In Praise of the Goat

 

'A procreant male goat of selfish will and libidinous desire, 

with curving horns of bronze ...'

 

I. 

 

Goats, as Joy Hinson reminds us, are adaptable and resilient animals who have a relationship with man that is as ancient and intimate as that of the dog, although somewhat more ambivalent, due to the fact that goats are often associated with immorality; the lamb-like nature of Christ contrasted with the caprine characteristics assigned to devilish deities from Pan to Baphomet.  

 

Hinson writes: 

 

"Goats have a symbolic significance: in early pagan cultures they represented lust and debauchery; in satanic cults they often represent Satan himself; while in Christian culture they symbolise sinners, those who have fallen from grace." [1] 

Most likely this is due to the lascivious nature of the male goat who, during mating season, will become increasingly hungry, aggressive, and sexually active thanks to raised levels of testosterone. 

 

He will also urinate on his own forelegs and face in order to enflame the females of his species. Sebaceous scent glands at the base of the horns further add to the male goat's malodorous allure and some does will refuse to lift her pretty tail and mate with a buck whose scent is insufficiently rank.  

 

 

II. 

 

D. H. Lawrence is someone who understands the nature of the goat better than most and in his poetry collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) he reflects on the nature of both the he-goat [2] and she-goat [3]. 

 

In the first of these, Lawrence writes of a male goat during rutting season who "charges slow among the herd" of females, sniffing at their rear ends and hoping to get lucky, or sometimes turning "to fight, to challenge, to suddenly butt" a rival goat with his horned-head:

 

  And then you see the God that he is, in a cloud of black hair 

  And storm-lightning-slitted eye. 

 

This aggressive violence and rage belongs to him as much as his insatiable libidinousness, but it's the will to "Orgasm after orgasm after orgasm" for which he is best-known to us; that, and what Lawrence calls his egotism:

 

  The goat is an egoist, aware of himself, devilish aware of himself, 

  And full of malice prepense, and overweening, determined to stand on the highest peak

  Like the devil, and look on the world as his own.

 

As for the she-goat, "with her goaty mouth", having curled back her tail and "exposed the pink place of her nakedness", she stands smiling like Mona Lisa:

 

  And when the billy goat mounts her 

  She is brittle as brimstone. 

  While his slitted eyes squint back to the roots of his ears.

 

It's as if he never quite manages to touch the quick of her; as if she somehow exists in a world that is just beyond him. 

 

And besides, for all the he-goat's ardour and sexual vigour, the act of copulation is quickly done and dusted [4].    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Joy Hinson, Goat (Reaktion Books, 2014), p.11.  

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'He-Goat', Birds, Beasts and Flowers (Martin Secker, 1923), pp. 160-164. Click here to read in the Project Gutenberg eBook edition. 

     

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'She-Goat', Birds, Beasts and Flowers (Martin Secker, 1923), pp. 166-168. Click here to read in the Project Gutenberg eBook edition.

    

[4] On average, a male goat will ejaculate after just half-a-dozen thrusting movements once intromission has occurred and copulation will therefore last no more than a few seconds. 

      On the other hand, pre-copulatory stages of the sexual act (i.e. foreplay) can last for up to ten minutes and involve male goats chasing females in heat, sniffing (then licking) their ano-genital region, and watersports. Some he-goats also like to perform acts of auto-fellation prior to mounting a doe.

      Readers who are interested to know more might like to see Corneliu Gaspar, Luminița-Iuliana Ailincai and Adina-Ximena Dodan, 'Observations of Sexual Behaviours in Goats (Capra Hircus) Raised on Non-Professional Farms', in Journal of Applied Life Sciences and Enironment, Vol. 55, Issue 3, (2022), pp. 301-310. Published online 2 March, 2023: click here.

 

 

For Nael Ali, whose article 'The Goats of War Metal' in SIG News, Issue 3, (1 Sept 2024), pp. 8-9, motivated me to write this post.   

Notes on SIG News Issue 3: From Girlypop to Reconceptualising the Skateboard Graphic

SIG News Issue 3

(September 1st, 2024)

 

 

I.

 

For those who don't know, SIG is an acronym for the Subcultures Interest Group; an informal collective operating out of the University of the Arts London (UAL) concerned with what we might briefly describe as the politics of style.

