On Two High-Maintenance Individuals and the Man Who Paid the Price of Befriending Them

Ludwig Wittgenstein, D. H. Lawrence, and Bertrand Russell 

photographed in 1929

 

 

I. 

 

In the early 20th century, the phrase high-maintenance was one confined to the world of technical engineering and referred to sensitive machines that demanded constant monitoring and often frequent servicing or repair with specialised parts to ensure smooth running.

  

But by the late 1980s, it was being used by those hip to the latest slang to describe romantic partners and emotionally draining personality types, as well as racing cars and fighter jets. The phrase only gained wide circulation, however, thanks to the hugely popular and influential rom-com When Harry Met Sally (dir. Rob Reiner, 1989) [1].    

 

 

II. 

 

I'm not here to discuss the Harry Burns & Sally Albright relationship, however, and whether the latter was or was not difficult to date due to her being very particular about the manner in which her food was served. 

 

I'm here, rather, to discuss an English writer and an Austrian-born thinker, both of whom I'm sure Bertie Russell would agree were extremely exacting, hyper-sensitive, and emotionally volatile men of genius: D. H. Lawrence and Ludwig Wittgenstein. 

 

While Lawrence was a passionate, prophetic novelist who used poetic language to describe being and Wittgenstein an analytic philosopher who used rigorous logic to define the limits of language, they had similar temperaments and shared an intensity that many people found exhausting.   

 

 

III. 

 

Born in an East Midlands mining community in 1885, Lawrence was a visionary who - by his own admission - preferred his own subjective model of the truth and waged a relentless crusade against many - perhaps most - aspects of the modern industrial world and the moral-rational idealism rooted in Plato that gave rise to Christianity. 

 

Sensitive to criticism, social convention and all forms of authority - and happy to tramp around the world on what he termed a savage pilgrimage, picking fights with friends and enemies along the way - Lawrence was someone who seemed to actively court controversy and thrive on conflict. 

 

His books were censored and sometimes banned. And if he can legitimately be thought of as carrying forward Nietzsche's project of a revaluation of all values, Lawrence can also be viewed as a forerunner of the countercultural revolution of the 1960s. 

 

 

IV. 

 

Born just outside Vienna in 1889 into an extremely wealthy family, Wittgenstein was unsparing in his demand for absolute conceptual clarity and perfection from himself and everyone around him. Whether spending years obsessing over a single architectural detail, pushing students to breaking point with his teaching methods, or waving pokers in the faces of visiting professors [2], he tolerated no sloppy thinking (as might be expected of someone who originally wished to study aeronautical engineering).  

 

His close companion and friend - the brilliant Cambridge mathematician David Pinsent - noted that Wittgenstein was always on edge and easily upset by the smallest thing or any imagined insult. If someone made a casual remark or used a cliché, Wittgenstein would react with genuine horror and fury, viewing it as a moral failing rather than innocent small talk. 

 

Like Lawrence, his personal life was marked by a series of fierce arguments, abrupt ruptures and intense reconciliations. He swung between deep self-loathing and absolute certainty in his own rightness in matters of philosophical logic. Prone to severe bouts of depression, he would sometimes have suicidal thoughts and seek out total isolation. 

 

In brief: both Lawrence and Wittgenstein were highly-strung as well as high-maintenance individuals. 

 

 

V.

 

Just to be clear: Lawrence and Wittgenstein never met. 

 

When Lawrence visited the University of Cambridge in March 1915, at the invitation of Bertrand Russell, he was introduced to several prominent figures, including the economist John Maynard Keynes, but Wittgenstein was then serving on the Eastern front as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army. 

 

Probably it's just as well that they didn't meet. 

 

For Lawrence was less than comfortable in the hallowed halls of Cambridge and came away detesting the Apostles, describing his visit as a major crisis that revealed to him the rotten nature of English intellectual life [3]. 

 

His visceral response was in part triggered by the rational cynicism of those he encountered and in part by his homophobia. For several members of the Cambridge Apostles and the affiliated Bloomsbury Group were either homosexual or had bisexual leanings and Keynes once rather amusingly declared that "practically everyone at Cambridge [...] is an open and avowed sodomite" [4] - this included Wittgenstein, of course.      

 

 

VI. 

 

Although they never met, there was one man - already twice mentioned in this post - who knew them both and was exasperated first by Wittgenstein (in the period 1911-1913) and then by Lawrence (1915-1916): Bertrand Russell ...

 

Born in 1872 - so a generation older than Lawrence and Wittgenstein - Russell would become one of England's most celebrated thinkers, social reformers, and outspoken opponents of the First World War (even spending six months in Brixton prison in 1918 for his pacifist writings and activism).  

 

Having won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1890, he graduated in 1893 with a degree in mathematics. Two years later, he won a prize fellowship in philosophy and was eventually given a teaching post in 1899. Aligning himself with figures such as G. E. Moore and Alfred North Whitehead, Russell was part of the revolt against idealism and one of the founding figures in analytic philosophy.  

 

 

VII.

 

Russell first met Wittgenstein in October 1911, when the latter suddenly appeared one tea time, unannounced and unexpected. Wittgenstein introduced himself as an engineering student from Austria who wanted to study mathematical logic. 

 

Intrigued, Russell welcomed the earnest young fellow and quickly recognised he was an extraordinary individual - so much so, that he came to think of Wittgenstein not merely as his student and research collaborator, but his protégé. Between their first meeting and the summer of 1913, the two men developed an intense intellectual bond and worked tirelessly to solve some of the fundamental problems in mathematical logic. 

 

However, Russell soon discovered that Wittgenstein could be difficult, to put it mildly - not least of all when insisting on the impossibility of proving there were no rhinos in the room - and in May 1913 their relationship suffered a significant strain when Wittgenstein criticised Russell's work on the Theory of Judgment with such savagery that it shattered Russell's confidence in his own writings. 

 

Shortly afterwards, Wittgenstein decided to leave Cambridge and retreat to a secluded wooden hut in Norway, before eventually volunteering to fight in the Great War. Afterwards, the relationship between the two men was never the same again. 

