Day of the Dead (Essex Style)

Day of the Dead 
SA / 2019

In Mexico, November 1st is a day of celebration in which the people remember friends and family members who have died and, perhaps, recall also their Aztec past, prior to European colonisation, allowing them the opportunity to decorate their homes with marigolds and loosen the aura of necessity surrounding categories of the present in which only life is sanctified.

Watching over events is the goddess Mictēcacihuātl, queen of the underworld, who renders the flesh and washes the bones of the dead; she who threatens to one day swallow all the stars in the heavens above.

Meanwhile, in grey-skied Essex, one sad-looking crow sits on a wire-mesh fence overlooking the train tracks and unlovely Romford landscape where, in a sense, every day is given over to death and there seems to hover a doom so dark one feels as if one might lose one's mind.

"Then I say to myself: Am I also dead? Is that the truth?"*

* D. H. Lawrence, 'We die together', Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 544.

Class Sketch

Mssrs. Cleese, Barker, and Corbett in the Class Sketch 

Written by Marty Feldman and John Law

The Frost Report (7 April 1966)

I.

If I remember my political theory correctly, then class consciousness refers to an individual's knowledge of their socio-economic status which allows them to judge where their own best interests lie. For Marxists, the hope is that by raising awareness of inequality and injustice, etc., one increases the chances of collective action and, ultimately, revolution.      

However, whilst I've always been aware of myself as working class and fully conscious of what that entails - and whilst I've always had a certain level of mistrust for the middle classes - I've never been motivated to join the Labour Party or align myself with those on the far left who long for power and to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.  

In the end, I just don't care enough about even my own interests; certainly not when these are conceived in material terms of ownership. According to my Armenian friend, Vahe, that's because I'm too other-worldly, suffer from a form of false consciousness, don't fully understand the historical process, blah, blah, blah ...


II.    

In a short essay written in 1927, D. H. Lawrence argues that the gulf between social classes is very real and very deep, though there are now, he says, only two great classes: middle and working; the aristocratic upper class having entirely been absorbed into the bourgeoisie.

Indeed, notes Lawrence, even the working class share in the aspirations of the middle class; to be successful and to have a lot of money in the bank. However, there remains a very real difference and division which is rooted in feeling and in the politics of touch:

"What is the peculiar repugnance one feels, towards entering the middle class world? [...]
      What is the obstacle? I have looked for it in myself, as a clue to this dangerous cleavage between the classes. And I find it is a very deep obstacle. It is in the manner of contact. The contact, among the lower classes [...] is much more immediate, more physical, between man and man, than it ever is among the middle classes. The middle class can be far more intimate, yet never so near to one another. It is the difference between the animal, physical affinity that can govern the lives of men, and the other, the affinity of culture and purpose, which actually does govern the mass today.
      But the affinity of culture and purpose that holds the vast middle class world together seems to me to be an intensification today, of the acquisitive and possessive instinct." [39]

       
III.

Like Lawrence, I was  born among the working class. My father too went down the mines when he left school - though unlike Lawrence's father, he hated it and didn't last long as a collier. After the War, he and my mother - at her instigation - moved south, to London, leaving their old life in the north east of England behind. Eventually, they ended up in Essex in a newly built two-up, two-down council house, where I was born.

My father was employed in a non-managerial position at the Bank of England printing works in Debden. My mother was a traditional housewife, who occasionally did part-time jobs outside the home if money was particularly tight. She had hopes for me and my sister, but nothing too grand or ambitious: some kind of clean office job that paid well. Like the Lawrence household, ours was absolutely working class: tabloid-reading, football-loving, and ITV-watching. 

Of course, one is never entirely shaped by or a prisoner to the past, to one's background, to one's class. But one can never quite escape it either. Or - in my case as in Lawrence's - one never really wants to escape and move up in the world, or get on in life. Why? Well, according to Lawrence, it's because this involves too great a cost; one has to sacrifice something vital and vibrate at a different pitch of being, as it were.

For between the classes exists "a peculiar, indefinable difference" that determines the way the heart beats. This might sound like nonsense, but I know exactly what Lawrence means. And I understand entirely why it is he never quite managed (or wanted) to climb up the social ladder, even when offered a helping hand to do so:

"No one was unfriendly. [...] But it was no good. Unless one were by nature a climber, one could not respond in kind. The middle class seemed quite open, quite willing for one to climb into it. And one turned away, ungratefully. [...]
      And that I have not got a thousand friends, and a place [...] among the esteemed, is entirely my own fault. The door to 'success' had been held open to me. The social ladder had been put ready for me to climb. I have known all kinds of people, and been treated quite kindly by everyone [...] whom I have known personally.
      Yet here I am, nowhere, as it were, and infinitely an outsider. And of my own choice." [37-38]

Precisely: here I am nowhere, with nowhere left to go.

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Which Class I Belong To', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 33-40. 

See also 'Myself Revealed' in the above text, pp. 175-81, which is essentially a variant of 'Which Class I Belong To', that concludes: "I cannot make the transfer from my own class into the middle class. I cannot, not for anything in the world, forfeit my passional consciousness and my old blood-affinity with my fellow-men and the animals and the land, for that other thin, spurious mental conceit which is all that is left of the mental consciousness once it has made itself exclusive." [181] 

Note: 'Myself Revealed' was included in Assorted Articles (1930) under the title 'Autobiographical Sketch'.  

