On the Peacock and the Gamekeeper

Peacock by go-bananas on deviantart.com

The literary imagination of the nineteenth-century was fascinated by the symbol of the peacock. Indeed, even the young D. H. Lawrence, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, can't resist having one of these ornamental birds come screeching its way into his first novel  ...

The narrator, Cyril Beardsall, is sat one evening in an abandoned churchyard, chatting with his new acquaintance, Annable, the misanthropic (and misogynistic) local gamekeeper.

Although Annable is despised by the villagers and regarded as something of a devil, Cyril can't help confessing the erotic attraction he feels towards him; "his magnificent physique, his great vigour and vitality, and his swarthy, gloomy face drew me in". Cyril also likes the way that the older man treats him "as an affectionate father treats a delicate son", touching him on his shoulder or knee, as they sit discussing "the decline of the human race" into folly and corruption.        
 
Suddenly, a peacock came flapping out from behind the church and flew onto the marble figure of an angel that continued to guard a grave, even if it had long ceased caring for the poor parishioner buried therein:   

"The bird bent its voluptuous neck and peered about. Then it lifted up its head and yelled. The sound tore the dark sanctuary of twilight. ... Again the bird lifted its crested head and gave a cry, at the same time turning awkwardly on its ugly legs, so that it showed us the full wealth of its tail glimmering like a stream of coloured stars over the sunken face of the angel."

At first, Annable was silent and simply watched the peacock moving uneasily in the twilight. But then he exploded with unexpected and somewhat absurd misogynistic rage - especially considering the exuberant maleness that the large bird displayed: 

"'The proud fool! - look at it! Perched on an angel, too, as if it were a pedestal for vanity. That's the soul of a woman ... the very, very soul. Damn the thing, to perch on that old angel. I should like to wring its neck.'"

The peacock gave another loud cry; it seemed to Cyril to be stretching its beak at them in derision. Annable picked up a piece of earth and flung it at the bird, saying: "'Get out, you screeching devil!'" The peacock flew away, over the tombs and down the terraces.

"'Just look!'" said Annable, "'the miserable brute has dirtied that angel. A woman to the end, I tell you, all vanity and screech and defilement.'"

Now, it transpires that this contemptuous view of women is the result of a bad marriage experience; according to Annable, his wife manipulated him from the beginning and quickly turned him into an objectified plaything. Then she got bored and fell in love with a poet. Feeling he'd been shit upon and humiliated, he left and allowed the world to think him dead.

That doesn't sound very nice. But, ultimately, his ugly and resentful remarks on women - like those of Lawrence's other famous gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, - are unpleasant, unfair, and unforgivable, whatever the unfortunate circumstances that gave rise to them.
 

See: D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

In Praise of an Unnatural Death (and in the Hope of Dying on the Scaffold)

Unnatural Death by Ashkan Honarvar (2015)

Ultimately, to have done with the judgement of God means refusing to accept what medical professionals like to describe as death by natural causes. Which is to say, the all-too-predictable kind of death that results from illness, old age, or an internal malfunction of the body and its organs. 

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

Personally, I have always quite fancied the idea of being executed. It's not that I particularly want to be hanged, guillotined, gassed, electrocuted, given a lethal injection, or shot at dawn, but I do like the thought of enjoying a last meal before then facing an audience before whom one can display the noble virtues as I understand them; irony, indifference, and insouciance. 

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

In a famous essay from 1927, Freud theorised gallows humour thusly:  

"The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure."

There are many examples; William Palmer, the notorious nineteenth-century murderer known as the Prince of Poisoners, is said to have climbed the gallows and placed a foot tentatively on the trapdoor before enquiring of the hangman: 'Is it safe?'

But I think my favourite story concerns Mussolini who, about to be shot by communist partisans, asked them to aim at his heart - before turning his face to one side and adding 'Don't ruin the profile.'

Cold Turkey and TV (How We're Betrayed by Tradition)

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Boy
(looking as bored then as I feel today)

There are many traditions associated with Christmas; singing carols, decorating a tree, hanging up a stocking, kissing under the mistletoe, exchanging presents, etc.

But, for many people, the big day itself is ultimately reduced to a plate of cold turkey leftovers and zoning out in front of the TV: sic semper erat, et sic semper erit. Is it any wonder that suicide rates spike at this time of year?

The fact is, whether we like to admit it or not, traditions can be fatal: the mindlessly repetitive transmission of customs that no one really cares about and beliefs that no one considers truthful, from one generation to the next, is at last soul-destroying.