Nevertheless, Russell helped Wittgenstein publish his groundbreaking Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (in German in 1921 and in English translation the following year) - he even generously wrote an introduction, despite the fact that Wittgenstein made clear his view that Russell fundamentally misunderstood the work.  

 

Russell also facilitated Wittgenstein's return to Cambridge in 1929, by agreeing to accept the Tractatus as a doctoral thesis (and act alongside Moore as the examiner). But Wittgenstein wasn't particularly grateful and he increasingly grew to dislike Russell's popular writings and changing philosophical direction. 

 

 

VIII.

 

And then there was Lawrence ... Someone whom Russell found even more of a high-maintenance madman. At least Wittgenstein, for all his idiosyncrasies, was logical in his thinking and didn't subscribe to a libidinal philosophy based on an intuitive way of knowing described as blood-knowledge [5].  

 

Russell first met Lawrence in February 1915. They were introduced, I believe, by their mutual acquaintance Lady Ottoline Morrell, who, for some reason, imagined that both men would greatly benefit from the meeting. 

 

And, to be fair, at first they seemed to get along like a house on fire - united in their passionate opposition to the War, if nothing else. Russell initially found Lawrence an astounding figure: "He is like Ezekiel or some other Old Testament prophet [...] he sees everything and is always right" [6]. They even planned to co-author and deliver jointly a series of public lectures on social reconstruction. 

 

However, their brief working and personal relationship quickly deteriorated due to deep philosophical differences and by early 1916 Lawrence chose to cut all ties with Russell - though not before sending him a number of outrageously aggressive and insulting letters that, for a while, made Russell feel so wretched that he even considered killing himself. 

 

Take a butcher's at this one for example, written on 14 September 1915, which opens: "Dear Russell, I'm going to quarrel with you again. You simply do not speak the truth, you simply are not sincere" and which then goes on to say: 

 

"You are simply full of repressed desires [...] Your will is false and cruel. You are too full of devilish repressions to be anything but lustful and cruel. [...] The enemy of all mankind, you are, full of the lust of enmity. It is not the hatred of falsehood which inspires you. It is the hatred of people, of flesh and blood. It is a perverted mental blood-lust. Why don't you own it. Let us become strangers again, I think it is better." [7]    

  

Wittgenstein may have made Russell feel intellectually inferior - and he may have found Wittgenstein's moral perfectionism tiresome - but Lawrence left him feeling completely worthless as a human being - and who needs that?    

 

 

IX.

 

On reflection - and despite my not much caring for him - it's difficult not to afford Bertrand Russell a significant degree of sympathy. 

In D. H. Lawrence and Ludwig Wittgenstein, he was obliged to manage two of the most intensely high-maintenance individuals of the modern era - young men who were incredibly exhausting and demanding to be around. 

Biographers, friends, and peers have extensively documented how both Lawrence and Wittgenstein were routinely impossible - prickly, combative, tormented, and heavily burdened by an agonizing duty of genius. Both actively thrived on opposition, were prone to explosive rages, and would rather sit in hours of tense, excruciating silence than tolerate casual small talk.

 

What Russell encountered in both men was an insane refusal to compromise with the world as it was. Crucially, however, while Lawrence insisted on raw, emotional vitality at all times, Wittgenstein enforced a standard of absolute intellectual integrity and this fundamental divergence explains why Russell ultimately drew such a sharp line of distinction between the two. 

In his Autobiography, reflecting on his state of mind during the tumultuous period in which he was closely associated with both men, Russell summarised the difference: "Lawrence is just as ferocious a critic as Wittgenstein, but I thought Wittgenstein right and I think Lawrence wrong." [8]

 

In other words, Russell respected Wittgenstein's hostility because its strict conceptual honesty acted as a rigorous intellectual challenge, forcing him to abandon untenable logical theories. 

Lawrence's hostility, on the other hand, was purely personal and rooted in Lawrence's need to psycho-pathologise the people he met. Lawrence successfully drove Russell to the edge of despair, but his criticisms lacked any substantive philosophical basis, leaving Russell unconvinced by his arguments. 

Push comes to shove, then, Russell chooses the logical fanaticism of Wittgenstein over the destructive emotional chaos of Lawrence. For at least with the former, you can reason - which is not the case with a man who sings If it be not true to me / what care I how true it be [9] and talks an awful lot about his solar plexus. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] In a famous scene in the movie, Harry (played by Billy Crystal) informs Sally (Meg Ryan) that there are, in his view, two types of women: high and low maintenance. This permanently shifted the phrase from a niche piece of slang into a universal linguistic shorthand for a demanding partner - and for this we can thank the film's writer Nora Ephron. 

      It might be noted, however, that there are critics of the term - especially as it is often used by men as a sexist insult about women (particularly women who are simply more than they can handle or out of their league).

 

[2] See the post 'Did You Hear the One About the Philosopher and the Actress?' (30 Oct 2025) in which I discuss the infamous 1946 incident where Wittgenstein brandished a poker in Karl Popper's direction. 

 

[3] In a notorious letter [19 April 1915] to David Garnett, Lawrence wrote that the scene at Cambridge filled him with "misery and hostility and rage" and he compared Keynes and co. to "black-beetles" (perhaps of the very same species that Wittgenstein would later place in an imaginary box to make a point about the meaning of words for inner sensations coming from public use rather than private hidden objects; see Philosophical Investigations (1953), § 293). 

      See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 320-321.

 

[4] Keynes wrote this playful observation in a 1906 letter to his close friend and lover Duncan Grant, with reference to the tight-knit, intellectually progressive circles at the university. It is quoted by Simon Goldhill in Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History (Cambridge University Press, 2025). See Chapter 2: 'The Politics of Homosexuality', pp. 92-144.

      Lawrence, who struggled with his own homoerotic impulses, was disgusted by how casually and cynically the Cambridge crowd treated sexuality. He viewed their lifestyle not as a genuine form of love, but as a sterile, intellectualised perversion (they had their sex in the head, as he liked to say).

 

[5] In a famous letter (17 Jan 1913) to Ernst Collins, Lawrence writes: "My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true." See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 502-504. Lines quoted are on p. 503.  