On the Origins of a Solar-Phallic Landscape

S. A. von Hell: A New Day (c. 1985-87)

Someone very kindly emailed to say how intriguing and strangely affecting they found my solar-phallic landscape painted sometime in the mid-1980s and featured on a recent post [click here]. They also requested that I provide some background to the work which, as they rightly assume, wasn't merely imaginative ...

Primarily, the picture has its origins in the work of the writer and artist D. H. Lawrence, who once confessed in a letter to a friend:

"I put a phallus [...] in each one of my pictures somewhere. And I paint no picture that won't shock people's castrated social spirituality. I do this out of positive belief that the phallus is a great sacred image: it represents a deep, deep life which has been denied in us, and is still denied."

This brief remark encapsulated my philosophical aesthetic at the time and provided a kind of mini-manifesto.

Secondly, the picture was very much influenced by my love of Killing Joke, particularly during the period beginning with Fire Dances and ending with Brighter Than a Thousand Suns. I bought the three albums released before this period - and the first two albums that followed - but my beautiful obsession with the band was at its most intense and uncompromising between 1983-87, i.e., the pagan years, when I subscribed to an eco-apocalyptic model of Romantic primitivism tinged with Nazi occultism.

The oak tree foliage at the side of the picture was an idea I took from the cover to the Killing Joke single from which I also lifted the title, A New Day (1984) - see image below. 

Finally, the painting was born also of my reading of Jung's writings on the solar phallus and the collective unconscious; in other words, it was meant to be an image with archetypal significance. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, let me try to briefly explain ...    

One of Jung's favourite stories concerned a paranoid-schizophrenic patient with suicidal tendencies named Emile Schwyzer, who had spent most of his life in and out of mental institutions; a man who believed that stars were composed of dead souls and that the Earth was flat and surrounded by infinite seas.

One day, Schwyzer reported a particularly striking hallucination, in which the sun seemed to possess an erect penis that moved back and forth and caused the wind to blow. This vision stayed with Jung, although he was unable to fathom its meaning until he became aware of a similar solar-phallic image within the ancient Roman mystery religion centred on the god Mithras. Then, it all made perfect sense and everything clicked into place; here was a compelling piece of evidence for the existence of a collective unconscious.   

At the time - i.e., in the mid-1980s, when I thought Jung was a genius rather than a crank - I was happy to buy into all this, despite numerous problems with the actual details of the story and with Jung's celebrated theory (a theory that has more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese, as James Hillman acknowledges).

What Jung is essentially doing, is extending Kant's categories of reason to the production of fantasy; archetypes are conceived as categories of the imagination and analytic psychology is thereby revealed as a form of transcendental idealism with mytho-hermeneutic knobs on. Not my cup of tea at all; certainly not now, when the last thing I would paint - if I were to ever pick up a brush again - would be a solar-phallic landscape.       

Notes 

The letter by D. H. Lawrence to Earl Brewster (27 Feb 1927) can be found in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 648-49.  

(E. G. Records, 1984) 

On My Brief Life as a Painter

S. A. Von Hell: A New Day (c. 1985-87)

One of the few things I have in common with Adolf Hitler, is that I too failed to get into art school; though in my case, this was St. Martin's, London, not the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and I don't remember being particularly shocked or devestated by the decision, unlike Herr Hitler, whose rejection would prove fateful.

For one thing, I had no training or background in the arts, and no discernible talent, skill, or competency as a painter. In fact, when I went for the interview at St. Martin's, I didn't even have a proper portfolio; I just had ideas and a kind of occult-pagan aesthetic that was heavily influenced at the time by D. H. Lawrence, Killing Joke, and Franz von Stuck.

My interviewers, unsurprisingly, were not impressed and weren't shy in telling me that they found my views to be disturbing and the handful of sketches for hand-painted t-shirts that I did bring along to be puerile. The punk insistence that all that mattered was attitude - who cares about composition and colour - failed to convince. 

Anyway, long story short - and as I've said - I didn't get a place on the course and the very small number of canvases I produced in the mid-1980s - including the fairly large phallic landscape above - have all been destroyed by damp or thrown away by my sister who was supposed to be looking after them for me in her loft.  

For better or for worse, I decided post-St. Martin's to reinvent myself as a poet rather than a painter - and then, later, as a philosopher-provocateur. But I miss playing around with paints and have promised myself to one day produce some new pictures, if only for the sheer pleasure of covering a surface with something other than words. 

Note: for a supplementary post to this one, please click here.

Reflections on a Rose and a New Year's Resolution

SA/2019

New Year's Day: the world of my little garden forever undying. Roses, stained with the blood of Aphrodite, bloom and make happy. Sometimes, I think it would be nice to remain alone with the flowers and do nothing but quietly reflect upon their perfection.

But then, after a few minutes, I realise that not only is such a life impossible, it's also undesirable; that one's main duty as a Lawrentian floraphile is to actively shelter the rose of life from being trampled on by the pigs.      

Thus, in 2019, I resolve to "go out into the world again, to kick it and stub my toes. It is no good my thinking of retreat: I rouse up and feel I don't want to. My business is a fight, and I've got to keep it up." 

