On the Feral Poetry of Fran Lock

 

Fran Lock in human and hyena form

 

 

Fran Lock likes to describe her poetic practice as feral - by which she means "omnivorous, opportunistic, accretive and excessive" [1]. 

 

Hers is not a poetry which germinates in "periods of quiet sustained reflection", but one cobbled together with a certain violence and a needs-be-as-needs-must attitude born of her working-class background. 

 

But is it any good? Based on the work I've read so far, I'd say it is ...

 

Or, at any rate, I'd say that - as a Deleuzian - it appeals to me, because, like Kafka, Lock is not attempting to express the inexpressible, or impose a coherent and conventional linguistic form on lived experience, so much as construct a minor literature. 

 

In other words, she problematises everyday language which all-too-easily and all-too-often becomes sticky with familiar use and overlaid with doxa. 

 

Raised with a strong sense of her Irish heritage, Lock carries English away from itself and opens up a kind of foreign tongue within it; not by simply inventing neologisms, but by forcing a dominant language out of its usual syntactic conventions and thereby making it stutter or scream and travel to its own external limits (limits which are not outside language, but are the outside of language).

 

It's no surprise that Lock is also interested in therianthropy, because writing at its best always effects a becoming-animal (be it insect, hyena, or great white whale) [2] and transports us from the land of Oedipus to that zone of indiscernibility wherein we can lose our domesticated human selves and experiment with wild forms of otherness.  

 

She doesn't always succeed, but that's okay; Lock has learnt to assume the risks of failure and embrace her "moments of humiliated over-reach", continually pushing not only beyond her own comfort zone but her own competence. 

 

It's better, she argues, to be thought ridiculous than boring and if that alienates some readers and critics, she doesn't care; "I’m not a branch of the service industry, and nobody said my relationship to the people encountering my work had to be gentle or friendly."  

 

That's a statement that makes an old punk very happy ...

 

 

Notes

[1] Fran Lock, 'T. S. Eliot Prize Writers' Notes', on the Poetry School website: click here. All lines quoted here are from this text. 

 

[2] Admittedly, and somewhat disappointingly, Lock refers her idea of becoming animal (understood in terms of literal transformation) back to the American author Charles Hoy Fort and his book Wild Talents (1932), and not to Deleuze and Guattari's more philosophical notion developed in Mille Plateaux (1980). 

 

 

Bonus: to watch Fran Lock briefly talking about her work, her relation to language, and animal transformation fantasy, click here. 

 

 

I am grateful to Chloe Rose Campbell for introducing me to the work of Fran Lock. 

 

 

Advice to a Young Blogger (2): On Establishing Your Blog as a Plane of Immanence

Gilles Deleuze attempting to keep things simple

 

 

I. 

 

In a recent post I offered some advice about blogging; stressing the need to be consistent, insistent, and persistent if one wishes to establish a plane of immanence [click here].

 

But Franz, from Austria, has written to ask what is meant by this complex concept, borrowed from Deleuzian philosophy [1], in relation to a humble theory of blogging.

 

So, let me try and answer ...

 

 

II. 

 

By establishing a plane of immanence - in relation to a theory of blogging - I mean that one must do more than merely create a space of writing in which to publish one's ideas, memories, observations, and holiday snaps [2].

 

On a blog conceived as a plane of immanence, we find an intricate network of forces, particles, connections, affects, and becomings and the writer becomes a subject-without-identity - a difference engineer - not an author who personally vouches for the truth content of the posts or guarantees the logical organisation and development of the blog. 

 

On a blog conceived as a plane of immanence, posts shouldn't be considered as empty forms awaiting for an author to fill them with content in order to give them their significance. Posts should be thought, rather, as active productions (or events) in themselves that require concrete methods of immanent evaluation rather than texts awaiting judgement with reference to a transcendent model of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.     

 

The key thing is: on a blog conceived as a plane of immanence, one can ensure the eternal return of difference; not repetition of the same. In that way, blogging is about becoming, not securing identity. 

 

And remember: Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own ... [3]  

 

Notes

 

[1] Deleuze can be a difficult philosopher to read at times, but I think it's fair to say that when he writes of a plane of immanence, he's putting forward an epistemological notion; but when he writes of the plane of immanence, he posits an ontological idea (developing Spinoza's monism). It's the former that has always most interested me; that is to say, the fact that there can be multiple planes of immanence each corresponding to an image of thought. 

 

[2] Like Deleuze, I do not think writing is an attempt to impose a coherent and conventional linguistic form on lived experience; blogging should not become a form of personal overcoding. Any writing that is reliant upon the recounting of childhood memories, foreign holidays, lost loves, or sexual fantasies, is not only frequently bad writing, but dead writing; for literature dies from an excess of emotion, imagination, and autobiography, just as it does from an overdose of reality. See the post entitled 'A Deluezean Approach to Literature' (30 August 2013): click here. 

[3] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 239. 

 

 

Piss Artists 2: Helen Chadwick (Piss Flowers)

Helen Chadwick in a field of Piss Flowers

Photo by Kippa Matthews (1992)

 

 

I. 

 

For most British people, a piss artist is one who likes to get drunk, act the fool, produce shoddy work and generally waste time. In other words, one who gets pissed a little too often; pisses around a little too much; and pisses people off more than is deemed acceptable. 

 

However, for some of us, the term also triggers thoughts of Warhol, Chadwick and Serrano and here I would like to discuss a famous work by the second of these three piss artists, Helen Chadwick ...

 

 

II. 

 

The British artist Helen Chadwick died (relatively) young - she was only 42 - but not before she completed the work by which I, like many of her admirers, best remember her - Piss Flowers (1991-1992). 

 

Piss Flowers is a work composed of twelve sculptures made by quite literally pissing in the Canadian snow and then pouring plaster into the (pre-cut) flower-shaped cavities left by the warm streams of urine. 

 

These casts were then attached to stem-like pedestals based on the fat-bodied shape of a hyacinth bulb, before being cast in bronze and enamelled white.        

If it sounds like all good clean fun (whatever that means), Chadwick insisted that, actually, it was hard work producing the dozen finished pieces and they also cost her £12,000, which might sound like a small or large sum of money, depending on one's circumstances [1].   