      When, a couple of years later, Lawrence tried to convince Russell of a non-mental, elemental form of consciousness, the latter was unimpressed and unpersuaded. And, rather unfairly and somewhat crassly, Russell would later write that Lawrence's mystical philosophy of blood was essentially fascist in character and led straight to the Nazi death-camps See Volume II (1914-1944) of his three-volume Autobiography (George Allen & Unwin, 1967-1969), p. 23. 

 

[6] Bertrand Russell, quoted by John Worthen in D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (Allen Lane / Penguin Books, 2005), p. 158.

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, Letters II. 392. As John Worthen notes, this letter went too far for Russell, who from this point on found Lawrence "increasingly absurd, incapable of real thinking and madly unrealistic". See D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, p. 160.

 

[8] Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, Vol. II (1968), p. 54. Russell originally wrote these lines to Lady Ottoline Morrell in a letter of July 1915.

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction' to Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 70. (My italics.)

 

 

On the Politics (and Philosophy) of Empathy

 A coloured detail from a lino-style illustration by Space Ink

Visit: SpaceInkShop on etsy.com  

 

 

I.

 

Interestingly, whilst the word empathy has Ancient Greek roots, the complex modern concept it refers to originates in 19th-century German aesthetics: Einfühlung described the projection of self into a work of art [1]. 

 

This term was translated into English and given a wider psychological meaning by Edward B. Titchener in 1909. Since then, the word has become central to ethical and political debates - serving as something closely related to, yet distinctly separate from, older concepts such as sympathy and compassion. 

 

 

II.  

 

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk famously expressed his dislike for the word empathy, viewing it as a type of false coinage [2] privileged by the radical left to manipulate and exploit human feeling for ideological ends. 

 

Taken to its logical extreme, Kirk argued, empathy is not only socially damaging, but suicidal for those who fail to recognise it as an irrational and pathological form of behaviour that, in a Nietzschean sense, is "more dangerous than any vice" [3]. 

 

 

III. 

 

The specific term - suicidal empathy - was coined by Lebanese-born Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad, a long-term opponent of political correctness and social justice activism (or what is frequently termed wokeism) in academia. 

 

According to Saad, when an individual or a governing class is psychologically conditioned to believe that empathy is the highest moral virtue, then their decision-making process becomes fatally compromised [4]. 

 

Thus, for example, we might witness the rights of illegal migrants - belonging to cultures with beliefs, values, and customs entirely alien (and in some cases openly hostile) to those of the native population - being prioritised, even when it risks national security. 

 

 

IV. 

 

Obviously, this is a controversial idea.

 

Popularised by figures such as Kirk, Elon Musk, and others on the right of the political spectrum concerned with rapid demographic and cultural change in the West, it is fiercely contested by those who - wishing to abolish not only national borders but all barriers between self and others - preach that love is universal and unconditional.  

 

For the latter, sympathy no longer suffices. Only the deeper sentiment of empathy as total identification promises to heal the world via a process that, somewhat paradoxically, involves the simultaneous celebration of diversity while negating all differences between people in the name of Humanity. 

 

It's clearly a post-Christian vision (and as such one that would horrify Nietzsche).

 

And yet, ironically, those on the right who wish to defend the nation state, often turn to a medieval Catholic doctrine - ordo amoris - to justify their rejection of empathy. While they may feel a moral obligation to love strangers and sympathise with their hardships, they believe their primary duty is to care for their own family first, followed by their neighbours, and then members of the wider community and nation. 

 

Only after these obligations are met can the interests of the rest of the world be taken into consideration [5].

 

 

V.

 

As a Nietzsche scholar back in the day, I did not have to deal with the word empathy [Einfühlung]. In fact, I'm not sure it even appears in his writings [6]. 

 

For as indicated, while the verb sich einfühlen existed in German Romantic poetry, the noun Einfühlung was only popularised as a term in aesthetics in the 1870s. By the time it became a concept in German psychology (thanks to Theodor Lipps), Nietzsche was already pushing up daisies.  

 

Heidegger, meanwhile, preferred to speak of Mitsein and offered no specific theory of empathy per se. In fact, he critiqued the concept, arguing that there was no conceptual need for such, as human beings are already ontologically with-one-another rather than existing as merely isolated individuals. 

 

In other words, it's not Einfühlung that explains human solidarity and connectedness - relationality is fundamental to Dasein and we are always already living in a shared world [7].

 

 

VI. 

 

One philosopher who did write about empathy, however, was Wittgenstein - and he had some interesting things to say on the subject involving beetles in jars ... [8]

 

Actually, let me qualify that: Wittgenstein did not write extensively about empathy, but his later philosophy radically challenges how we understand the minds, emotions, and pain of others. 

 

For Wittgenstein, there are no hidden mental or emotional states - so we don't need to be mindreaders [Gedankenleser] or empaths who can mystically intuit and experience the moods and feelings of others. There's no need either, argues Wittgenstein, to look inside ourselves to understand others.

 

Emotions are not private inner states; they are tied to language games and public expressions and behaviours; i.e., to shared forms of life [Lebensform]. Thus, to understand another person doesn't require a spiritual merger or total identification. Empathy is an everyday mechanism built directly into our communal practices. 

 

But that means, of course, that when behaviour or language diverges too far from our shared background (due, for example, to species divides), true empathic understanding may reach a limit: If a lion could speak, we couldn't understand him [9].

 

And this remains true even if the lion speaks perfect English, because it unfolds into being in a world completely alien to our own.

 

Similarly, when encountering people from entirely different cultural frameworks, we cannot simply feel how or what they feel. Such understanding requires slow, patient immersion into a common language-game. 

 

Unfortunately, we live in an era where no one has the time or patience for that - an age where an increasing number of people only want to interact with those to whom they feel instant kinship or can immediately identify as one of their own. 