Far from sustaining a people within a living faith or culture, tradition becomes a substitute for such; an empty form, devoid of significance, whose meaning has long been forgotten. Nietzsche warned of the way that history can, at a certain point, become disadvantageous; the past starts to enforce its claims on the present regardless of the cost, preventing the birth of new thoughts and feelings and any future unfolding.

Etymologically, the word tradition warns us of the threat that it contains; for tradere means not only that which is delivered as a gift across time, but also that which betrays. We are exposed to danger by our own inheritance, as soon as we allow it to automatically determine who we are and how we live.

This is why we must challenge convention and all forms of doxa; why we must not simply show unquestioning love and loyalty to the past; why we must let the dead bury the dead (so that they don't bury us beneath the accumulated filth of ages).

And this is why, if you really want to have a merry Christmas, it takes more than pulling a cracker and wearing a paper hat round the dinner table ... 

All I Want for Christmas ...

All I Want for Christmas Is You

Ever since a young child, I have, as a rule, instinctively felt myself in visceral opposition to that which has mass popular appeal, or solicits universal critical consensus. But there are, thankfully, always exceptions to any rule - even one's own.

And perhaps the loveliest of all exceptions is that slice of immaculate pop magic conjured up by the American singer-songwriter Mariah Carey during the festive season of 1994.

It's not my absolute favourite Xmas song: that would be Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End), by The Darkness (2003), for reasons indicated elsewhere on this blog [click here]. And, obviously, I'm also very fond of Slade's Merry Xmas Everybody (1973), showcasing the unique genius of Noddy Holder.

But Mariah's is the best and gives the purest sense of festive joy. She is, as one critic has pointed out, a great philosopher of the human heart:

"Since 1994, the song has sold more than 14 million copies and made a reported $50 million in royalties. And besides making her some sweet seasonal cash, Carey's masterpiece is an incredible feat of philosophical subterfuge. Christmas is a time of material and affection-based excess, yet the song is narrowly focused on just one thing: getting to be with a specific person, e.g., you. It rejects the idea of love in general in favor of love in particular, simultaneously defying and defining pop-music conventions. With infinitely more economy of expression and undoubtedly catchier lyrics, "All I Want for Christmas Is You" is a sort of Hegelian dialectic of Christmastime desire, taking the conflicting notions of abundance and specificity and packaging them neatly into an earworm for the generations."
              

- Emma Green, 'All I Want for Christmas Is You: A Historical Dialectic', The Atlantic (23 Dec 2015).

Infrathin Erotica (Fragment from an Illicit Lover's Discourse)

 

The blissful feeling that the Illicit Lover experiences when he sits in a seat on the Tube vacated by a young woman and her body heat is transferred unto him is heightened by his knowledge that this is not merely a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, but an example also of Duchamp's ambiguous concept of the infrathin - a concept which refers to (amongst other things):

(i) those fleeting sensory experiences whose pleasure escapes any form of rational explanation  ...

(ii) that intangible fourth dimensional state that transcends mundane existence ... 

(iii) the almost imperceptible difference that exists between two seemingly identical objects ...  

Later, he notices how the perfume of the Prostitute marries with the scent of her flesh into an intoxicating cassolette. And he delights also in the way that her cigarette smoke smells of the mouth that exhales it (the same mouth that fellates him with such consummate ease).  

Carri on Sex Pistols (Comments on the Case of Joe Corré and His Bonfire of Punk)

Artwork by Jamie Reid 

(Virgin 1979)

I've been asked to comment on Joe Corré's decision to burn his valuable collection of Sex Pistols memorabilia on the River Thames last month in order to mark the 40th anniversary of the release of Anarchy in the UK, whilst, at the same time protest punk's commercial co-option. Obviously, there was a good deal of vanity and a certain selfishness in the stunt which, from what I've seen of it, all looked a bit naff. And - who knows? - perhaps Henry Rollins is right to suggest that it should ultimately be interpreted as an act of revenge by an angry son left out of his father's will.

But, having said all this, the amount of scorn and vitriol directed towards Corré by aged, self-righteous punks - including, of course, that man-mountain of hypocrisy, Johnny Rotten (rightly identified as The Collaborator all those years ago) - is surely undeserved. For if a man wants to burn his own bondage trousers (and his own inheritance) that's really his own business and ultimately hurts no one. I'm not sure Malcolm would have found the whole thing hilarious, as Corré suggests, but I doubt it'll have him spinning in his grave either.

I suspect rather, that, were he still alive, what Mclaren would have done is remind us of his own ingenious and far more provocative attempt to expose and destroy the legend and the legacy of the Sex Pistols in the aftermath of the band's spectacular implosion, after Rotten flounced off in search of artistic integrity and a more mainstream career in the music business.