The Piss Flowers were displayed (on artificial grass) as part of Chadwick's solo exhibition - amusingly entitled Effluvia - at the Serpentine Gallery, in the summer of 1994 [2]. Happy days ...

 

 

III.

 

Enchanted by the fact that the majority of flowering plants possess both male and female sexual organs and have found a way to incorporate sexual difference into their singular being, Chadwick wanted to produce a work which celebrated this via a form of erotic play, or what she describes in a poem written at the same time as "Gender-bending water sport" [3].   

 

Thus, it was important that she and her male partner, David Notarius, both pissed into the snow; she using her liquid waste to create the central phallic-shaped pistil and he directing his urine to produce the delicate, labial-looking circumference. In the same poem referred to above, Chadwick writes of "Vaginal towers with male skirt" [4].   

 

Later, she would describe Piss Flowers as a metaphysical conceit - and a deeply romantic work in which two people are united as one via bodily expression. It might also be seen, as one commentator rightly points out, as an example of indexical art - i.e., art that doesn't appear to be authored but directly preserving an imprint of reality (an idea that had long fascinated Chadwick). 

 

Whether one finds the flowers beautiful or repulsive (or both) is, of course, a matter of individual judgement; one local councillor up in the East Midlands was quoted by the Nottingham Evening Post as saying: "I doubt the minds of the people who can create things like this." [5] 

 

Whilst personally I wouldn't want a fleur de pisse planted in my back garden, I do admire Chadwick's attempts to create things of beauty out of unconventional materials, such as bodily fluids and base matter.

 

And her attempt to effect a becoming-plant by entering into an unnatural alliance with the snow in such a manner that queer forms blossom from molecular forces is not only artistically daring but - from a Deleuzean perspective - philosophically interesting. 

 

One can't help wondering what would Linnaeus say ...?

 

Notes

 

[1] £12,000 in 1992 was the equivalent to around £31,000 today.

 

[2] Effluvia received widespread critical attention and national press coverage. It was seen by over 54,000 visitors - a record number for the gallery at that time.

 

[3] Helen Chadwick, 'Piss Posy' (1992). 

      Unfortunately, I cannot locate this poem online and do not know if it was ever published. However, I did come across (what I think is termed) an ekphrastic poem written by Jo Shapcott, entitled 'Piss Flower' (2018), which can be read online (thanks to The Poetry Archive) by clicking here. It is clearly inspired by Chadwick's work.  

 

[4] Helen Chadwick, 'Piss Posy' (1992). 

 

[5] The fact that this censor-moron was a councillor up in D. H. Lawrence country only goes to show how little things have changed; 60-odd years earlier, Lawrence's art was attacked as the work of a depraved sex maniac - including his watercolour Dandelions (1928), which famously depicts a man pissing on some flowers: click here. 

 

 

To read the first post in this series - on Andy Warhol's Piss and Oxidation Paintings (1977-1978) - please click here.

 

To read the third post in this series - on Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987) - please click here.

Petrophilia: A Brief Note on the Geochemical Origin of Life and the Religious Worship of Rocks

Der Nietzsche-Stein [1]

 

 

I. 

 

According to Deleuze and Guattari, not only do plants and animals sing and express themselves, so too do rocks [2]. I don't quite know what they mean by this, but as a petrophile, it's always been an idea that resonated with me. 

 

Of course, I know that rocks are not alive. But I also know that biochemistry rests upon geochemistry and that researchers have shown how rocks and minerals play a crucial role in almost every phase of life's emergence; catalysing, for example, the synthesis of biomolecules, and kick-starting metabolism [3]. 

 

In fact, according to the British organic chemist and molecular biologist Graham Cairns-Smith, the very earliest form of life was possibly a type of clay mineral able to carry genetic information and evolve. This is a provocative and controversial claim, but one that has been taken seriously by philosophers interested in the question of what does and does not constitute life [4].

 

We usually think of the latter as being carbon-based and involving cells containing DNA. But Cairns-Smith obliges us to ask if that was always the case - and must it always be the same on distant alien planets? 

 

 

II. 

 

When feeling in a slightly less scientific and more religious frame of mind, I'm also tempted to agree with D. H. Lawrence that from the smallest stone to the greatest rock we find God made manifest [5]. 

 

It seems that those ancient pagans who practiced their pantheism in material (non-abstract) terms were profoundly right to do so; for "everything that has being has being in the flesh" [6].

 

Interestingly, we might note in closing how even some modern Christians celebrate Jesus as the Rock of Ages, i.e., an unfailing and seemingly everlasting presence in their lives [7].  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] According to Nietzsche, the central idea of Thus Spoke Zarathustra - i.e., the idea of eternal recurrence - came to him when he encountered this large rock on the shores of Lake Silvaplana (Switzerland).

 

[2] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 44.

 

[3] See Robert M. Hazen (ed.), 'Genesis: Rocks, Minerals, and the Geochemical Origin of Life', Elements Vol. 1 (June 2005), pp. 135-137.

 

[4] See Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, (Cambridge University Press, 1985).

      This book popularized the clay hypothesis, which promoted the idea that self-replication of clay crystals in solution might provide a simple intermediate step between biologically inert matter and organic life.

 

[5] See D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 95.

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'Bodiless God', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 605. See also the poem 'The Body of God' on the same page of the above.

 

[7] This well-known Christian hymn written by Reformed Anglican minister Augustus Toplady was first published (in full and with a revised first verse) in The Gospel Magazine in March 1776. 

Reflections on Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han (Part Three)

Cover of the Portuguese edition 

(Relógio D'Água, 2022) [a]

 

 

I.

The ethics of inactivity rests, according to Byung-Chul Han, on timidity. For it is timidity which increases our attentiveness (our ability to listen) to others and to the world. 

 

I'm not sure about this, however, and wonder if the German word Scheu might better have been translated as shy. For shyness, it seems to me, is not quite the same as timidity; it lacks the nervousness or fearful aspect of the latter and is more about instinctive reserve [b].