  

Notes

 

[1] Readers who would like to know more may care to read Robert Vischer's Über das optische Formgefühl: Ein Beitrag zur Aesthetik (1873), in which he discusses how viewers comprehend an artwork by projecting themselves (and their feelings) into its forms. For Vischer, this was a universal process; human beings having an innate capacity to empathise not only with other people and living organisms, but also inanimate objects. As this idea fell from favour in aesthetic theory during the early 20th-century, it was picked up by thinkers working in other fields of study - including psychology.

      A section of this work is available in Empathy, form, and space: problems in German aesthetics, 1873-1893, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities / University of Chicago Press, 1994).

 

[2] What Kirk said was this: "I can't stand the word empathy, I think empathy is a made-up, New Age term, and it does a lot of damage. Sympathy is a better word because empathy means you are feeling what another person felt, and no one can feel what another person feels." He concedes, however, that as a political tool, empathy has been highly effective. 

      Quoted by Mark Powell, in 'The ten biggest lies about Charlie Kirk', in the Australian edition of The Spectator (19 Sept. 2025). 

 

[3] Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1968), § 2, p. 116.  

      The line in full reads: "What is more harmful than any vice? Active sympathy for the ill-constituted and weak - Christianity ..."

 

[4] See Gad Saad, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind (Broadside Books, 2026). Critics of the book have described it as a racist attempt to dehumanise others and undermine the natural human virtue of empathy.

      In an essay in The Guardian titled 'Loathe thy neighbour: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy' (8 April 2025), Julia Carrie Wong discussed Saad's book among other works critical of empathy and described what was going on as a far-right attempt to "dismantle and discredit one of the essential tools for any society - our capacity to recognize and respond to suffering". 

      She continues: "We should see the campaign against empathy [...] for what it is: a flashing red light warning of fascist intent", and ends her essay by declaring: "Empathy is not a sin, a toxin, or an evolutionary dead end. It is a tool, and like all tools it can be a weapon. We are going to need it."

 

[5] In 2025, the American vice-president JD Vance's invocation of ordo amoris to defend the foreign aid policies of the second Trump administration caused quite a fuss. Even the Pope joined in, criticising Vance's interpretation of the doctrine saying that love has to be shown for all without exception. 

      Now, I'm no theologian - I'm not even a Christian of any denomination - but it does seem to me that ordo amoris is essentially an order of rank which does, in fact, establish a hierarchy of care. Certainly in the work of Augustine and, later, Thomas Aquinas, special regard is due to be paid to those persons with whom one has a more intimate connection, thanks to contingent factors such as the time and place of one's birth.

      Readers who wish to know more are encouraged to read Augustine's De doctrina Christiana. This crucial theological text consists of four books that describe how to interpret the Scriptures. The first three books were published in 397 and the fourth was added in 426. An English translation by R. P. H. Green was published by the Clarendon Press in 1995.  

      See also, Summa Theologiae, by Thomas Aquinas, in which the idea of ordo amoris is developed alongside all the major theological teachings of the Church. This text was unfinished at the time of his death in 1274. The first English translation, published in 1911, was attributed to the Fathers of the English Dominican Province as the actual translator, Laurence Shapcote, wished to remain anonymous.

 

[6] When Nietzsche discussed our feelings for others - particularly others who were suffering or misfortunate in some manner - he usually spoke (for the most part negatively) about pity [Mitleid] - seeing it as a depressive, life-denying emotion inherited from Christianity (Zarathustra warns against it as a dangerous temptation). 

      However, Nietzsche did posit a noble model of compassion or sympathy rooted in strength and wellbeing; a generous form of fellow-feeling based not only on shared pain, but shared joy - a genuine rejoicing with others [Mitfreude].

 

[7] See Heidegger Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, (Blackwell, 1962), p. 162. 

 

[8] Wittgenstein introduced his famous beetle in a box thought experiment to challenge the idea that our inner feelings are private objects. See § 293 of Philosophical Investigations (1953). 

     In brief, the analogy challenges the ridiculous idea that empathy relies upon the (psychic) ability to peek inside someone else's Schachtel so as to see what they are feeling (what their Käfer looks like). Empathy is about connection, not inspection: you do not need to see the beetle to act with compassion. You simply need to respond to their public behaviour; if someone is crying, just put an arm round them and offer them a hanky to dry their eyes. 

 

[9] This is one of the most famous lines in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Blackwell, 2008), p. 190.    

 

 

Thanks to Ruth Malone for help with the Heidegger section.  

 

 

Did You Hear the One About the Philosopher and the Actress?

The Philosopher and the Actress: 

Wittgenstein & Raquel Welch 

  

I. 

 

According to the Google AI assistant, Ludwig Wittgenstein was an austere and reclusive Austro-British philosopher who did not know and never met the Hollywood sex symbol and actress Raquel Welch. 

 

Not only did they move in completely different social and professional circles, but Wittgenstein died in Cambridge, in 1951, aged sixty-two, when Miss Welch would have been an eleven-year-old child living in California with her parents.    

 

But even if they didn't cross paths in what passes for the actual world, perhaps their lives were entangled at some weird quantum level. At any rate, I can think of a parallel incident involving the same tool that allows us to make a connection between these two individuals ...

 

 

II. 

 

Many younger readers, having grown up in a world of central heating, will probably never have warmed themselves before a real fire place; never watched smoke sucked up a chimney, never emptied an ashpan, never filled a coal scuttle, or handled the various other tools that one needs to maintain a good fire, such as a long metal poker, designed to safely adjust and break up the burning logs or red hot lumps of coal so as to improve airflow. 

One person who did know how to handle a poker - though not always in the manner intended - was Herr Wittgenstein and even many non-philosophers will be familiar with the astonishing confrontation with Karl Popper at the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club, in October 1946. 

 

Arguing over whether there existed substantial problems in philosophy, or merely linguistic puzzles, things grew increasingly heated when Wittgenstein began to wave a poker around to make his case, at one point thrusting it in Popper's direction and challenging him to give an example of a moral rule. 

 

According to Popper, he calmly stood his ground and replied: 'One should not threaten visiting lecturers with a poker.' Infuriated by this mocking response, Wittgenstein - and again we rely on Popper's account of the incident - threw down the poker and stormed out of the room [1].     