In other words, I shall continue in my attempts to torpedo the ark ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Risen Lord', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 271. 

D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), Letter 4034, to Earl Brewster (28 May, 1927), pp. 71-73.  

On Opening Heaven and Hell: A Boxing Day Post Dedicated to a Secular Saint, by Símón Solomon

You pays your money and you takes your choice ...

I.

While it's probably safe to say that the philosopher Stephen Alexander is not en route to canonisation any time soon, the presiding presence of Torpedo the Ark may forgive me for divulging to his readers that he once indirectly referred to himself as Harold Hill's first secular saint.

Thus, on this day of all days, we wanted to pay our own deconsecrated tribute from across the Irish Sea to this prodigiously stylish, provocative and gifted writer, from whom - despite the prevailing disembodiment of the friendship in recent years - we continue to take much fractious inspiration and sometimes antagonistic pleasure, and to whose deliciously idiosyncratic platform we are delighted to be able to contribute as Gastautor and commentator on a (semi-)regular basis.

Stephen, though your name may never be dedicated to divinity (or even up in the lights we often feel you deserve), we hope that the pious vessel in your sights will be repeatedly holed but not wholly blown out of the water, lest TtA one day exhaust its irreverent purpose ...


II.

Though much of the detail of his namesake's biography is overlaid by theological propaganda, our main Biblical source for the historical St. Stephen, viz., the Acts of the Apostles, places him as a notable Hellenistic Jew tasked in his role as archdeacon with a fairer distribution of welfare to Greek-speaking widows. At the same time, with his practised penchant for signs and wonders, he was also said to have excelled in the rather attention-seeking art of enacting miracles, which quickly aroused the interest of the Synagogue of the Libertines, the Cyrenians and the Alexandrinians.

Clearly, there was only one way such subversive street theatre was going to end ...

As is the case with any saint worth his or her (pillar of) salt, the manner of Stephen's death infinitely transcends the significance of his foreshortened life. Accordingly, and in the traditional fashion, although it appears that he may just have missed out on early membership of the 27 Club, his timeless demise, as protomartyr of at least six denominations of the Christian church, was not lacking in gruesome glamour. 

Following blasphemy charges trumped up by the usual suspects, in which he stood accused of crimes against God, Moses and, more importantly, the Sanhedrin Assembly, Stephen's knockdown reminder while on trial that the chosen people had crucified the Son of God and less than life-preserving echoes of Christ's prophecies concerning the destruction of the Second Temple hardly screamed of an overwhelming desire to keep body and soul together.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his self-evident impatience to meet his Maker, however, Stephen himself was reportedly equanimous before his judges, with one report likening his countenance to that of an angel. Sentenced to the Biblical cliché of death by stoning, he faced the rock-wielding mob with prayers for his murderers and a divine vision to boot, rapturously declaring (in what was presumably not a piece of holy misdirection to facilitate a cunning escape) that he had 'seen heaven open and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God!'

In Christian iconography, the St. Stephen is frequently depicted for obvious reasons with three stones, while holding a palm frond (signifying victory over the flesh) and a copy of the Gospels. Those to whom his patronage now extends comprise a hilarious miscellany that includes deacons, bricklayers, stonemasons, casket makers, people with headaches, and ... horses!


III.

In Ireland, St. Stephen's Day has also been known as Day of the Wren [Lá an Dreoilín]. In what appears to have been a ritual of atonement, groups of wren boys with painted faces would hunt and stone a wren to death, then tie the birds corpse to a holly stick and parade it through the streets, while a nominated hunter collected coins. Among numerous variants of the Wren Boys’ song, alluding to this act of ornithological regicide, one runs:

The wren, the wren, the king of all birds, 
On Saint Stephen's Day was caught in the furze, 
Although he is little, his family is great. 
I pray you, good landlady, give us a treat.

In its Celtic lineage, the associated myth derived from a Samhain sacrifice, in which the wren was connected with midwinter song and the dying year, and may also have been entangled with Druidic rituals. The Welsh warrior and magician Lleu Llaw Gyffes reputedly gained his (etymologically contested) name by killing a wren. On the Isle of Man, meanwhile, the hunted wren is an avatar of the shapeshifting queen of the fairies, Tehi Tegi, who was said to have drowned her suitors in the river and then turned herself into one to evade capture.

Among both the Norse and Christian traditions, the wren's association with treachery is likewise strikingly emphasised, in which one highly poetic legend conveys that, during the 8th-century Viking raids, as a troop of Irish soldiers entered an enemy camp under cover of darkness, the micropercussion of a wren nibbling breadcrumbs on a drum woke the sleeping warriors, leading to the invaders' rout.

In the case of St. Stephen, the story runs that, while attempting to conceal himself on the cusp of death - for it seems even martyrs, like Bee Gees, are not after all wholly indifferent to staying alive - his hiding place was revealed by a chattering wren.

For us, the way such symbolic narratives sew betrayal into the tapestry of these archetypal matrices of love and war, of soul and death, provides a kind of cold comfort at this chilly time of year, restoring the psyche to its sacrificial self-exposures, demanding our hunger for transcendence dance with deception, and darkening our enthusiasms.

The ecstasy of St. Stephen reminds us, whether we find our faith in God’s death or eternal life, of the art of dying as a summons to visionary existence. We know St. Stephen of Harold Hill is enduring his own considerable sacrifices now and we wish him every strength of spirit for the year to come, as well as much power to his writing elbow.