 

But maybe I'm mistaken: I'll leave it to any passing etymologists to decide the matter ...  

 

 

II.

 

"The root of the current crisis is the disintegration of everything that gives life meaning and orientation. Life is no longer borne by anything that supports it, and that we can support." [48]

 

In other words - words first uttered by a madman 150 years ago - God is dead. One might have hoped that we'd moved on from here and realised that nihilism needn't be dressed in the gloomy dark colours of the late 19th-century. Personally, the last thing I want to do is give life meaning and point it in the right direction. 

 

Nor am I interested in ideas of immortality and the imperishable - when Han uses these words I think of D. H. Lawrence mocking those who desire to witness the unfading flowers of heaven [c]. 

 

I'm sorry, but I like the impermanence of things and the fact that all things pass. What Han calls temporal structures - annual rituals and festivals - may provide the passage of time with a certain architecture or narrative, but they don't, thankfully, make time stand still. I'm all for preserving the rhythym of life and allowing being to linger, but that doesn't mean stopping the clocks.    

 

Nor do I want incontrovertible truths - even if they are said to make happy (there's more to life than happiness and there's also more than one type of happiness). And I'm sick of being weighed down by powerful symbols. 

 

The latter may very well influence our behaviour and thinking "at the pre-reflexive, emotional, aesthetic level" [50] - and symbols may be excellent at creating the shared experience that enables the formation of a socially cohesive community - but that doesn't always result in compassion, does it? Just ask those who lived under the swastika, or hammer and sickle.      

 

"A community is a symbolically mediated totality." [51] That's Han. But it could be Heidegger. Or might be Hitler. And if my failure to long for a "wholesome, healing totality" [51] makes me a splinter or fragment lacking in being, that's fine. Liberal society has many downsides - it isolates the individual and forces them to compete - but living in some kind of people's community that promises fullness of being and salvation is not something I desire.  

 

Although, having said that, I do understand the attraction of what Lawrence terms a democracy of touch [d] and I suspect that's the sort of community Han is thinking of when he talks about creating ties between people invested with libidinal energy (though I'm not sure that Eros is the answer to everything).  

 

 

III.

 

Having got roughly half way into (and thus also half way out of) Han's book, let us remind ourselves of his central argument: "the highest happiness is owed to contemplation" [53] - not action. It's an argument we can trace all the way back to the pre-Socratic philosophers. 

 

Ultimately, we act in the world so that we might one day be afforded the time to sit and wonder at the world. Being free to gaze in silence and stillness is the reward for all our efforts. If, as Heidegger says, Denken ist Danken, then to gaze in awe with eyes opened by love is also to express gratitude - and, more, to give praise:   

 

"The ultimate purpose of language is praise. Praise gives language a festive radiance. Praise restores being; it sings about and invokes the fullness of being." [55]  

 

To which we can only add: Hallelujah! - and quickly turn the page ...

 

What Han basically wants is to have at least one day of holy inactivity per week: to reinstate the idea of the Sabbath in which time is suspended and man is released "from the transient world into the world to come" [60]. 

 

I've no objection to that (even if I remember keenly the boredom I felt as a child each and every Sunday). But I do tire of his religious language (as I do when listening to Jordan Peterson, for example).

 

 

IV.

 

Han spends a good deal of time in the chapter entitled 'The Pathos of Action' critiquing Hannah Arendt's political thinking. But that wasn't what interested me. Rather, it was the material on Socrates and his daimon that caught my attention ...

 

It seems that the latter does not encourage Socrates to speak, rather it prevents him from acting, as he makes clear in this passage from the Apology:

   

"Perhaps it may seem strange that I go about and interfere in other people's affairs [...] but do not venture to come before your assembly and advise the state. But the reason for this [...] is that something divine and spiritual comes to me [...] a sort of voice [...] and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward." [e]

 

This strikes a chord with me because I also have a daimon of non-commitment holding me back in this manner; one who persuades me to turn away from every door that is opened and decline to accept any opportunity offered. People think it's perversity on my part - or a lack of self-confidence combined with a lack of ambition - but it's not; it's this mysterious demon which Han terms the genius of inactivity.  

 

According to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben - quoted here by Han - this demon is both what is closest to us and what is most impersonal about us; that which is beyond ego and individual consciousness; that which shatters the conceit that we are fully in control and free-willing; that which "'prevents us from enclosing ourselves within a substantial identity'" [79][f].  

 

Han follows this up with the following fascinating passage:

 

"The properties that make us someone are not genialis; that is, they do not accord with the genius. We meet with the genius when we cast off our properties, the mask we wear on the acting stage. The genius reveals the propertyless face that lies behind the mask." [79]

 

This countenance without properties is what we might also call the faceless face; or perhaps even (borrowing a term from Deleuze and Guattari) the probe-head [g]. To be inspired, says Han, is to lose face and cease being someone "encapsulated in an ego" [79]; i.e., to be enthused is to become self-detached. 

 

However, as Larry David teaches, it's vital to curb enthusiasm. Or, as Deleuze and Guattari say, caution is the golden rule when dismantling the face and/or building a body without organs; "you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality" [h].

 

This, arguably, is the most important - and most often overlooked - point in A Thousand Plateaus.  

 

V.

 

The crisis of religion, says Han, is a crisis of attention: "It is the soul's hyperactivity that accounts for the demise of religious experience" [86-87] - and, indeed, the destruction of the natural world. 

 

I don't agree with Han that a Romantic [i] and religious understanding of the world is necessary, but it might help to just slow down a bit and appreciate not just one another, not just birds, beasts and flowers, but even inanimate objects (each one of which vibrates and radiates at the centre of its own paradise). 

 

This doesn't mean uniting with the infinity of nature, it means rather living cheerfully in the material realm on a flat ontological surface, or what Lawrence calls (after Whitman) the Open Road. The goal is not a community of the living, but a democracy of objects wherein all things can interact in a vaguely friendly manner but outside of any transcendent system of meaning.   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Although this is the cover of the Portuguese edition - featuring some of Cézanne's nude bathers - please note that page numbers given in this post refer to the English translation of Byung-Chul Han's work by Daniel Steuer (Polity Press, 2024), entitled Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity.