 

 

III. 

 

Interestingly, Raquel Welch also knew how to handle a poker with violent intent ...

 

According to a recent documentary [2], Welch once threatened her father - an aeronautical engineer from La Paz, Bolivia, of Spanish descent - with said implement during a family argument around the dinner table in which he had thrown a glass of milk in the face of her mother. 

 

She was sixteen at the time and sick of her father's tyrannical behaviour towards her and her mother and this incident - in which he backed down and backed away - changed their relationship forever as well as the dynamic of the household. Thus, it was a defining (and empowering) moment for her [3]. 

 

And whilst Popper may have a point - one should probably not threaten visiting professors with a poker - I feel that the young Miss Welch (or Raquel Tejada, as she was known at this time) was justified in standing up to a bully who had humiliated and sought to intimidate her mother on many occasions over many years.   

 

In brief: violent and abusive husbands and fathers deserve to get their comeuppance.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Whether Popper's account is strictly accurate - or is dramatised for comic effect - is debatable. The most comprehensive account of this confrontation can be found in the best-selling book by David Edmonds and John Eidenow; Wittgenstein's Poker: The story of a ten-minute argument between two great philosophers (Faber & Faber, 2001).  

      Readers might also like to know that an animated short film entitled Wittgenstein's Poker is currently in post-production, directed by Christian De Vita, written by Casey Cohen, David Edmonds and John Eidenow, starring Brian Cox (as Bertie Russell), Richard E. Grant (as Wittgenstein) and Karl Markovics (as Popper): click here for details, or to lend support via Kickstarter, click here. 

 

[2] I Am Raquel Welch (dir. Olivia Cheng, 2025), is a feature documentary (produced by Network Entertainment) which explores her life and legacy. To watch a trailer on mubi.com, click here. 

 

[3] Those wishing to know more should see Welch's 2010 memoir, Beyond the Cleavage (Weinstein Books), in which she provides an account of this incident with her father and a poker that she gripped with both hands. 

 

On the Monstrous Nature of Philosophy

 Frankenstein's Monster x Ludwig Wittgenstein [1]

 

'Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of the living ...' [2] 

 

I. 

 

Philosophers, like monsters, "are creatures that fail to meet prevailing measures and norms by radically exceeding or falling short of them ..." [3]. 

 

Their form of life - to use a term favoured by Wittgenstein in his later work - is unconventional to say the least; and some might even describe it as inhuman, although that is perhaps going a little too far, as even the most monstrous (and unintelligible) of philosophers share certain practices and customs with others and their thinking ultimately springs from the same bio-cultural reality [4].  

 

In sum: philosophers are not monsters per se; but their thinking is a monstrous form of life; i.e., both unnatural and prophetic [5]. And such a monstrous form of life "is not homogenous and smooth; its language is not a common and transparent one; it is not the unanimous and harmonious sound of angelic tongues" [6]. 

 

II.

 

According to the film theorist and philosopher Noël Carroll, the word monster is - rightly or wrongly - one that might easily be applied to philosophers. 

 

Why? 

 

Because monsters, like philosophers, "are unnatural relative to a culture's conceptual scheme of nature. They do not fit the scheme; they violate it. Thus, monsters are not only physically threatening; they are cognitively threatening. They are threats to common knowledge" [7].  

 

As David Birch notes: "There is an uncanny parallel here between the characterisation of monsters and the work of philosophers." [8] 

 

Indeed, we might even conclude that the best collective noun for a group or gathering of philosophers might not be a school, but a den of monsters.

 

Having said that, I repeat what I say at the end of section I: philosophers are not monsters per se; but their thinking is a monstrous form of life ... And, for me, the person who has developed this line of thought to its nihilistic limit, is Ray Brassier ...

 

 

III.  

 

In a book that I often return to and never tire of reading - Nihil Unbound (2007) - Brassier savages those philosophers who would attempt to stave off the threat (he would say promise) of nihilism by safeguarding the experience of meaning and everything else that humanity clings to and believes in. 

 

In brief, Brassier wishes to accelerate the process (or logic) of disenchantment that began with the Enlightenment and turn philosophical thinking into what he terms the organon of extinction:

 

"Philosophy would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. It should strive to be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity." [9]  

 

However else we might describe this speculative realism, it's certainly not thought as most people think it; it's thought in a monstrous form; "throwing us into a world we no longer recognise, and that does not recognise us" [10].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Obviously, by linking the names of Frankenstein and Wittgenstein I do not wish to imply that the latter was a fan of Mary Shelley's 19th century queer gothic novel. Indeed, as far as we know, he never read the book, nor did he refer to it in any of his writings. 

      And whereas Shelley was very much influenced by David Hume - her novel might even be read as an exploration of the tragic consequences of a skeptical worldview and the limitations of empiricism - the same cannot be said of Wittgenstein, who had a largely negative view of the 18th century philosopher. 

      Interestingly, as David Birch reminds us, there is an astonishing passage in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) in which Hume confesses that philosophical solitude results in his feeling like 'some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expelled all human commerce, and left utterly abandoned and disconsolate' (Treatise, Book 1, Part 4, Section 7). 

      See David Birch, 'Are Philosophers Monsters?', The Philosophers' Magazine - click here. I shall return to this essay later in the post. 

 

[2] Ray Brassier, Preface, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. xi. 

 

[3] Jasmin Trächtler, 'Speaking in Monster Tongues: Wittgenstein and Haraway on Nature, Meaning and the "We" of Feminism', in Forma de Vida (2023): click here. 

 

[4] Should AI systems ever achieve independent consciousness, we might not be able to say the same of them. For perhaps they'll reason in a way that is truly posthuman (or techno-monstrous) and we'll no more be able to understand than we would a speaking lion; see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell, 1953).   

 

[5] The word monstrous derives from the Latin mōnstruōsus (from monstrum), meaning unnatural. But it also etymologically relates to the Latin verbs mōnstrare and mōnēre, which mean to reveal and to warn.  

 

[6] Jasmin Trächtler ... op. cit. 

