On Lunacy

The Moon: lovely to look at but ineffective

Still, today - even in Parliament - there are people who subscribe in all seriousness to the so-called lunar effect. In other words, they believe there's a magical correlation between the Moon and human biology and behaviour. As above - so below, as those with a Hermetic leaning like to say ...

However, a considerable number of scientific studies have found no evidence to support this belief. Thus, despite the insistence of poets, occultists, filmmakers, and various lunatics, it seems that the light of the silvery Moon does not make some individuals go crazy and others become excessively hairy.

Nor does the Moon control menstruation in the same way it controls the tides and Camille Paglia's claim that a woman's body is "a sea acted upon by the month's lunar wave-motion", is laughable. For whilst it's true that women's bodies are (like men's bodies) mostly water, so is it also true the Moon only affects open bodies of water - not water contained in bodies (and even if this weren't the case, there'd be an issue of scale to consider).

So, sorry Camille, but moon, month and menses are not synonymous and do not refer to one and the same phenomenon. It's simply coincidental that the menstrual cycle in women and the lunar cycle are both 28-days in length - and, in fact, even that's not quite the case; for often the length of the former varies from woman to woman and month to month, whilst the length of a synodic period is actually a consistent 29.5 days.

If it's surprising to find Ms. Paglia perpetuating lunar mythology in relation to female sexuality having built her model of feminism upon biology and constantly stressing the importance of hormones, it's no surprise to discover D. H. Lawrence was a great exponent of such baloney, believing as he did that the Moon is "the mistress and mother of our watery bodies".

Lawrence also upheld the popular belief that the Moon is somehow intimately related to questions of madness and suicide, particularly with reference to modern individuals who have, he says, lost the Moon. For it is the Moon which governs our nervous consciousness and soothes us into serenity when we are mentally agitated or disturbed:

"Oh, the moon could soothe us and heal us like a cool great Artemis between her arms. But we have lost her, in our stupidity we ignore her, and angry she stares down on us and whips us with nervous whips."

Thus, according to Lawrence, it's the the angry Moon which is responsible for young lovers committing suicide; "they are driven mad by the poisoned arrows of Artemis: the Moon is against them: the Moon is fiercely against them. And oh, if the Moon is against you, oh, beware of the bitter night, especially the night of intoxication."

To be fair, even Lawrence knows that this sounds like nonsense. He insists, however, that's because we're idiots. If only we opened ourselves up once more to the cosmos, then we'd understand that the Moon is a not just a dead lump of rock with an iron core, but a "globe of dynamic substance, like radium or phosphorus, coagulated upon a vivid pole of energy" and that there exists "an eternal vital correspondence between our nerves and the Moon".

Break this relationship, says Lawrence - though I'm not sure how one might do so, anymore than one might counteract the pull of gravity simply by refusing to acknowledge its reality - and the Moon will have her revenge, like a cruel mistress.

The problem is that whilst Lawrence's lunacy sounds harmless enough, Quentin Meillassoux has shown how such correlationism has crept into and corrupted all post-Kantian philosophy making objects conform to mind - something, ironically, that Lawrence loathes and fights against elsewhere in his work.

Ultimately, it's not a question of wanting to disconnect or come out of touch with the universe; rather, it's about acknowledging the latter exists without us ...


See: 

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

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

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2008).

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990).

Bootylicious

Oh my gosh! Look at her butt!

Nicki Minaj sleeve photo for her smash hit single 'Anaconda' 

taken from the album The Pinkprint (2014)  

Curb Your Enthusiasm has taught me that for a man to comment on a woman's ass is always to invite trouble and misunderstanding. For as Cheryl points out to Larry, a woman's ass is very personal and it's simply inappropriate to make even a lighthearted reference to it. This is perhaps particularly the case when the ass in question belongs to a woman of colour.

However, at the risk of being mistaken not only for an ass man - and I'm not an ass man - but also for a middle-aged white man with a fetish for young black girls, I would like to defend and celebrate the bootyliciousness of women such as Beyoncé Knowles and Nicki Minaj, particularly in the faces of those who denigrate and seek to body shame such women in a manner that often betrays underlying misogyny and racism. 

For example, I read a piece recently by a (white male) music critic in which he laments the passing of truly gifted black female singers including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, Gloria Gaynor, Gladys Knight, Diana Ross, Nina Simone, and Dinah Washington. Which is fine, if a somewhat predictable and uncontroversial list of names that no one with ears is going to seriously dispute or raise objection to. 

Unfortunately, however, he can't resist taking a dig at today's performers, including Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj, whom, he says, have helped pornify popular culture and become famous "not for their soulful voices or beautiful faces, but for endlessly twerking and firing lasers from their grotesquely over-inflated behinds". These women, he says, "have none of the talent, none of the charm, and none of the sophisticated intelligence" of their predecessors.            

This may, perhaps, have some element of truth in it. But, it seems also to display a puritanical fear of the flesh; particularly female flesh and particularly the black female bottom. One wonders if the writer is simply scared he'll not be able to handle all that jelly or what we might term corporeal excess - the too-muchness of nature, that Camille Paglia writes of in relation to the Venus of Willendorf.   

In a sense, then, the critic is right - the performers of today are earthy in every sense of the word and they drag us down and drag us back with their crude, uninhibited, anally-fixated sexuality. Whereas the great artists mentioned earlier elevate the human spirit with their soulful voices and beautiful faces and represent "the triumph of Apollonian image over the humpiness and horror of mother earth".

In the end, you pays your money and you takes your choice ...


Notes

To watch the scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm (S2/E2) in which Cheryl confronts Larry about his ass fetish, click here. 

To listen to the track 'Bootytlicious', by Destiny's Child, taken from the album Survivor (2001), click here. 

This song popularised the term bootylicious as an approving neologism and it has now entered mainstream English, as has a greater appreciation for women with larger hips, thighs and buttocks (i.e., a body type culturally associated with black and Latina women, though there are plenty of European women who also pride themselves on a fuller, more Rubenesque figure). 

See: Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990), Ch. 2, 'The Birth of the Western Eye'.