 

[b] I have written in praise of shyness in a post published on 27 May 2014: click here.

 

[c] Referring to the kingdom of heaven established after the material universe is destroyed, Lawrence writes: "How beastly their new Jerusalem, where the flowers never fade, but stand in everlasting sameness. How terribly bourgeois to have unfading flowers!" 

      See D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 144.

 

[d] See Stephen Alexander, 'Towards a Democracy of Touch', chapter 13 of Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 262-275, wherein I examine and develop Lawrence's idea introduced in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). There are also several posts published on Torpedo the Ark that discuss the idea: click here for example.

 

[e] Plato Apology, trans. Harold North Fowler, (The Loeb Classical Library / Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 115. Han quotes this section (31 c-d) from a different edition; Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, (Hackett Publishing Co., 1997).

 

[f] Han is quoting Giorgio Agamben writing in Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort, (Zone Books, 2007), p. 12. 

 

[g] According to Deleuze and Guattari, beyond the face "lies an altogether different inhumanity: no longer that of the primitive head, but of probe-heads [...]"

      See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 190.

 

[h] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 160.

 

[i] Han seems to see himself as a disciple of Novalis, the 18th-century German poet, novelist, philosopher, and mystic. He certainly subscribes to a similar model of Romanticism, writing, for example, that the Romantic idea of freedom is a corrective to our liberal-bourgeois notion of individual freedom, just as the Romantic conception of nature "provides an effective corrective to our instrumental understanding of nature" [92]. 

      He also argues that to Romanticise the world is to give it back "its magic, its mystery, even its dignity" [94] and that it is a mistake to describe "the Romantic longing for a connection with the whole" [96] as reactionary or regressive. It is, rather, a fundamental human longing. Obviously, I don't share Han's Romantic idealism or fervour and don't think I want to live in a promiscuous future world in which things don't only touch but permeate each other and there are no boundaries.     

 

 

To read part one of this post on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa, click here. 

 

To read part two of this post on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa, click here. 

 

What Was I Thinking? (28 December)

 

Torpedo the Ark: images from posts published on 

28 December (2013-2021)

 

Sometimes, it's interesting to look back and see what one was thinking on the same date in years gone by - and sometimes it's simply embarrassing ...

 

Our God is Woman: Our Mission is Protest! 

On this date in 2013, for example, I was keen to express my support for a twenty-year old philosophy student and Femen activist, Josephine Witt, who staged a one-woman protest at St. Peter's Cathedral in Cologne, briefly disrupting a televised Christmas mass by getting her tits out and declaring herself to be God, before half-a-dozen horrified clerics wearing an assortment of robes pulled her from the altar, bundled her out of the building, and handed her over to the secular forces of law and order. 

 

I'm not sure I would now be quite so sympathetic to such an action. 

 

 

In Praise of an Unnatural Death 

 

Skip forward three years and on this date in 2016 I was keen to challenge the judgement of God by refusing to accept what medical professionals describe as death by natural causes; i.e., the all-too-predictable kind of death that results from illness, old age, or an internal malfunction of the body and its organs. 

 

As a philosopher, I argued, one should always desire and seek out the opposite of this; i.e., the joy of an unnatural death, be it by accident, misadventure, homicide, suicide, or that mysterious non-category that is undetermined and which, for those enigmatic individuals who pride themselves on their ambiguity, must surely be the way to go.

 

I then confessed my own preference to be executed, like William Palmer, the notorious nineteenth-century murderer known as the Prince of Poisoners, who is said to have climbed the gallows and placed a foot tentatively on the trapdoor before enquiring of the hangman: Is it safe? 

 

I would like, in other words, to go to my death with the cool courage and stoicism of the dandy and a ready quip on my lips that might cause even my executioner to smile (and serve also to annoy the po-faced authorities who demand seriousness and expect contrition in such circumstances).

 

 

To See More Clearly Than Ever Before 

 

In December 2018, meanwhile, I was entering my Daphne Du Maurier phase - a phase that never really passed and became a long-lasting love for the author and her astonishing body of work. On the 28th of this month I wrote a series of notes on one of her near-perfect short stories - suggested to me by the poet Simon Solomon - 'The Blue Lenses' (1959).

 

The premise of the post and story was the same: what if everyone were to suddenly lose their human features and be seen with the head of the creature that best expresses their inhuman qualities; not so much their true nature, as what might be termed their molecular animality - would we still find this gently amusing? I suspect not: in all likelihood, initial astonishment would quickly give way to horror. 

 

However we choose to describe it, du Maurier's tale is not simply an imaginative fantasy and she, like D. H. Lawrence, is "another of the writers who leave us troubled and filled with admiration" precisely because she was able to tie her work to "real and unheard of becomings". Hers is a genuinely black art, as Deleuze and Guattari would say.   

 

Judenstern

 

Making particular reference to the case of Serge Gainsbourg, back on 28 December, 2019 I was concerned with the history of the badge that Jews were often obliged to wear for purposes of public identification (i.e., in order to clearly mark them as religious and ethnic outsiders). 

 

Although we tend to think of this practice in the context of Hitler's Germany, the Nazis were actually drawing upon an extensive (anti-Semitic) history when they revived the practice of forcing Jews to wear a distinctive sign upon their clothing, including, most famously, the yellow Star of David with the word Jude inscribed in letters meant to resemble Hebrew script.  

 

Gainsbourg was required to wear such as a young boy in wartime Paris; an experience he made bearable by pretending that it was a sherrif's badge, or a prize that he'd been awarded, and which he eventually wrote a song about: click here. 

 

 

Piquerism and Notes on Knife Play

 

On 28 December of the following year, 2020, I expressed my fascination with piquerism; i.e., the practice of penetrating the skin of another person with sharp objects, including pins, razors, and knives - something that I traced back to young childhood and the time I placed a drawing pin on a fat girl's chair in order to see if she would explode like a balloon with a loud bang.

 

Following this, I then explored episodes of knife play in the work of D. H. Lawrence, of which there are several, including the notorious scene in chapter XXIII of The Plumed Serpent (1926) in which Cipriano publicly executes a group of stripped and blindfolded prisoners with a bright, thin dagger, plunging the latter into their chests with swift, heavy stabs. 