 

[7] Noël Carroll, 'The Nature of Horror', in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol. 46, No. 1 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 51-59. Click here to access on JSTOR. The lines quoted here can be found on page 56. They are also quoted by David Birch, in his article cited above. 

 

[8] David Birch, 'Are Philosophers Monsters?'

 

[9] Ray Brassier, Preface, Nihil Unbound ... p. xi. 

      This quote is not only pinned above the desk at which I write, but pretty much encapsulates what Torpedo the Ark is all about; i.e., that the disenchantment of the world "deserves to be celebrated as an achievement of intellectual maturity, not bewailed as a debilitating impoverishment" and nihilism is the "unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the 'values' and 'meanings' which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable" [xi]. 

 

[10] David Birch, 'Are Philosophers Monsters?' We should note that Birch is speaking of Hume here, not Brassier. 

 

 

A Philosophical Reflection on Getting Older

Portrait of the Artist as a 

Darkly Enlightened Philosopher

(SA 2025) [1]

 

"Darling, am I looking old? / Tell me dear I must be told ..." [2]

 

I. 

 

You know you're getting older not just when another birthday looms on the horizon - each candle on the cake essentially another nail in the coffin - but when, following the presentation of a short paper at Kant's Cave [3], a young woman approaches not to discreetly slip you her phone number or ask for your email address, but to inform you of the fact that you remind her of her father.

 

Still, as a friend said with a smile, at least she didn't say grandmother ... 

 

 

II.

 

Many people like to believe that there are advantages to growing older; that experience makes one a little wiser, for example. But this is bullshit: and even if it were true, who wants a smidgen more wisdom when you can't see, can't run, can't breathe, and your hair has fallen out?

 

The fact is, most great works of philosophy were produced by thinkers in their mid-to-late 30s - Heidegger, for example, was 37 when Sein und Zeit was published - and whilst there are of course exceptions - such as Kant and his three Critiques - we can confidently say that there are very few works of significance written by thinkers over the age of 55 [4].  

 

As I'll be 62 next week - the same age as Wittgenstein when he died - that means I'm now way over the philosophical hill ... Still, at least I'm not buried beneath it.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The photo was taken on February 3rd 2025 at Kant's Cave (see note 2 below). I'm not sure if I look darkly enlightened, as intended, or simply like an old punk; one person described me as resembling a flamboyant East End gangster - i.e., a Kray brother dressed by Vivienne Westwood. 

 

[2] Lyrics from the X-Ray Spex song 'Age': click here to listen to it on a Peel Session (recorded 6 Nov 1978 and broadcast on the 13th of that month). 

 

[3] Kant's Cave is a monthly meeting organised by Philosophy for All and held in a first floor function room at the the famous Two Chairmen pub, in Wesminster. The paper addressed the question: What is the Dark Enlightenment?

 

[4] See the post by Eric Schwitzgebel analysing the question of what the average age is when philosophers complete their most influential work: The Splintered Mind (12 May 2010): click here. 

Another Sponge Worthy Post

Alejandro Mogollo Art on X

@alemogolloart

 

 

I. 

 

Someone called me a human sponge the other day, implying that I simply absorb other people's ideas and information found online in order to produce posts for Torpedo the Ark; a blog that has, they said, 'almost no original or creative content'. 

 

That seems a bit harsh: although it's perfectly true that I regard Romantic concepts of originality and individual creativity as untenable, subscribing as I do to the idea of intertextualité; i.e., that every text is shaped by (and functions within) a cultural and linguistic network of meaning and that compositional strategies including paraphrase, parody, and plagiarism are not only perfectly legitimate, but unavoidable [1]. 

 

My critic may not like it, but there are no private language games or individual thoughts and experiences [2] and ideas are never created ex nihilo.   

 

 

II. 

 

As for being labelled a human sponge, that doesn't trouble me at all: I like sponges. 

 

Sponges are amazing aquatic animals [3] and I dislike the speciesism contained in the accusation, as if being called a sponge were something one should feel insulted by or as if actually being a sponge were something to be ashamed of. 

 

If I were told that in the next life I would reincarnate as a member of the phylum Porifera that wouldn't trouble me in the slightest and nor would I see it as an evolutionary regression. Who needs the complexity of organs when one's body is continually exposed to circulating currents of water which supply food and oxygen on the one hand, whilst removing waste on the other? 

 

Human beings have been around for approximately 300,000 years: which is a long time. But it's nothing compared to the 543 million years that multicellular sponges have existed and done their thing - which includes fucking with one another [4] and, in the case of carnvivorous deep-water sponges, catching and eating prey [5]. 

 

My critic might want to consider this before using the term sponge in a derogatory manner. Indeed, he might even question his own worthiness in relation to the sponge ... [6]

 

Notes

 

[1] There are several earlier posts on TTA discussing this idea of intertextuality: click here. 

 

[2] Wittgenstein famously examined (and dismissed) the idea of a private language in Philosophical Investigations (1953); see sections 243-271. For Wittgenstein, even if there could be such a language it would be unintelligible not only to others, but to its supposed originator too.   

 

[3] Many people think that because sponges lack organs and don't move they must therefore be a simple form of plant life - just as they mistakenly believe that sea cucumbers are vegetables - but they're not; sponges are animals, just like you and me, and we possess a common ancestor (which is why we share 70% of our genetic material and why, for example, the elastic skeletons of sponges are made from the same protein (collagen) that is found in human tendons and skin). 

 

[4] Most sponges are hermaphroditic and reproduce sexually by releasing sperm cells into the water current which are then carried to other sponges, where they fertilise egg cells (ova). If need be, however, sponges can also reproduce asexually - not something we can do.

 

[5] This includes the recently discovered harp sponge (Chondrocladia lyra) which use velcro-like hooks on external body surfaces to capture much larger prey than the typical suspension feeding sponges which simply filter bacteria and microscopic organisms from the surrounding water. Once a carnivorous sponge has ensnared its prey, it secretes a digestive membrane that surrounds and engulfs the captured animal, breaking down its tissue so that it can eventually be absorbed and digested. 