Author's Notes

For an Irish perspective on St. Stephen, see Rosita Boland's article in The Irish Times entitled 'A martyr whose day is set in stone', (24 Dec 2010): click here.

For further Biblical background, see the entry on St. Stephen in the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia: click here.

And on the Irish Day of the Wren, see Rose Eveleth's article in The Smithsonian Magazine, entitled 'The Irish Used to Celebrate the Day After Christmas by Killing Wrens' (26 Dec 2012): click here.    

Finally, readers will doubtless recall Stephen Alexander's own controversial post on this topic published on Torpedo the Ark (26 Dec 2013), entitled It's My Name Day (And I'll Decry If I Want To). 


Editor's Notes

Simon Solomon is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and serves as a managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He blogs at (and can be contacted via) simonsolomon.ink

Simon appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm.

Of Parasitic Heads and Archaic Torsos: In Memory of Islaam Maged (A Guest Post by Simon Solomon)

My frail and breaking sister 

I hold these memories in my aching arms.

I. The Numen of the Part-Human

In shifting horror into black humour with a splash of compassion, a dash of French theory, and a dollop of autobiography for good measure, the ingredients of Stephen Alexander's recent post concerning the terrible and strangely beautiful case of the fused Egyptian twins Manar and Islaam left us humanely stirred and poetically shaken. We are thus grotesquely grateful for this tragicomic Yuletide offering.

Given the acute rarity of this condition, Manar is apparently the only child to have survived - at least temporarily - her own beheading. Nevertheless, it is the role of her bodiless sister-fragment, the sacrificed Islaam, to which we feel peculiarly drawn. As might be surmised, the unstable ambivalence toward it/her attests to the undecidable mixture of uncanny in/humanity with which one looks upon such stupendously rare entities - or they upon us.

If Islaam was quite literally nobody, this apparently did not stop her from eliciting her sister's mortifying sibling attachment, as well as the love of her family. To that end, after she had been surgically removed from the autosite, she was given proper burial rites by her parents, who, to all intents and purposes, clearly viewed Islaam as a tiny child and not merely a genetic obscenity or clinical remnant.

However, whilst a functioning separate brain ensured that Islaam had a mind of her own, one doesn't need to be a doctor to see that, having no possibility of bodily autonomy, she would have been entirely incapable of a viable life. Moreover, since it appears that her continued existence might have exerted a toxic and ultimately lethal drain on Manar's well-being (in the weeks before surgery, for example, the latter suffered several episodes of heart failure due to Islaam, rotting alive with gangrene, channelling waste back into their her body), a decisive intervention was clinically crucial to save the hostess.

While it might seem luridly sentimental to some readers to interrogate such medical expedients, let alone mourn a lethal parasite, Islaam's identification and death rites nevertheless point to the way in which the ownership of a head (whether or not it comes with arms, legs and a beating heart to complete the ensemble) secures a human destiny. There would appear to be no way, one might say, of resisting the urge to put a name to a face ...

II. Of Rilke, Radiance and Sculpture (Or the Terrible Beauty of Being Born)

Islaam's haunting posthumous image - a dead head resting upon the failed promise of a noble breast - put me in mind of Rilke's famous ekphrastic poem, 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' (1908), written in the aftermath of his reverberating association with the sculptor Auguste Rodin, for whom he worked as a secretary during 1905-6.

The poet's charged visits to the Louvre, where he viewed the ancient sculpture, were the cultural departure point for his phenomenological exploration of aesthetic distance vis-à-vis classical fragments, in which the object, under Rilke’s modernist gaze, more than merely taking its Baudrillardian revenge, gleamed with its own radiant and transformative life:

We have not known the unconscionable head 

nor its eyes' ripening apples. And yet the star- 

cold torso burns still like a chandelier, 

in which his glances gleam and abide,

cut back merely. Else the bow of the breast 

could not deceive you and no smile join 

to the shifting softness of the loins 

toward their procreative centre, their phallic absence.

Else the stone might stand disfigured and dwarfed 

below the shoulders, diaphanous,
not glister like a bloodied hawk,

nor pour through all its contours, 

since, like the panoptical sun, there is no place 

it does not see you. Change my life, yours. 

- Trans. S. Solomon

If, as Rilke famously claimed, beauty is the beginning of terror, we would turn his poetic equation on its head: it is the terrible that initiates us into the beautiful.

Thus, as we read it, Rilke's sonnet commemorates the luminous power of creation's disappearance: the way what is not, what is missing, what has broken off or crumbled to dust, charges and animates an artistic composition with numinous power, to the point of ultimately driving the modern mind into a state of psychic rearrangement.

As the solar god of poetic music, Apollo is all-seeing like the sun. But he is also a god of dreams, appearance and illusion. Art, therefore, is inherently treacherous; as implied by Rilke's deployment of the verb blenden (to 'blind', to 'dazzle', or 'deceive') to describe the lucent charisma of the ancient relic.

The sacred head was, or is now, unerhört - ‘outrageous’, ‘scandalous’, ‘tremendous’. Like the sun itself, the head of a god, Rilke tells us, is something we could not have borne; now, sightlessly reborn, it is the torso instead that, literally and metaphorically, takes us in. This mystical antique is, in effect, a kind of headless hallucination, a decapitated game-changer. An acephalic Apollo inserts a rent in the rational.

