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.   

 

 

On Philosophy and Prostitution (Reflections on An Illicit Lover's Discourse)

Everything I know I learned in the School of Vice!

I.

Reading a fragment by Cioran in which he advises the philosopher who is "disappointed with systems and superstitions" to imitate the street savvy scepticism of that "least dogmatic of creatures: the prostitute", reminded me of my own musings from long ago on this topic, collected as An Illicit Lover's Discourse ...    

II.

The aim of this short work, written many years ago and privately published (with a revised title) by Blind Cupid Press in 2010, was not to describe in detail the world of the Prostitute, but to examine the nature of the love affair that exists between her and her clients; for in this relation we discover much of the violence, obscenity, and poignancy of modern life.

The necessity for the book lay in the following consideration: the discourse of the Prostitute and her Illicit Lover was at that time openly displayed in every other central London phone box. This discourse, spoken and shared by thousands of amorous subjects, had received very little attention, scorned as it is by the languages of authority which, nevertheless, often share in its image-repertoire and sustain its stereotypes.

Essentially, I was hoping to indicate the manner in which some of the more frequently occurring myths upon which the pornographic imagination is founded are circulated by and within wider culture and reveal how legitimate discourses - of literature, fashion, and advertising, for example - frequently feed off and into the writings and images of the Prostitute.

The short fragments were written in relation to a large number of cards collected casually over a two-year period from phone boxes mostly in the Paddington and Soho areas of London, where they'd been conveniently placed by the Prostitute. To my mind, these cards constituted a populist and promiscuous medium and could be thought of as an obscene form of folk-art. Mushrooming in the fetid, urine-soaked environment of the phone box, they represented the public face of prostitution and were an affirmation of the Prostitute’s right to self-expression and self-promotion.

I made no attempt to establish any unity or development between the fragments. In fact, the only link between them was one of insistence and repetition; qualities which are of course inherent to pornography as a genre. Thus, as in the cards upon which they were based, the same words would appear over and over in the text, constructing the Prostitute not as a woman like any other, but as a symptomal subject of the pornographic imagination.

Some fragments broke off short; others contradicted something that had already been said elsewhere in the text. Ultimately, however, this was unimportant: the fragments were not meant to be taken too seriously and the success or otherwise of each depended on whether the reader was able to relate it to some aspect of their own experience and in this way be able to declare its truth.

If there was anything central to my assemblage of fragments, then, I suppose, it was the body of the Prostitute - although whether we can actually locate and reveal such is debatable. For the body of the Prostitute must not be thought of as a natural object just waiting to be discovered, but rather as a cultural construction in which is encoded a whole set of values: the shape, size, colour, age and all the ornamental attributes of the Prostitute’s body signify what we imagine illicit sexual desire and femininity to be. Thus the body of the Prostitute exposes our own fantasies.

Wishing neither to celebrate nor condemn the Prostitute, my affection for the figure as a woman who denies nothing and no one and lives beyond judgement, was fairly obvious throughout the text. Found in all places, all cultures, and all ages, the Prostitute is, paradoxically, someone who is forever at the margins of society and has abolished all history in her person. She is, in this manner, untimely.

And if this makes her philosophically interesting, then the manner in which she silently accepts the abuse of those who speak against her and call for her punishment makes her lovable in my eyes.

Notes

E. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard, (Penguin Books, 2018). See the section 'Philosophy and Prostitution' in chapter 1: 'Directions for Decomposition', pp. 81-82.

If I'd known of this text at the time of writing, I almost certainly would have referred to it. For what Cioran writes here is very close to my own position. I agree, for example, that the prostitute offers us a mode of behaviour which philosophers would do well to consider; detached and yet open to everything; lacking moral convictions and prejudices; quick to change position, etc. And, crucially, whores don't fuck between the bed-sheets ...   

Stephen Alexander, Whores Don't Fuck between the Bed-Sheets: Fragments from an Illicit Lover's Discourse, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010).