 

[6] Fans of the American sitcom Seinfeld will immediately recognise that I'm thinking here of the question that Elaine Benes once posed to potential lovers: So you think you're sponge-worthy? (Obviously, I'm aware that a contraceptive sponge - a soft, saucer-shaped device made of polyurethane foam and filled with spermacide - is not the same thing as a sea sponge.)

      Readers who wish to do so can click here to watch a clip from the season seven episode, 'The Sponge', dir. Andy Ackerman and written by Peter Mehlman (7 Dec 1995).  

 

 

Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) - Part 1: Propositions 1-120

 Jonathan Cape (2017)

 

 

I. 

 

As long-time readers of Torpedo the Ark will know, whilst, as a nihilist, my default position is always paint it black, I do also have a philosophical fascination with a colour much loved by painters and poets and which Christian Dior identified as the only one which can possibly compete with black: blue. 

 

This includes, for example, the lyrical blue celebrated by Rilke and Trakl; the deep blue invented by Yves Klein; the blue of the Greater Day that D. H. Lawrence writes of; and my fascination with this colour extends to blue angels, blue boys, blue lenses, and blue lagoons.  

 

Thus, no surprise then that I should eventually get around to reading Maggie Nelson's wonderful little book Bluets ...

 

 

II. 

 

First published by Wave Books in 2009, Bluets consists of 240 numbered propositions arranged not so much randomly, but with what we might term considered whimsicality to create the illusion of logical precision and continuity à la Wittgenstein. Each proposition is either a sentence or a short paragraph; none exceeds two hundred words in length.

 

The book documents not only the author's bowerbird-like obsession with the colour blue, referencing many famous figures along the way associated with the colour, but also provides an insight into Nelson's understanding of love and mental health and examines what role - if any - beauty plays in times of heartache or depression.

 

In 2016, she won a MacArthur Fellowship - known to many as the genius grant - and, on the basis of this one book alone I think that Nelson is indeed one of those very rare individuals who probably deserves the title of genius; an original and insightful writer who produces work that is both lyrical and philosophical.  

 

The title doesn't refer us simply to those small and delicate blue flowers belonging to the genus Houstonia, but also to a triptyque by the American abstract artist Joan Mitchell, Les Bluets (1973), which Nelson describes as perhaps her "favourite painting of all time" [a]

 

Here, I would like to provide a commentary on the book, picking up on some of the things that particularly resonate with me or pique my curiosity to know more. Hopefully, in the course of doing so I can demonstrate why the author and critic Hilton Als was spot on to praise Bluets as a "new kind of classicism" that, whilst queer in content, remains elegant in form [b].     

 

 

III.

5

 

Are we to understand that when, like Mallarmé, one replaces le ceil with l'Azur - "in an effort to rinse references to the sky of religious connotations" - one ceases to be a crypto-theologian and becomes a poet-philosopher? 

 

Is it true to say: whereof one can perceive blueness, thereof one cannot imagine God ...     

 

 

18

 

"A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck."

 

For a moment I thought I was reading Young Kim's A Year on Earth with Mr Hell (2020). 

 

But then I read the three sentences following: 

 

"Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my seceret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence."  

And realised I wasn't.  

 

20 

 

"Fucking leaves everything as it is." 

 

This is a very un-Lawrentian sentence; perhaps the most un-Lawrentian sentence you could imagine. 

 

For Lawrence insists that, on the contrary, fucking is transformational of the individual - changing the very constitution of the blood - and that a politics of desire, founded upon the act of coition, has revolutionary potential. 

 

Like Nietzsche, Lawrence believes that the lover is richer and stronger than those who do not fuck; that lovers grow wings and possess new capabilities. And there arises, he says, a post-coital "craving for polarized communion with others" [c] - not just for cigarettes. 

 

 

26 / 31

 

Nelson says that she's heard that "a diminishment of color vision often accompanies depression" and I couldn't help wondering if that's true; if feeling blue ironically makes the world seem greyer ...?

 

Well, apparently, it is: depression lowers the production of dopamine and this can impair neurotransmitters in the retina, making the world appear less vibrant and colourful. 

 

But then Nelson reminds us of the case of Mr Sidney Bradford, who had his vision restored in his fifties (having lost his sight as a baby) and saw the world at last in full-colour:  he died of unhappiness due to disappointment soon afterwards [d].      

 

35

 

"Does the world look bluer from blue eyes?", asks Nelson, before concluding that's probably not the case. 

 

But, like her, I like to imagine it does.

 

 

56

 

When reminded of Saint Lucy - patron saint of the blind, who was tortured and put to death by the Romans in 304 CE - I can't help thinking of Simone, the teenage erotomaniac at the heart of Bataille's notorious short novel L'histoire de l'œil (1928). 

 

For whilst Lucy didn't - as far as I know - insert the eye of a murdered priest into her vagina, she is often depicted in "Gothic and Renaissance paintings holding a golden dish with her blue eyes staring weirdly out from it".   

 

Depending on what sources one refers to, Lucy's eyes were either gouged out by her captors, or she removed them herself in order to avoid male attention and prove her religious devotion. For as Nelson writes, there are numerous stories of women "blinding themselves in order to maintain their chastity" and to demonstrate their fidelity to God (i.e., the fact that they 'only have eyes' for Christ).   

 

 

62

 

Nelson's definition of puritanism: the exchanging of corporeal reality for ideal representation. Not something that appeals to her: 

 

"I have no interest in catching a glimpse of or offering you an unblemished ass or airbrushed cunt. I am interested in having three orifices stuffed full of thick, veiny cock in the most unforgiving of poses ..."  

 

Fair enough: but this is still an image conjured up with words, is it not? And as Merleau-Ponty pointed out: Words do not look like the things they designate [e].  

 

 

71 / 72 

 

Hard to find dignity in loneliness; easier to find it in solitude. A pair of propostions of such high truth value that we may for all intents and purposes declare them true.  

 

 

101

 

When Nelson's friends were asked "how much time they would grant between 'a blinding, bad time' and a life that has simply become a depressive waste", the consensus was "around seven years". 