III. With all Earth for a Body: The Afterlife of Islaam

If the name Islaam translates as 'the will of God', we can reinterpret its bearer as directed by a pure vector of fate, the expressive silence of cosmic necessity. (Islaam's head was literally unerhört, unheard, since she could not make sounds, though she could apparently blink, cry and smile.)

The poetic question is whether it is sentimental to mourn a part object, or whether there is a play to be staged about a human bloodsucker that was literally no more than a pretty face. In viewing Islaam's death as an event and not merely the rational operation of a clinical machine, we are returned to an immanent a/logic of sacrifice, a lucent horror incarnated by an impossible object - 'impossible' in the sense of being unable to sustain itself, to offer mortal satisfaction, or to entertain a future beyond its urgent expenditure.

Islaam's irremediable fate, in exemplary terms, was to die that another might live, to stitch the decision of death like a phantom skull into the remaking of a consanguineous body. As such, we would argue, her separation is the inseparable operation that signals the possibility of the sacred.

Remembering the stillborn lamb and its hacked-off head in Ted Hughes's astonishing poem 'February 17th', we fantasise about Islaam's caput mortuum placed on a burial mound, 'its pipes sitting in the mud, / With all earth for a body'. Or under the ground, where the roots of plants might lend the dead head the push of organic limbs and the soil pack her bones with black flesh.

But she was the gift to whom only death could be given; like the fire of Antigone, or a baby Christ. What Rilke memorably described as 'all the shame of having a face' was never less shameful, never more strange.


Author's Notes

The epigraph beneath the image of Manar and Islaam is taken from Paula Meehan's poem 'The Lost Twin', which can be found in her collection Dharmakaya, (Carcanet Press, 2000). 

For two alternative translations of Rilke's sonnet Archäischer Torso Apollos, by Sarah Stutt, and an interesting discussion of the work by Carol Rumens in her Guardian column (15 Nov 2010), please click here.

This post is dedicated to my sister, Lisa Thomas.


Editor's Notes

Simon Solomon is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and serves as a managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He blogs at (and can be contacted via) simonsolomon.ink

Simon appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm. I am very grateful for his submission of this twin text to my own attempt to discuss the case of Manar (and Islaam) Maged, entitled Heads You Lose and published on 23 Dec 2018 - and grateful also for his kind permission to slightly edit the post.  

Chaos Reigns (Memento Mori)

Stephen Alexander: Chaos Reigns (2018)

I.

A sparkling ice-cold morning in December: but even beneath cloudless blue skies, and just days before Christmas, chaos reigns ...


II.

Danish film-director and screenwriter Lars von Trier is right: grief, despair, and - above all - pain are ever-present in this world and fundamentally determine the tragic (if extremely rare and unusual) phenomenon that people term life; something they not only value, but desperately cling on to, despite the three beggars.  

In one of the most memorable scenes of his 2009 movie Antichrist, Von Trier presents us with a malevolent-looking fox slowly disembowelling itself. As it does so, it looks up at a startled Willem Dafoe (playing the male character known simply as He) and utters the diabolical phrase: Chaos reigns.

This became an instant internet meme and many people thought it was funny: but it isn't funny. Those who find it so are just imbeciles whistling in the dark and if there's one thing I hate it's optimistic bravado; you can laugh at the bloody horror that lies beneath the surface, but don't ever think that in doing so you can laugh it away, or make yourself immune.

Ultimately it's good to show courage in the face of death and evil (which are synonyms for life), but this requires a certain honesty and an acknowledgement of one's own anxiety, not mocking stupidity.


Click here to watch the chaos reigns scene from Antichrist (dir. Lars Von Trier, 2009), starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. 

Thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting this post and reminding me of the above scene in Von Trier's film.    

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). 

Reflections on Cat Cognition and Feline Intelligence

Black cat looking out of window 
Stephen Alexander (2018)

I.

I don't have a cat: but I like cats. And I particularly like the friendly black cat who comes to visit - even after the Little Greek accidently trod on his paw.

Sometimes he sits in the garden; sometimes he prefers to stretch out on the back porch, sharpening his claws on the doormat. But he also likes to nose around the house and rub himself against the furniture. This morning, he jumped on the windowsill and stood staring out of the window.

I don't know what caught his attention and I don't really know what he thinks of things - or me for that matter. But, clearly, he's exercising an intelligence of some kind as he familiarises himself with a strange environment and interacts with new people, learning how to exploit and manipulate both.  

II.

Apparently, the brain of the average domestic moggie is just about large enough in size for cats to qualify as big brained animals - though of course, this doesn't necessarily mean they are intelligent; for whilst a correlation has been shown between these things, correlation does not mean causation.

However, thanks to behavioural observation, I think we can take it as a given that cats are smart - they dream, they scheme, they solve problems and they play. And even when told that dogs have twice as many neurons as cats, I refuse to accept that mutts are twice as intelligent. For whilst dogs can be vicious, only cats are sophisticated enough to derive pleasure from cruelty. Give a dog a bone and it's perfectly happy; but a cat only really gets excited at the thought of live prey.       