 

I think even at the time I was uncomfortable with this and not able to dismiss it with the same ease as Kate Leslie who, if shocked and appalled at first by the killings, eventually concludes that her new husband's penchant for a little ritualised murder is fine if carried out in good conscience.

 

 

Jane Ciracylides: the Girl with Insect Eyes

 

If over the Xmas period in 2018 I was reading Daphne du Maurier, in 2021 I was enjoying the work of J. G. Ballard, including a short story entitled 'Prima Belladonna' which was included in the collection Vermilion Sands (1971) - a collection which celebrates the neglected virtues of the lurid and bizarre within a surreal sci-fi setting described by Ballard as the visionary present or inner space; the former referring to the future already contained within the present and the latter referring to the place where unconscious dreams, fears, and fantasies meet external reality. 

 

The alien female figure of Jane Ciracylides, with her rich patina-golden skin and insects for eyes, has continued to fascinate me to this day. Who knows, perhaps I'll get to play i-Go with her one day (even if she always cheats).  

 

Thoughts Inspired by Ben Woodard's 'On an Ungrounded Earth' (2013)

Punctum Books (2013)

 

 

I.

 

When I hear the term geophilosophy my first thought is not to Deleuze and Guattari's work, but, rather, back to Zarathustra's injunction that above all things his followers should remain true to the earth and not listen to those who speak of superterrestrial hopes [a].

 

So a study such as Woodard's - author also of the darkly vital text Slime Dynamics (2012) [b] - was always one I'd feel obliged to get around to reading sooner or later. 

 

That said, I'm not sure his attempt to unground the earth will be something I'll be entirely comfortable with, although maybe that's the point and I'm certainly not adverse to the idea that we might denaturalise, destabilise, and deterritorialise the earth if that's what it takes to challenge certain models of thought that justify themselves by showing how they are grounded (and anchored) in the security of terra firma.

 

For I know what Nick Land means when he writes of a dark fluidity that rebels against such philosophies [c] - one wouldn't be able to continue with a blog called torpedo the ark if that wasn't the case. But, it's important not to be too swept up and carred away by talk of dark fluidity and solar waves etc.

 

For ultimately, I agree with Negarestani writing in his Cyclonopedia (2008) - and quoted here by Woodard - that whilst the earth with its solidity, gravity, and wholeness can be restrictive, the destruction of all ground to stand on only results in another hegemonic regime. 

 

Ungrounding, therefore, has to be about something more than mere destruction; has to involve the discovery or unearthing of an underside to the ground, or what I suppose those excited by the demonology of a new earth might call an underworld - although it's more the realm of worms [d] rather than horned devils; a place of decay and decomposition rather than evil.  

 

Does Woodard wish for man to inhabit such a world? I'm not sure - although he does point out that humans have, at times, lived beneath the surface of the earth and does insist that we "must burrow deeper into the earth, into the strange potentiality of infernal geologies" [70].  

 

Personally, I wouldn't fancy such an existence; living in a network of tunnels and underground bunkers, like a smuggler or terrorist. I don't even like riding the Tube. 

 

 

II. 

         

To be honest, Woodard's book only really came alive for me when, in chapter 4, he took us on a tour of that chthonic underworld that is commonly referred to as Hell, explaining along the way how the latter "in its chthonic configuration, suggests an odd short circuit between the earth as a shallow phenomenological playground and a deeper understanding of the earth as a complex geological system" [72]. 

For Woodard, Hell is best thought of as a volcanic inferno, rather than the dwelling place of demons; it is unfortunate, he says, when infernology is overridden by demonology (something that Deleuze is often guilty of).

III.

 

I also enjoyed the concluding fifth chapter on a monstrous dark earth that generates life which eventually rots back into compost and chaos, and a malevolent black sun, about which I have myself have written on numerous occasions: click here for example. 

 

Of the dark earth, Woodard writes:

"The earth [...] does not require much labor to become a monster. The earth is a stratified globule, a festering confusion of internalities powered by a molten core and bombarded by an indifferent star. This productive rottenness breeds the possibility of escaping the solar economy through the odd chemistry of ontology." [83-84] 

 

I'm not sure I entirely understand what he means at the end there, but I do like the thought of this earth as a storm of forces and a darkly productive monster - one that is "far removed from the Earth discussed in ecology studies and in popular culture, where it is caught between a thing to be worshiped and a thing to be exploited" [86].

 

I do not like the sons of Prometheus. But nor do I care for those sons of Orpheus who subscribe to a naive neo-pagan fantasy set in some post-industrial eco-utopia in which man is supposed to live once more in perfect harmony with nature.    

 

As for the sun, Woodard reminds us it's not simply the life-giving yellow star that so many philosopher's worship, but also a darkly malevolent monster that burns your skin and causes cancers and madness [e]: 

 

"Again it is tempting to return to Land and his pseudo-Bataillean nature philosophy. The sun must be the illuminator for Plato and Socrates. But there is, for Bataille, a second sun, a dark sun, a black sun: 'The sensations we drink from the black sun afflict us as ruinous passion, skewering our senses upon the drive to waste ourselves.'" [90] [f]

Woodard rightly notes how certain thinkers have strange dreams "about surviving this aspect of the sun, which culminates in the cataclysm of its destruction preceded by its darkening, its blackening, and its degradation towards meltdown" [90], but the fact is we're not going to outlive solar cataclysm. 

 

As Ray Brassier writes: "Solar death is catastrophic because it vitiates ontological temporality as configured in terms of philosophical questioning's constitutive horizonal relationship to the future." [g] 

 

That's a pretty nihilistic note on which to end - but there's really not much that can be done about it. For whether we like it or not, it's all going to end and not merely in the elimination of all terrestrial life, but, ultimately, in the annihilation of all matter. 

 

Woodard is by no means the greatest thinker or writer in the world, but he's to be congratulated for reminding us that oblivion is the name of the game and any humanistic optimism on this point - whether secular-scientific or mytho-religious in character - is simply pitiful [h].  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathusra, Prologue 3. The original German reads: "bleibt der Erde treu und glaubt Denen nicht, welche euch von überirdischen Hoffnungen reden!" 