 

I suspect - based on my own experience between April 2016 and February 2023 - that that's probably about right; that the seven year mark is the limit. Perhaps that's why when a person goes missing there is a presumption of death after seven years. 

 

(As for how long it takes to fully recover having reached one's limit, that's a question to which neither Nelson nor her friends provide an answer and I suspect it might take longer to retreat from the edge of the abyss than it does to get there.)

Notes

 

[a] Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Jonathan Cape, 2017), Prop. 145, p. 57. Note that I will henceforth only give proposition numbers (in bold) in the post.      

 

[b] Hilton Als, 'Immediate Family', The New Yorker (11 April, 2016): click here. 

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 135. 

      Later, in proposition 201, Nelson does acknowledge the truth of change, newness, and becoming-other: "I believe n the possibility - the inevitability, even - of a fresh self stepping into ever-fresh waters [...]" (p. 80).

[d] This is a real case, although Nelson is taking artistic license with her conclusion. For whilst Bradford did admit to finding the world visually disappointing following corneal grafts - and did die two years afterwards - he also had chronic health issues and no specific cause of death was entered on his death certificate. 

[e] Nelson quotes this line herself in proposition 70. It can be found in the essay 'Cézanne's Doubt', in Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwyn (Routledge, 2003). 

 

This post continues in part two (selected propositions from 121-240): click here. 

Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) - Part 2: Propositions 121-240

Joan Mitchell: Les Bluets (1973) 

Oil on canvas (281 x 580 cm) [f]

 

 

NB: part one of this post (reflecting on selected propositions from 1-120) can be read by clicking here.  

 

 

131 

 

This makes smile: 

 

"'I just don't feel like you're trying hard enough,' one friend says to me. How can I tell her that not trying has become the whole point, the whole plan?" 

 

 

134 

 

Once, I began assembling a book of fragments to do with the practice of joy before death - suicide notes, if you like. This proposition would've made a welcome addition: 

 

"If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones [...] and head down to the river." 

 

Philosophers, however, from Empedocoles to Deleuze, usually like to leap to their death like iridescent jumping spiders. 

 

 

150 

 

"For Plato, colour was as dangerous a narcotic as poetry." 

 

And, many centuries later, the Puritans also hated colours and "smashed the stained-glass windows of churches, thinking them idolatrous, degenerate". 

 

I knew both these things. 

 

But I didn't know that, before becoming a holy colour - one particularly associated with the Blessed Virgin - blue "often symbolized the Antichrist" (i.e., he who comes out of the blue to deceive mankind and deny the Father and Son).

 

 

156 - 161

 

According to Lawrence, it's a terrible thing to educate children into abstract knowledge, so that they may understand the world. For adults to solemnly explain to three-year-olds why grass is green is, he says, inexcusable stupidity and will arrest their dynamic development [g]. 

 

As there is always something a bit childlike about poets, it didn't surprise me to learn that although she had been told the answer several times to the question 'Why is the sky blue?', Nelson can never quite recall the explanation. 

 

The only part she does remember is that "the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it". 

 

Never mind the scattering of sunlight and the length of waves, etc., for Nelson the blueness of the sky "is something of an ecstatic accdent produced by void and fire".        

 

I love this thought: as I do the idea of divine darkness and agnosia - the latter being a form of unknowing that one discovers (or accomplishes) within the former: 'Explanations', as Wittgenstein once said, 'come to an end somewhere' [h].

 

 

164

 

I agree with Lawrence that the proverbial ideas of beauty as something sinful and shallow are all of them false [i]. 

 

And because I agree with this, I also very much like Maggie Nelson's proposition that, "despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said", beauty "neither obscures truth nor reveals it". 

 

And that blue - the colour of sex [j] - is perhaps the most beautful of all colours. 

 

 

167 - 168

 

When - like Cézanne, Artaud, and the American artist Mike Kelley - you've had enough of psychology and the narcissistic pleasure of seeing your own reflection (on film screens, for example), then it's time to attend to colour:

 

"Perhaps this is why I have turned my gaze so insistently to blue: it does not purport to be me, or anyone else for that matter."

 

 

171

 

Philosophically, this is at the heart of my project to do with the Ruins: gathering fragments of blue has nothing to do with paying tribute to (or wishing to recreate) some ideal model of blue wholeness; "a bouquet is no homage to the bush". 

 

 

183 / 185

 

Readers might recall that in proposition 20 Nelson stated: Fucking leaves everything as it is. 

 

Here, she echoes this by writing: "For better or worse, I do not think that writing changes things very much, if at all. For the most part, I think it leaves everything as it is."

 

That's an unusual thing for a writer to say: usually, like Goethe, they are anxious about the possibly destructive nature of language; the fact that words can kill the essential quality of a thing. 

 

If for Warhol sex was just another (occasionally quite satisfying) way to pass the time, then that's pretty much what writing is for Nelson [k]. 

 

 

204

 

And now, finally, thanks to Nelson, I have an answer when someone asks why I can never be bothered to have things repaired (even when this will cause significant damage and expense in the long term): I have little to no instinct for protection ...

 

"Out  of laziness, curiosity, or cruelty - if one can be cruel to objects - I have given them up to their diminishment."   

 

Notes

 

[f] Maggie Nelson names this as her favourite painting in proposition 145 of Bluets (Jonathan Cape, 2017), p. 57. She later admires Mitchell for her chromophilic recklessness, that is to say, for choosing her pigments "for their intensity rather than their durability". See proposition 154, p. 61.     

[g] See D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 123. 

[h] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Blackwell Publishers, 1953), §1. Nelson quotes this line in proposition 161 (p. 64).

[i] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Artcles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 182 - 217. Lawrence writes: "Beauty is not a snare, nor is it skin-deep, since it always involves a certain loveliness of modelling [...]" (p. 192). 

[j] Again, see Lawrence; 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essays and Articles, pp. 143 - 148, where he asserts that "sex and beauty are one thing, like fire and flame" (p. 145). 

[k] Later, "upon considering the matter further", Nelson admits in proposition 193 that writing does in fact do something; namely, it replaces the memories it aimed to preserve.