Apparently, cats also have excellent memories. Indeed, one of the reasons that stray cats adapt so well to extremely demanding urban environments is because they are able to retain and recall information and learn from past experience. They have also memorized their hunting and survival skills - unlike dogs, that have become almost completely dependent upon their human masters.

Ultimately, it's because cats have retained their indifference, mistrust, and contempt of man that they have also kept their savage beauty and seductive mystery across the millennia. They live alongside us, but have never really been domesticated; they have, as anthrozoologist Dr John Bradshaw says, three out of four paws still firmly planted in the wild and can easily revert within only a few generations back to the independent way of life enjoyed by their ancestors 10,000 years ago.


III.

Finally - and perhaps most interestingly of all - it's clear from extensive research that dogs pereceive us as different (superior) beings. They don't behave around us as they behave around other dogs and they know they live in our world. 

But cats, however, seem to regard people merely as bigger, clumsier versions of themselves and have thus not bothered to adapt their social behaviour; they act towards us in a manner that is indistinguishable from how they would act towards others of their kind.

Essentially, for cats there is only one world - and its theirs.

See: John Bradshaw, Cat Sense, (Basic Books, 2013). 

On the Art of Necro-Ornithology

Poor Dead Sparrow 

(on plastic orange background) 
Stephen Alexander (2017) 

As regular readers will know, I have had a persistent love for birds from early childhood; from cheeky house sparrows to menacing black crows. I love to watch them and I love to listen to them. 

I agree entirely with Luce Irigaray: Birds are our friends. They accompany us throughout our life, making happy and bringing comfort in times of crisis. Angels, one might suggest, not only have mighty wings, they also have sharp beaks.   

People who don't like birds, or would do them harm, obviously have something wrong with them. But, I have no objections to those individuals who find the dead bodies of birds an opportunity for art and lovingly transform feathered corpses into aesthetic objects of morbid curiosity.

Because whilst for birds, as for flowers, beasts and man, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive, the second best thing is to leave behind a beautiful corpse, or a fascinating image. 

Knowing nothing about taxidermy, however, and unable to draw for toffee, the best I can do is try to take an interesting snap with my iphone when encountering a poor dead sparrow lying on the front garden path (before gently wrapping the little body in kitchen paper and placing it in the bin). 

Note: readers interested in birds might like to see the earlier posts related to this one: Feathered Friends, On the Whistling of Birds at Midnight, and Necro-Ornithology (Study of a Dead Baby Bird).

Necro-Ornithology (Study of a Dead Baby Bird)

Dead Baby Bird 
(on chrome yellow background with daisy) 
Stephen Alexander 2017

You know what it is to die alone,
Baby bird!

To have fallen from the nest, unfledged,
Dragon-faced and flipper-winged.

Once your tiny beak-mouth chirruped
With bold reptile defiance, indomitable.

Now maggots rend your unfeathered flesh.

Serenity Now (Notes on 'The Flying Fish' by D. H. Lawrence)

Stephen Alexander 
Window onto the Greater Day (2017) 

 

"'Beauteous is the day of the yellow sun which is the common day of men; but even as the winds roll unceasing above the trees of the world, so doth that Greater Day, which is the Uncommon Day, roll over the unclipt bushes of our little daytime. Even also as the morning sun shakes his yellow wings on the horizon and rises up, so the great bird beyond him spreads out his dark blue feathers, and beats his wings in the tremor of the Greater Day.'"

- D H Lawrence, The Flying Fish (1925)

I've always rather liked this poetic passage in which Lawrence suggests that the day-to-day world of man is not the only reality; that we might, in times of great crises and crack-up, glimpse something of the deeper blue that belongs to the Greater Day, wherein shines that other (darker) sun. It's liberating to think that there is something external to our own small and tight and over-furnished universe; something unconquerable and unknowable in its sheer immensity; the world in which flowers bloom and objects sparkle.

And it's strangely comforting to imagine like Lawrence a new type of humanity living in this fourth dimensional world without walls; that those who belong to the Lesser Day and cannot or will not leave their homes behind, will "'shudder and die out, like clouds of grasshoppers'". For the Greater Day belongs to those men and women who, like flying fish, are able to move between worlds on translucent wings, invisibly rejoicing as they do so.

The poorly protagonist of this unfinished tale gains his clearest insight into how astonishing life can be in the Greater Day, when witnessing a school of porpoises swimming alongside the ship on which he's sailing. Lawrence describes the scene in very beautiful detail as a "spectacle of the purest and most perfected joy in life". Although travelling at high speed, the marine mammals do so with carefree composure and serenity.

And that's the crucial thing; for you can't access the blue splendour of the Greater Day by an act of restless, noisy self-assertion. Rather, it requires qualities that many modern people no longer value: silence, stillness, and attentiveness ... One must, as it were, learn to enjoy watching paint dry and listening to the grass grow. 


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Flying Fish', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 

Jumping Grace (A Short Verse in the Manner of Michel Houellebecq)

En sautant Grace -

Visiblement belle

Ravie dans son nouveau soutien-gorge de sport

Indifférente à la gravité.

Jumping Grace -

Conspicuously beautiful

Happy in her new sports bra

Unconcerned with gravity.

Thanks to Gedvile Bunikyte for kind permission to use her photograph. 