 

[b] Woodard's Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation,and the Creep of Life, (Zero Books, 2012) is another text I've not got round to fully reading, although I have previously mentioned it on Torpedo the Ark: click here.  

[c] Woodard quotes the line from Land that I refer to on p. 6 of Ungrounded Earth. It reads: "A dark fluidity at the roots of our nature rebels against the security of terra firma." See The Thirst for Annihilation (Routledge, 1992), p. 106. Note that all future page references to Woodard's book will be given directly in the post.  

 

[d] Woodward has a fascination with worms of all kinds (real and fictional); he calls them "engines of a terrestrial weirdness". See On an Ungrounded Earth, p. 21. 

[e] I have written elsewhere and at length on this; see the essay 'Sun-Struck: On the Question of Solar Sexuality and Speculative Realism', published on James Walker's Digitial Pigrimage (14 Jan 2019): click here. 

 

[f] Woodard is quoting Land writing in The Thirst for annihilation, p. 29.   

[g] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 223. Woodard also quotes this line in his text, see. pp. 90-91. 

[h] See the recent post published on oblivion (22 Nov 2023): click here. 

Was D. H. Lawrence a Primitive Communist?

Top: Quetzalcoatl by Hunt Emerson in Dawn of the Unread (Issue 7)

Bottom: Communist red flag with classic hammer and sickle design

 

 

I.

The concept of primitive communism is often credited to Marx and Engels and advances the idea that hunter-gatherer societies were traditionally based on egalitarian social relations and the common ownership of resources, distributed in accordance with individual needs. 

 

It seems that Marx and Engels took the notion from the pioneering anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan - best known for his work on kinship and social structure amongst the native peoples of North America (particularly the Haudenosaunee) - although it might be argued that the idea of primitive communism can also be traced back to Rousseau and his celebration of the noble savage.    

 

Wherever they picked up the idea, it obviously excited the imagination of Marx and Engels and they developed it broadly, applying it, for example, not only to wild hunter-gatherer societies and indigenous peoples, but to barbarian societies formed by the ancient Germanic tribes beyond the borders of the Roman Empire.

 

Marxist scholars and theorists - perhaps embarrassed by the romanticism of all this - attempted to downplay the significance of primitive communism in the work of their idols [1]. 

 

However, the madmen of the Khmer Rouge, looking to build on the revolutionary fantasies of Marx and Mao, really ran with the idea. Indeed, the party's General Secretary was so impressed with the self-sufficient manner in which the mountain tribes of Cambodia lived that he relocated the urban population to the countryside and forced it to work on collective farms. This resulted in approximately a quarter of Cambodia's population dying from malnutrition and disease, but at least he gave it a go.   

 

Still, never mind Pol Pot - what about D. H. Lawrence? Was he too someone seduced by the fantasy of primitive communism?

 

II. 

 

According to John Pateman, The Plumed Serpent can be read as an allegorical work that isn't so much concerned with ancient Aztec gods as promoting a political vision of a possible future Mexico based upon a model of primitive communism. 

 

For Like Marx, argues Pateman, Lawrence was interested in how human development might involve a radical return to pre-modern social relations. Thus, the hymns which Lawrence writes for his fictional neo-pagan religious movement should be heard as a revolutionary call to action, comparable to The Communist Manifesto (1848).

 

I have to say, I think there are problems with this reading of Lawrence's novel. And, push comes to shove, I'm with the German hotel manager who describes Ramón's Quetzalcoatl movement as another form of national socialism - not primitive communism [2].  

 

However, as I don't have advance access to the paper that Pateman is due to present to the D. H. Lawrence Society next month, I shall refrain from offering any criticisms here and now. Instead, let me just remind readers of my own readings of The Plumed Serpent, which can be found in several posts, including here, here, and here. 

 

In sum: The Plumed Serpent is - for me at least - Lawrence's rather frantic attempt to create what Deleuze and Guattari would call neo-territorialities based upon old fragments of code and the invention of new forms of jargon and myth [3]. 

 

Unfortunately, such neo-territorialities are, at best, artificial and archaic and, at worst, fascistic and malignant. As Kate's dead husband once told her: "Evil is lapsing back to old life-modes that have been surpassed in us." [4]  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] There was very little research into primitive communism among Marxist scholars and would-be revolutionaries beyond the 1844 study by Engels until the 20th century when some, like Rosa Luxemburg and the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, took up the idea and developed it. 

      Non-Marxist scholars of pre- and early-history did not take the term seriously, although it was occasionally examined if only then to be swiftly dismissed; for it soon became clear that Morgan's work was flawed (to say the least). 

      Today, there are still those who insist that we could learn much from (matriarchal) societies that practice economic cooperation and communal ownership, but they rarely (if ever) use the term primitive communism. For such thinkers, it is the dominant culture's bias against any alternative to capitalism (and the patriarchy) that is the problem - and if it hadn't been for Western colonialism and imperialism, we'd still find many peoples living happily and peacefully in a non-alienated manner.   

 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 103. 

      It's interesting to recall that Kate, the middle-aged Irishwoman at the centre of the novel, refuses to accept this estimation of Ramón and his followers; for her, they were real men who wanted something more than modern pettiness: "She would believe in them. Anything, anything rather than this sterility of nothingness which was the world, and into which her life was drifting", writes Lawrence. But this, surely, is one of the great dangers of nihilism (and helps explain the attraction of fascism); one searches desperately for something or someone to cling on to. Even the most dangerous political invalids and the most fanatic of religious lunatics can suddenly seem attractive and find their ideas taken seriously - something that Nietzsche explicitly warns of.   

 

[3] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 257.