 

They have conveniently published a ten-point manifesto, which, amongst other things, declares the group's resistance to temporal colonisation, that is to say, the imposition of a perpetual present in which it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine a future (or remember a past) that is radically different.

 

Via a number of disruptive techniques, including the reversal of old ideas and subcultural practices into the future, members of SIG attempt to live yesterday tomorrow and loosen the "aura of necessity and sanctity surrounding categories of the present" [1]. 

 

It's more a form of retrofuturism than nostalgia: "The pull of the future informs our drawing from the passed to provide the necessary soil and toil of the present" [2], as point 3 of the SIG Manifesto puts it.

 

Anyway, the third issue of SIG News (cover dated 1 September 2024) is out now and I thought it might be fun to take a look ...

 

 

II.    

 

The issue opens with a piece by Ross Schartel on developments in the world of girlypop following the social media phenomenon of #barbiecore. 

 

Now, I have to admit, I'm not really up to speed with these microtrends driven by TikTok; nor had I ever heard of Chappell Roan. 

 

Nevertheless, I was interested to learn of attempts to reclaim the hyperfeminine, even if Chappell Roan is clearly a pop persona heavily influenced by drag performance and rooted in queer cynicism rather than anything affirmative of the fact that girls at their most phenomenal and inhuman are extraordinary events whose individuation doesn't proceed via subjectivity, but by pure haecceity. 

 

In other words, girls are defined not by their girlyness or material composition (sugar and spice), but by the intensive affects of which they are capable. 

 

 

III.

 

Moving on, there's a nice piece on the British rockabilly revival of the late 1970s and early '80s by Jake Hawkes. 

 

I'm not sure, however, about the truth value of his claim that rockabilly was "the most forward-thinking subculture" of the period and when he writes that it feels "closer to the zeitgeist today" [3] one can't help asking the very same question that Mencius Moldbug once put to Richard Dawkins: What, exactly, is this Zeitgeist thing?

 

There's also an easy read article by Paul Tornbohm on London's easy listening scene in the 1990s, something I missed but would very much have enjoyed being part of had I only known about it, loving as I do TV theme tunes and the delights of Gallic pop, for example.

 

I wasn't quite sure what to make of Nael Ali's piece - 'The Goats of War Metal' - though I smiled when he conceded that the theme of gender politics in relation to his area of research "might be a topic" [4] worthy of future discussion - I would say so!

 

I would also suggest that Ali read the following by D. H. Lawrence:

 

Firstly, the poem 'He-Goat', in which Lawrence explores the wilful egotism of a male goat and the destructive aspects of libidinous desire [5]; and secondly, a letter written to Aldous Huxley [28 Oct 1928] in which Lawrence dismisses art which tries desperately to be transgressive as romantic and fascistic; a pornographic mix of the sentimental and the sensational. 

 

He writes: "if you only palpitate to murder, suicide, and rape in their various degrees [...] it becomes a phantasmal boredom and produces ultimately inertia [...] and final atrophy of the feelings" [6], which will of course result in war.  

 

IV.

 

Sadly, I just missed the skateboard craze of the 1980s: when I was a nipper, we used to make do with a book and skate to race down Daventry Road. 

 

Nevertheless, I did appreciate Joel Lardner's argument in his article on skateboard graphics that "visual interruption and glitch work call forth the distinct performative model in which these graphics are received, reflecting the inevitable accident, an ever-present aspect of skateboard practice" [7] - that's a clever insight. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. ix.  

[2] The SIG Manifesto can be found on the back cover of SIG News 3 (1 Sept 2024). Those who wish for more information on the Subcultures Interest Group can contact k.quinn@fashion.arts.ac.uk or r.bestley@lcc.ac.uk 

[3] Jake Hawkes, SIG News 3 (UAL, 1 September 2024), p. 5. 

 

[4] Nael Ali, SIG News 3 (UAL, 1 September 2024), p. 9.  

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'He-Goat', The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 334-336. The poem can also be found on allpoetry.com: click here.  

[6] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 600.

[7] Joel Lardner, SIG News 3 (UAL, 1 September 2024), p.10.

 

 

This post continues in part two: click here.