Thanks to Simon Solomon, Christian Michel and Sophie Stas for help with the translation (into French); any errors or inadequacies are entirely my own. 

On the Art of the Persimmon

Stephen Alexander: Lip Service (2017)

The relationship between fruit and art is long and intimate; in paint and poetry - still life and free verse - mankind has attempted to capture the fleshy beauty and essential thingness of these delicious, nutritious, seed-disseminating structures formed from the swollen ovary of the flowering plant and heavy with cultural and symbolic meaning. People everywhere love to consume fresh, juicy fruit. And people everywhere love to articulate their own perishable existence in angiospermatic terms; we too blossom and go to seed; we too ripen and rot.      

Now, I'm sure everyone will have their favourite fruit, favourite fruit painting and favourite fruit poem. Personally, I'm a big fan of the persimmon at the moment; the glucose-rich, lotus fruit of the ebony tree which ranges from pale yellow-orange in colour to deep orange-red, depending on species and variety. Belonging to the genus Diospyros, many mistakenly believe the persimmon to be a divine fruit, but, actually, it's an earthly delight found all around the world from East Asia to Southern Europe to North America.      

As for my favourite fruit painting and fruit poetry ...

Well, in my view, Cézanne's apples are still the most brilliant and courageous attempt not only to astonish Paris, but to affirm the existence of the fruit as a mind-independent object; i.e. as something that has its own mysterious reality external to our ideas and ideal representations.

And, in my view, D. H. Lawrence's fruit poems in his magnificent collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), remain the greatest verses ever written on pomegranates, peaches, figs, sorb-apples, and grapes. For Lawrence, like Cézanne, was sensitive to the otherness of the non-human world in all its libidinal materiality and allure; he doesn't give a fuck about what we might term the spiritual aspect of fruit which appeals to human vanity and results in reassuring artistic cliché.

But whilst Cézanne painted many types of fruit apart from apples - including pears, oranges and lemons - he unfortunately didn't paint any pictures of persimmons (as far as I'm aware). And so I've provided my own image to accompany this post; a photograph I've entitled Lip Service and which shows the eaten remains of a persimmon on a pink sponge background. It might not have the Zen-like qualities of Mu Ch'i's 13th century ink on paper masterpiece, but I think it's a provocative work of postmodern art.    

Equally regrettable is the fact that Lawrence didn't write a poem about the persimmon either. However, this happily affords me the opportunity to offer a few lines taken from one of Li-Young Lee's rather lovely verses in which, amongst other things, he instructs us how to identify which persimmons are ready to eat and remembers how his mother alerted him to the solar nature of the fruit:
      

Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.

...

My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.

Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.

- Li-Young Lee, "Persimmons", from Rose, (BOA Editions Ltd, 1986).

Another Bloody Sunset (On Eternal Recurrence and the Snobbery of Photographers)

Die Ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen 
SA/2016

I hate people who take photography seriously; people who fuss over every aspect of their composition and have to employ all the latest technology; people who look down on those of us who enjoy simply taking snaps - including snaps of the sunset which, apparently, is not the done thing in the world of professional image making. Indeed, there's even a sneering acronym used in online chat forums: NABS - not another bloody sunset.

For me, there's something not only touching but philosophically interesting about the fact that, apart from a few superior types who like their cyclopic perception of the world to remain immaculate and claim to be unmoved by natural beauty or the wonder of events, people continue to look to the skies and attempt to capture, however naively or inadequately, the splendour of the rising or setting sun.

For I suspect that one of the things that enchants is the fact that just as no one steps twice into the same river, no sunset is ever witnessed more than once; it's an absolutely unique occurrence that only gives the illusion of an identical event happening over and over each day.

Nietzsche famously terms this the eternal recurrence of the same and, as Deleuze demonstrates in his radical interpretation of this concept, what returns is actually difference itself (paradoxical as this initially seems and contrary to what those commentators believe who write of return in terms of crushing certainty and fixed essence, rather than the very momentariness of the moment).  

The reason people will never tire of the sun and its effects and will never tire either of pictures, is because even the most clichéd of these images tell us something crucial; namely, that despite the experience of duration and continuity, there is no universal stability. 

On the Triumph of Donald Trump: Don't Say I Didn't Warn You ...

Photo credit: AP/LM Otero

I hate to be one of those people who says I told you so, but, back in 2008, in a series of essays on myth, history and cultural despair, I did suggest that - thanks to globalization - we in the West find ourselves today in very similar position to the people of Austria during the 19th century and that the potential for a new type of pessimistic and reactionary politics, based on notions of race, religion, and national identity, was thus a very real danger.   

Such a desperate response, I noted, might not be very desirable, but was perfectly understandable when mass immigration had resulted in the internal exile of indigenous populations in their own societies and concern over their future survival as ethnically and culturally distinct groups was increasingly widespread.

In order to provide some theoretical support for this argument, I referred to an essay by Jean Baudrillard in which he offered a painfully revisionist explanation for why it is that only figures on the far-right seem to possess the last remnants of political interest. This passage in particular seemed at the time - and still seems - absolutely spot on:

"The right once embodied moral values and the left, in opposition, embodied a certain historical and political urgency. Today, however, stripped of its political energy, the left has become a pure moral injunction, the embodiment of universal values, the champion of the reign of virtue and the keeper of the antiquated values of the Good and the True ..."