      Of course, it wasn't just Lawrence who oscillated from one pole of delirium to another and it's not just fascist society that works in this way. For as Deleuze and Guattari go on to point out, liberal capitalist societies - born of "decoding and deterritorialization, on the ruins of the despotic machine" - are also "caught between the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritoriaizing unity, and the unfettered flows that carry them toward an absolute threshold." [260]

      In other words: "They are torn in two directions: archaism and futurism, neo-archaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia [...] They are continually behind or ahead of themselves." [260]

      Having said that, sometimes  an unexpected force of radical change can erupt "even in the midst of the worst archaisms" [277], whilst, on the other hand, a revolutionary line of flight can quickly lead into a black hole of some kind. Thus, we can never say in advance with absolute certainty where a literary experiment or political revolution might take us.    

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, p. 137.

      In a sense, this was also Lawrence's conclusion: you can't go back or cluster at the drum. See 'Indians and an Englishman', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 119-120. 

 

 

Musical bonus: Killing Joke, 'Primitive', from the debut studio album Killing Joke (E. G. Records, 1980): click here for the remastered version (2005).    

  

In Defence of Isis Veiled: What a Practice of Occultism Might Mean in an Age of Transparency

Cover art for the Treadwell's Paper 

Occultism in the Age of Transparency (2023)

by Stephen Alexander (shadowy version)

 

 

This post is a slightly revised extract from a paper presented at Treadwell's Bookshop, on 7 September, 2023. The event was graciously hosted, as ever, by Christina Harrington, and marked my return to the store as a speaker after an absence of eleven years [1]. 

 

 

**************************************************

 

 

The Veil of Isis is a metaphorical and artistic motif in which nature is personified as a goddess, covered by a veil or mantle representing the inaccessibility of her secrets [2]. 

 

Illustrations of Isis with her veil being lifted were extremely popular from the late 17th to the early-mid 19th century and were usually intended to show the triumph of Reason. However, even occultists were happy to play this game of indecent exposure; Madame Blavatsky, for example, used the metaphor of Isis unveiled when expounding the spiritual teachings of Theosophy [3]. 

 

According to Blavatsky, whilst scientists and philosophers revealed only material facts and superficial forms, she would penetrate further to the most hidden truths. That, to me at least, is a shameful ambition.

 

And I don't much like it either when practitioners of modern ceremonial magic also attempt to unveil Isis, or command demons hidden in darkness to make themselves apparent and obedient to the will of the one who has summoned them forth. 

 

For me, occultism - particularly in this, the age of transparency - should be a defence of concealment and anonymity, not making visible and naming those beings who stand dark on the threshold of the Unknown. 

 

I don’t want to violently drag everything out into the open - least of all some poor demon - so it can be subject to our x-ray vision. For even gods and demons die when they shed all negativity (all shadow, all darkness). That’s why Goethe’s Faust encouraged us to hold tight to the veil of Isis, even if we can never embrace the goddess, or catch anything other than a glimpse of her [4]. 

 

Occultism is ultimately not about revelation, but mystical initiation. And this involves closing your eyes and shutting your mouth; for it's an attempt to maintain the silence and stillness. Thus, when casting a spell, for example, whisper it in a voice that is lighter than breath. For magic, like poetry, is an event of stillness (i.e., a phenomenon of negativity) that enables us to listen to the silence (to be attentive to the darkness). 

 

In other words, magic is about tuning in to intensities; about forming a sensitive relationship with the world "that is not characterized by representation (that is, by ideas or meaning) but by immediate touching and presence" [5]. Only in silent stillness "do we enter into a relation with the nameless, which exceeds us" [6].

 

Silence, stillness, secrecy, and shadows are the fourfold of terms at the heart of occultism. 

 

And I would suggest to any would-be wiccans or neo-pagans here this evening that, instead of trying to move with the times and making secret rituals open to everyone, you stay concealed, hidden, and withdrawn. 

 

And, above all, stay still: for just as we can only ever catch a glimpse of the gods, they can only cast their gaze upon those who "linger in contemplative calmness" [7]. 

 

In sum: occult practices and magical rituals are symbolic techniques of becoming-imperceptible [8] and I’m hoping, that via a form of occultism, we might learn how to stage our own disappearance and darken the world, giving it back its shadows, its secrecy, and its silence. 

 

For whilst people talk a lot about plastic in the seas and worry about their so-called carbon footprint, I would suggest that light pollution and noise pollution are far more threatening to our ontological wellbeing. 

 

 

Photo by Paul Gorman 

(as posted on Instagram)

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Readers can find a full list of previous Treadwell's papers by clicking here.

 

[2] The motif was based on a statue of Isis located in the ancient Egyptian city of Sais, which was said to have an inscription reading: I am all that has been and is and shall be; and no mortal has ever lifted my mantle - which admittedly sounds like a challenge. For an interesting philosophical study of this topic, see Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis (Harvard University Press, 2008). 

      Taking the allegorical figure of the veiled goddess Isis as a guide, and drawing on the work of both ancient and modern thinkers (the latter including Goethe, Rilke, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger), Hadot traces successive interpretations of a cryptic phrase which has long intrigued the Western imagination and is attributed to Heraclitus: Phusis kruptesthai philei (Nature loves to hide). 

      Hadot concludes that there are essentially two (contradictory) approaches to nature: the Promethean, or experimental-questing, approach, which embraces technology as a means of tearing the veil from Nature and revealing her secrets; and the Orphic, or contemplative-poetic, approach, according to which such a denuding of Nature is a grave trespass. 

 

[3] Blavatsky’s most famous work - Isis Unveiled:A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology - was published in 1877. For some, a seminal text; for others, a work largely plagiarised from the writings of other occult authors. 

 

[4] Whilst most people understand a glimpse simply to mean a brief or partial view - to catch a quick look, perhaps in passing, of something or someone - it has a more poetic and philosophical resonance for those with ears to hear. D. H. Lawrence, for example, was fascinated by the word and often used it in his late poetry to describe how aspects of divinity are seen in the faces and forms of people when they are momentarily unaware of themselves. It's this glimmer of godhood which gives human beings their more-than-human beauty; which makes the flesh gleam with radiance or the bright flame of being. See the related group of verses on pp. 579-582 of The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 

      Heidegger also privileged the word Blick, which I would translate as glimpse. For Heidegger, a glimpse is a kind of lightning flash which provides an insight into that which is, whilst, at the same time, guarding the hidden darkness of what remains forever withdrawn. See 'The Turn', from the 1949 Bremen Lecture series Insight Into That Which Is, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, (Indiana University Press, 2012), pp. 64-73.

