressing Room and (Alleged) Coprophobia (2 April 2024): click here.  

 

[5] Nietzsche famously discuss this in the second essay of the Genealogy (1887). 

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 35. 

 

[7] I have published several posts dealing with the subject of anal sex in Lawrence's work: click here.  

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Pansies', Appendix 6 in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 664. 

 

[9] Ibid.  

      Of course, there are some - like Sir Clifford Chatterley, for example, who delight in this idea of cutting God off at the waist; see chapter XVI of Lady Chatterley's Lover, where he reads to Connie from one of the 'latest scientific-religious books' - Whitehead's Religion in the Making (1926) - about the manner in which the universe is physically wasting and spiritually ascending. 

      Connie has no time for such nonsense, but Clifford insists that "'whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being'" (see p. 235 of the 1993 CUP edition, ed. Michael Squires).   

 

Once Upon a Time ... There Was a Philosopher Named Friedrich Nietzsche and He Privileged a Pissing Giant Over Clever Dwarves

Nietzsche with Snow White, dwarves, and other fairy tale characters 

in a whimsical, enchanted forest with a gingerbread house

craiyon.com 

  

We think that play and fairy tales belong to childhood: how shortsighted that is! 

As though we would want at any time of life to live without play and fairy tales! [1]

 

 

I.  

 

As the above quotation demonstrates, Nietzsche always loved fairy tales - or Märchen, as the Germans call them - a genre of short story characterised by magical or supernatural elements, archetypal characters, a fantastical setting, and (all too often) a conventional moral lesson in which good triumphs over evil and order is restored to a chaotic world. 

 

So, no surprise then that he should write one of his own ...

 

 

II. 

 

Whilst in Turin, in April 1888 - only nine months before his collapse - Nietzsche scribbled an untitled short text about a giant and some dwarves into a notebook where it remained unpublished for many years [2]. 

 

Less than 150 words in the original German, it's a queer story about the mortal danger of being urinated upon when you are of restricted stature, by someone monstrously bigger in size. For it's not only unpleasant, when you're a dwarf, if a giant pisses on you, but there's the very real risk of drowning (a prospect that even the most ardent urophile might blanch at) [3].

 

Thus, the dwarves recognise that they have to find a way to prevent the giant from relieving his bladder - and, indeed, stop him from shitting on them as well.     

 

(Somehow, I don't think Disney are going to be bidding for the rights to make this into a film anytime soon.)  

 

For the oldest and wisest dwarf, this double danger presented something of a philosophical problem; clearly action needed to be taken in the face of an existential threat. But the situation necessitated not only trying to scare the giant away by tickling him and biting his toes - "customary means to encouraging and enforcing bowel and bladder control" [4] - but morally measuring up and rising to the challenge as a people.   

  

 

III. 

 

What are we to make of this ...?

 

The story seems to suggest that powerful individuals - in this case one who is great in size and strength - can become threatening to the well-being of others smaller in size and weaker in strength and therefore need to be restrained and, if possible, persuaded to curtail their natural instincts.         

 

But that would be a rather surprising lesson coming from Nietzsche who not only refuses to posit a doer separate from their deeds [5], but usually writes in praise of greatness and dislikes the little people who, in the name of morality and civilisation, wish to cut others down to their own size, à la David, slayer of Goliath (1 Samuel 17) [6]. 

 

Zarathustra, for example, is forever bemoaning the fact that everywhere he looks, everything has become smaller; houses, men, virtue and even happiness [7]. Small people, he says, mistake mediocrity for moderation and fundamentally only want one thing: that nobody shall do them any harm - and that includes not pissing on them.  

 

So, despite initial impressions, Nietzsche's tale is probably a satirical (uro-scatological) attempt to reverse values and "twist the standard Märchen perspective that establishes cultural relationships between giants and little people" [8].    

 

Ultimately, argues Richard Perkins: 

 

"The giant expresses a natural and cultural superfluity that squanders its great capacities. He represents 'overflowing' as such, and, in an important sense, his crude bodily eliminations illustrate the supreme value that Zarathustra designates as the 'gift-giving virtue' [...] The giant pisses away his virtue as gold glistens and as the sun radiates its creative brilliance." [9]   

 

And on that watersporty note ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (II. 1. 270), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 277. 

 

[2] For those who can read German, the tale can be found in the Critical Student Edition of Nietzsche's Complete Works: KSA 13: 483: 16. 