In short, the left has become boring and this results not only in their abject surrender, but in a situation where it’s only neo-fascist and populist politicians who have anything interesting left to say: "All the other discourses are moral or pedagogical," writes Baudrillard, "made by school teachers and lesson-givers, managers and programmers".

In daring to embrace evil and reject political correctness, I concluded, the far-right looks set to scoop the political jackpot ...

Now - just to be clear - this didn't mean back in 2008 and it doesn't mean now that I support or necessarily share the views of Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, or Donald Trump. But it does mean I can understand the attraction of these figures to voters who are sick to death of being spoken down to by those in power who think they know better than the people who have to live with the consequences of their decisions.

And it does mean I'm conscious of the more prosaic reasons why the above seem to speak to and for an angry white working-class who feel increasingly marginalized by high-tech industries and the enforced integration of ethnic minorities into their communities.

For, unfortunately, globalization doesn't only unleash flows of capital, information, and talent across national borders, it also brings with it crime, disease, and barbarism (by which I mean unfamiliar and often antithetical customs, norms, values and beliefs). And so, unsurprisingly, defensive ideologies arise that promise to counter threats to national and cultural identity and restore order.

And so Brexit and the triumph of Donald Trump ...

Notes

Stephen Alexander, 'Reflections beneath a Black Sun', The Treadwell's Papers, Vol. IV, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010).

Jean Baudrillard, ‘A Conjuration of Imbeciles’, in The Conspiracy of Art, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext[e], 2005). 

The Southend Venus (Alternative Version)

Stephen Alexander: Birth of a Southend Venus (2016)

Lawrence writes that the gods exist according to the soul's desire. Which doesn't mean they are merely imaginary or mind-dependent, but that their becoming-manifest does require a creative act of attention on our part; what some might call an act of faith.

In other words, in order to experience their presence - in order to glimpse them in the limbs and bodies and faces of men and women (in their movements, gestures and expressions) - then one must learn to see that which the camera cannot capture. 

And so to the young woman I'm describing as a Southend Venus ...

Seen as a low resolution image snapped on a smartphone, it's true that she looks quite ordinary and anonymous; just another pretty teen in the universal outfit of denim shorts and t-shirt.

But, seen with an eye that is free from optical complacency and which is sensitive to far more than light, her flesh suddenly gleams with transcendent loveliness and she embodies that innocence and forgetfulness that betokens an Essex Aphrodite.            

 

Roland Barthes: Essays and Interviews Vols. 1-5

Roland Barthes, chez lui, en 1970

I once wrote a little verse about how, like a lover at the graveside, I would often go into bookshops and gently straighten up the volumes of work by Roland Barthes assembled on the shelves; vainly hoping for one last word to be forthcoming; one previously unpublished text to magically appear.

Little did I realise at the time just how much material was in fact still to come; articles, essays, interviews, letters and lecture notes which had been available to a French audience ever since the expanded edition of Barthes's Oeuvres complètes, ed. Éric Marty, appeared in 2002 (Éditions du Seuil), but which remained relatively inaccessible and unknown to readers in the anglophonic world. 

So I'm extremely grateful to Seagull Books who have just published the fifth and final volume in their Essays and Interviews series, drawn from the above, and translated (by Chris Turner) into English for the first time.

I strongly recommend to all readers of this blog that they buy, steal or borrow the following:
 
1. Roland Barthes, A Very Fine Gift and Other Writings on Theory, trans. Chris Turner, (Seagull Books, 2015).

2. Roland Barthes, The Scandal of Marxism and Other Writings on Politics, trans. Chris Turner, (Seagull Books, 2015).

3. Roland Barthes, Masculine, Feminine, Neuter and Other Writings on Literature, trans. Chris Turner, (Seagull Books, 2016).

4. Roland Barthes, Signs and Images: Writings on Art, Cinema and Photography, trans. Chris Turner, (Seagull Books, 2016).  

5. Roland Barthes, Simply a Particular Contemporary: Interviews 1970-79, trans. Chris Turner, (Seagull Books, 2015).


Notes 

Those readers interested in my poem, 'In the Bookshop', can find it in Abraxas, Issue 3, ed. Christina Oakley Harrington and Robert Ansell, (Fulgur, 2013).  

Those readers interested in a recent interview with Chris Turner in which he discusses his work translating Barthes and other French writers, including Baudrillard, should click here. 

Post 666: Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia

As numerical phobias go, fear of  666 - the number of the Beast - is certainly right up there within the cultural imagination; perhaps only the number 13 frightens or discomforts more people.    

Let those who have understanding reckon with this number, entreats the author of Revelation. And trying to puzzle out the precise nature and identity of the Beast has been something generations of scholars, theologians, artists and occultists have spent their lives doing. Aleister Crowley famously declared himself to be the Beast 666 and the number is key within his magickal system of Thelema.

According to Crowley, it's an important solar number; though whether this refers to the Ideal sun of Plato radiating Truth, Beauty and Goodness, or the malevolent sun of Bataille that decays and incites acts of sacrificial madness, I don't really know and, if I'm honest, don't really care - 'cos Crowley always rather bored me.     

Thus if, when young, I painted the number 666 on the collar of a shirt emblazoned with the words I am an anti-Christ / I am an anarchist, I was being more Rotten than Beastly ...