 

[5] Byung-Chul Han, 'Stillness', in Non-things, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2022), p. 77. 

 

[6] Byung-Chul Han, 'The Magic of Things', Non-things, pp. 56-57. 

 

[7] Byung-Chul Han, 'Stillness', Non-things, p. 83.

 

[8] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996). According to the above, there is one becoming towards which all other becomings rush, marking the immanent end of becoming and providing the process with its cosmic formula; the becoming-imperceptible (279). 

 

 

Readers who are interested might also like to see two earlier posts that acted as previews to the talk at Treadwell's: 

 

'In Memory of Anne Dufourmantelle: Risk Taker Extraordinaire and Defender of Secrets' (14 May 2023): click here 

 

'On Georg Simmel's Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies' (10 August 2023): click here. 

 

 

La beauté est une promesse de bonheur: On the Joy of Discovering Stendhal

Portrait rouge et noir de Stendhal by SA (2022)

based on the original work by Louis Ducis (1835) 

 

"Ne me demandez pas qui je suis et ne me dites pas de rester le même ..." [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Stendhal is one of those 19th-century French writers that I've never got around to reading. 

 

And that's despite the fact that Nietzsche thought highly of him, describing Stendhal in Beyond Good and Evil as the last great psychologist [2] and confessing in Ecce Homo that he envied Stendhal for providing the finest and funniest atheist joke: God's only excuse is that he does not exist [3].

And it's also despite the fact that, astrologically speaking, Stendhal belongs to the House that I privilege above all others (i.e., the 11th). Being an Aquarian doesn't necessarily make you an interesting writer, but it does mean that Stendhal can be placed alongside the likes of Byron, Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Burroughs, to name but a few.   

 

However, the fact remains I've never been tempted to read Stendhal - until now; and that's entirely thanks to a fascinating article written by Naveed Rehan, an independent scholar based in Lahore, Pakistan ... [4]

 

 

II. 

 

Rehan's description of Stendhal as a man full of contradictions who is believed to have used over a 100 different pseudonyms and worn many masks in his lifetime, could almost have been written with the aim of catching my attention and sending me to the Amazon website so as to immediately order a copy of Souvenirs d’Égotisme, a short unfinished text which, Rehan informs us, recounts his time in Paris between 1821 and 1830 and which was written in just thirteen days during the summer of 1832. 

 

According to Rehan, this memoir would now be classified as a work of creative nonfiction - "a relatively new name [...] for an old way of writing, often referred to as belles-lettres" [5]. The key to this style of writing - whatever we choose to call it - is artfulness. 

 

It's a clever, ironic, sophisticated genre produced by writers who aren't afraid to slant the truth and who understand the importance of shaping experience and giving natural feeling artificial form. As Rehan notes: "It is not enough just to be sincere in writing true life stories; one must also craft them so that they can have the desired effect upon the reader."  

 

Having said that, Stendhal declares his intention "to be absolutely truthful and sincere in his Memoirs", which is a concern and more than a little problematic. But then we remember D. H. Lawrence's injunction to trust the text, not the author and we discover that Stendhal's perfect sincerity is just another pose and that, as Rehan points out, Souvenirs d’Égotisme is as artful as even a Wildean reader would wish for.   

 

The fact is, we never discover the real writer behind the mask; although arguably his identity is not so much hidden as dispersed and multiplied, until we are no longer sure who he is. Attempts to piece together an authentic and unified self from his fragmentary writings - to discover Stendhal's true identity - are ultimately doomed to failure; this master of illusion and disguise will never be found out or pinned down.     

 

And that's a good thing. Why? Because, as Rehan suggests, it enables Stendhal to preserve freshness of heart, by which I think she refers to the innocence of becoming; which is always of course a becoming-other and by no means merely an imaginative exercise, even if it can often be something that takes place within great works of literature, as Deleuze and Guattari demonstrated. 

 

I'm grateful to Naveed for presenting Stendhal in such a charming light; one which counters the orthodox Lawrentian view that he was, as a matter of fact, a nasty piece of work [6].      

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This line from Michel Foucault could easily have been penned by Stendhal; both men wrote in order to have no face. The line can be found in L’archéologie du savoir (1969) and is usually translated into English as: 'Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same ...'

 

[2] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, II. 39. 

 

[3] Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 'Why I Am So Clever', §3.

 

[4] Naveed Rehan, '"I Am Large, I Contain Multitudes": Rereading Stendhal's Souvenirs d’Égotisme', The Friday Times, (12 December, 2022): click here. All quotes in the post above are from this piece by Rehan. 

 

[5] Rehan is not the first or only critic to suggest that creative nonfiction is just a rather more austere sounding term for belles-lettres. 

      In an article entitled 'Non-fiction is dead: Long Live Belles-lettres', Arpita Das, for example, argues that writing which although based on reportage of real events, people and places is nevertheless a skilful literary construction, is best described "by that charming phrase coined in the days of Voltaire, 'belles-lettres', meaning simply 'fine writing'". 

      The article can be found in Open magazine (2 Dec 2011), or read online by clicking here.  

 

[6] See Lawrence's letter to E. M. Forster (6 Nov 1916) in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 21. 

      For those readers who don't have this book to hand, Lawrence writes: 

 

"I believe in bonheur, when people feel bon. But to pretend bonheur when you only feel malice and spite [...] no thank you. [...] I feel a bit shy even of Stendhal's bonheur. I look for it in vain in Rouge et la Noir, and L'Amour, and Chartreuse. A man may believe in that which he in himself is not. But I don't give much for such a belief. [...] Let a man go to the bottom of what he is, and believe in that. And Stendhal was not bon: he was méchant to a high degree. So he should have believed in his own wickedness, not kept a ticket to heaven up his sleeve, called bonheur."  

      Lawrence's essentialism and sincerity - on full display here - would of course make it difficult for him to ever really like (or trust) Stendhal, or those who, like Stendhal, affirmed the truth of masks and stamped becoming with the character of being.