      For those who can't, an English translation by Richard Perkins is available in his essay 'A Giant and Some Dwarves: Nietzsche's Unpublished Märchen on the Exception and the Rule', in Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies, Vol. 11, Nos. 1-2 (Wayne State University Press, 1997), pp. 61-73. 

      This essay, which I shall quote from later in the post, is available to read or download on JSTOR: click here. 

 

[3] One wonders if Nietzsche ever read Rabelais's The Inestimable Life of the Great Gargantua (1535), in which the famous giant urinates on the city of Paris from the heights of Notre Dame, causing the people to flee, fearful that they'll be washed away in a torrent of piss (and, indeed, over 250,000 Parisians - not even counting the women and children - do drown in the resulting flood, according to Rabelais).     

 

[4] Richard Perkins, op. cit., p. 71. 

 

[5] Refuses, that is to say, to fall into the metaphysical and grammatical trap of thinking that there's a free-willing subject who can - and in certain circumstances ought - to change their behaviour. This clever moral move allows notions of blame, guilt, and sin (i.e., bad conscience) to enter into the world; see the Genealogy where all this is examined by Nietzsche in depth. 

      The key point is this: to ask a giant not to express his strength and not to piss when his bladder's full, is like asking an eagle not to prey upon a lamb. 

       

[6] One thinks also of how the good people of Lilliput are initially fearful and mistrustful of Gulliver and how, even after he has saved their land from invasion and extinguished a fire at the royal palace by, funnily enough, pissing on it, they turn on him and decide to blind him and starve him to death. 

      See Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels (1726).   

 

[7] See 'Of the Virtue that Makes Small', in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 

      See also 'On the Vision and the Riddle' in the same text, where Zarathustra (assuming the role of a giant) carries a dwarf on his shoulders in order to give the latter a glimpse of greatness. Unfortunately, however, the dwarf fails to understand the profundity of what he sees and Nietzsche is able to show why the metaphor about 'standing on the shoulders of giants' (i.e. accepting intellectual dependency on past figures) is something that needs to be critically re-examined. 

 

[8] Richard Perkins, op. cit., p. 66.  

 

[9] Ibid., p. 70. 

      Perkins also directs us towards another unpublished piece in which Nietzsche gives his philosophical project a scatological twist: a fragment dating to late 1883 (see KSA 10: 635-37), which concludes with the startling injunction to shit and become as gods! For a discussion of the theoscatological in Nietzsche (and Lawrence) please click here. 

 

Re-entering the Circle of Fragments

Self-portrait used for cover of The Circle of Fragments 

(Blind Cupid Press, 2010)

 

 

I. 

 

The final book I published with Blind Cupid Press in 2010 [1] was a collection of little poems [2] written in the period 2000-09.

 

The title of the work - The Circle of Fragments - and, to some extent, the style of the pieces themselves, was inspired by the following lines written by Roland Barthes: 

 

"To write by fragments: the fragments are then so many stones on the perimeter of a circle: I spread myself around: my whole little universe in crumbs; at the centre, what?" [3]  

 

"The fragment ... implies an immediate delight: it is a fantasy of discourse, a gaping of desire. In the form of the thought-sentence, the germ of the fragment comes to you anywhere: in the café, on the train, talking to a friend ..." [4]  

 

What I wrote in a very short preface to the book is even more true now than then: along with a few broken bones and some shards of shattered glass, these leftover fragments - written between Barcelona and Berlin, Aberdeen and Athens - are pretty much all that remain from this period of my life.  

 

And so, it was amusing to recently re-enter le cercle des fragments and look back at what they captured (and, just as importantly, what they missed or failed to capture).    

 

 

II.

 

Obviously, I cannot reproduce all 112 of the fragments, although readers will find a number of them scattered here and there on Torpedo the Ark if they search the index closely enough (or click on those titles below that conveniently come with a link). 

 

However, I thought it might be instructive to provide a full list of titles [5] in the hope that they will provide a clue of sorts as to the content, theme, mood, and tone of the anthology:

 

Sea-Bitch, German Sea-Cow, Sun-Lizard-Rock, Love Remains the Great Adventure, In the Land of Convalescence, Underground with all the World, Death Chant, Sitges, Post-Coital Disappointment, At the Anchovy Museum (Collioure), Mosquito, Black Holes, The Holy Life, One Should Not Apologise Oneself Out of Existence Simply to Please Her, The Sorrow of an Invisible Man, The Bitterness of a Domesticated Man, The Woman Who Was Jealous of the World, Idiota, At the Funeral of a Domesticated Man, Lolita, In Memory of Anaïs Nin, In Memory of Henry Miller, The Birthday Cake, On the Other Side, Blanes, Song of a Discontented Man, When You Are Dead, In the Bookshop, Yolanda, In Becoming a Subject of the Sun, Lemon Drizzle, The Taormina Virgins, Un relation privilégiée, Phallic Defiance on Ward H2, In Memory of Friedrich Nietzsche, Filthy Love (In Memory of Georges Bataille), Diary Fragment, Hakenkreuz, Her Cunt, Supposing Truth to be a Woman, Life Bleeds, At the Party, Spinster (In Memory of Sylvia Plath), Flightpath, In Memory of Marinetti, Under Erasure, Haecceity, In Memory of the Divine One, The Three Consolations, Baby on the Bus, Aberdeen, Miracle, Tear Drops, Polarity, Confession of a White Widowed Male, Being and Nothingness, The Boring Dead, Little Greek, Flow, Becoming-Flower, Promises Promises, Fucked-Up, Crab-Like, Pa amb Tomaquet, Sandals, Floratopia, Fox, We Do Not Have Souls, September, In This Life, Posthumous Hope, Decree Nisi, Dawn, Image, Thomas, Mark, In Kissing Liberty, Odysseus, With the Coming of the Sun and the Rising of the Moon I Think of Her, Dawn Chorus, Conflicted Morality and Desire, Seven Fragments of Glass: I: Crash! II: In the Confrontation with Glass III: At the Hospital in Athens IV: Poppies V: The Vengeance of Objects VI: On Which Side is Wonderland? VII: I Love Everything That Flows, This is not a Love Song, Love, What She Should Tell Him, Tears, The Danger, Gifts, Self-Sacrifice, The Hired Hand, Snippets, Death Sentence, Lost Crows, We’re a Long Way From Wuthering Heights, Breast Relief for a Dying God, Little Miss Microbe, Reflections on the Abolition of Slavery, Regents Park, Cockroach, Caliban, If the World Were Caring, The Tour Guide, Roses in April, Abandoned, Baby Fingers, Negritude, Rats, Beige, Zurüchgeblieben, Aufklärung.   

 

 

III. 

 

Looking back, I still think many of these little poems sparkle in an amusing manner (even if the world at the time did not agree) and I regard them with similar affection as D. H. Lawrence regarded his own collection of fragments, which he called Pansies.

 

Better, says Lawence, to offer a simple thought which "comes as much from the heart and the genitals as from the head" [6], than present clever ideas and opinions - or didactic statements - dressed up in lyrical form. 

 

And this passage from Lawrence re his book of pensées perfectly expresses how I felt about The Circle of Fragments: 

 

"I do not want to offer this little book as a candidate for eternity in the ranks of immortal literature. It is [...] a book of today, and if it is a book of tomorrow, well and good. But I hope that on the third day, it will have gone to sleep, and become forgotten. Immortal literature dragging itself out to a repetitional eternity can be a great nuisance, and a block to anything fresh." [7] 

      

   

Notes

 

[1] There were seven Blind Cupid Press books published in 2010. The other six titles were:  

 

Whore's Don't Fuck Between the Bedsheets: Fragments from an Illicit Lover's Discourse 

Outside the Gate: Nietzsche's Project of Revaluation Mediated Via the Work of D. H. Lawrence

Visions of Excess and Other Essays

The Treadwell's Papers Volumes I & II: Sex/Magic and Thanatology

The Treadwell's Papers Volumes III & IV: Zoophilia and Reflections Beneath a Black Sun

Erotomania and Other Essays

[2] As will become clear, I primarily think of the pieces as fragments, though often in the past I described them as little poems, even if that's a problematic term both for me and for my critics who insist that they lack the rhythymic language and richness of imagery that defines the art of poetry. Some have suggested that they might, at a push, be called aphorisms, but, again, I'd be weary of using that term; the fragments may be short and observational, but I'm not sure they embody any form of wisdom or truth. 

 

[3] Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Papermac, 1995), pp. 92-93.

 

[4] Ibid., p. 94.  

  

[5] I'm one of those writers to whom titles matter. Indeed, I sometimes dream of the perfect title that would make the text redundant. Probably this is why I was once told that I'm not a serious writer or thinker, but, rather, a sloganeer or a comedian addicted to certain catchphrases and for whom everything is ultimately just a set up for a punchline. 

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Introduction to Pansies, Appendix 6, The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 663. 

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Unused Foreword to Pansies, Appendix 7, The Poems, Vol. I ... p. 667.