Ultimately, Never Mind the Bollocks was just another rock 'n' roll album; conventional in every regard. Obviously, there are some unbelievably powerful tracks. But I'm tempted to say now that the greatest thing about it is the title and Jamie Reid's artwork.

Similarly, the really interesting aspect of the Sex Pistols' story is the point at which they become more than just another corny 4/4 beat combo. And it starts when Malcolm conceives of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and begins the process of not only destroying everything - including the loyalty and expectation of their own followers - but anticipating precisely what would happen next; the assimilation and marketing of punk.

Julian Temple's film opens with Malcolm and Helen burning all traces of the band's existence in the hope that they might somehow prevent their posthumous exploitation in the form of either collectable artefacts to be showcased in museums and expensive art galleries, or cheap merchandise churned out for easy consumption by gullible fans. The same film later reveals the forlorn nature of this hope; if you like their pop music, you'll love their pop corn - it's pure punk!  

What I'm arguing, in short, is that Joseph Corré's rather feeble gesture was unnecessary; his father had alerted us in 1979 to fact that the Sex Pistols were by then no more than a brand name and that Bambi was already being butchered.         


Note: those interested in watching film of Corré's stunt should click here.

City All Over (Notes on Urban Wildlife)

Some creatures have always been happy living synanthropically alongside man and have long been residents of the city. Rats, pigeons, and cockroaches are three very obvious examples, drawn from three very different classes of animal. We may think of them as pests to be exterminated, but they think of us much more generously and not only survive but thrive in the urban environments we've constructed and gradually extended over the entire globe.     

Indeed, as our cities grow ever greater in size and areas of natural wilderness continue to shrink and disappear, more and more species are faced with the stark choice of either adapting to life within the concrete jungle, or face extinction. Some, obviously, aren't going to make it. But a surprising number of animals - large and small - are at least giving it a go and competing for food, space, and shelter alongside the more familiar magpies, foxes, squirrels, and stray cats.  

Unbelievably - but wonderfully - we can today find wild boar in the suburbs of Berlin, boa constrictors in Miami, baboons in Cape Town, big cats in Mumbai, and birds of prey in NYC. Even the Hollywood Hills are home to their very own mountain lion.      

What's amazing is the speed with which some creatures are getting the hang of things; learning to navigate the traffic or exploit the subway system; learning to communicate in new ways, thereby overcoming the problem of constant noise; learning to hunt by electric light; learning to exploit human waste as well as human kindness. It seems that, in some cases, we're not just witnessing radical adaptability and the acquirement of new transferable skills, but accelerated evolution; the creation of bolder, brighter, brand new urban species. 

All of which makes me happy and just a tiny bit hopeful for the future. I think everything that can be done to encourage and further this should be done; that we should welcome as many of our animal brethren in out of the cold as possible and allow them to enjoy the benefits of big city living.

Evening All: Reflections on the Case of PC Semple

Every now and then a story comes on the news that leaves me spluttering in the breakfast bowl; not so much in moral outrage, as amused disbelief. 

One such story is that of PC Gordon Semple, 59, who, tragically, was murdered by an Italian Lothario, Stefano Brizzi, with whom he'd arranged a sexual liaison via Grindr, the world's most popular gay dating app.

Details of the crime are sordid and shocking enough: the hapless bobby, who was simply looking for some sado-masochistic fun with a like-minded fellow, was strangled and dismembered. Over the course of the next few days, Brizzi attempted to dissolve the remains in an acid-filled bathtub - but not before cannibalising some of the tastier body parts (toothmarks were found by a forensic dentist on one of the policeman's ribs and puddles of human fat were discovered inside the poorly cleaned oven).      

As appalling and abhorrent as these details are, they aren't what made me choke on my cornflakes; this, rather, was caused by a victim impact statement read to the court by PC Semple's older brother, Ronald,  during Brizzi's trial at the Old Bailey.* In the statement, he said Gordon was a caring and gentle person, much loved by his family and friends, who were left devastated by news of his murder, blah, blah, blah.

So far, so platitudinous: but then he adds - preposterously - that his sibling deserved to be remembered by the community he served for over thirty years as a real-life Dixon of Dock Green ...!   

I have to say - with no disrespect to the deceased, his colleagues, his grieving family and friends, or members of the queer community - that's a bit rich ...

For not only does it reflect rather unfairly on the character played by Jack Warner who, as far as I recall, never once attended a drug-fuelled orgy, used his truncheon as a dildo, or indulged in his taste for hot, dirty, sleazy sex whilst still on duty, but it also falsely sanitizes and sanctifies the life of PC Semple, who, clearly, was a monster of depravity devoted to a life of kink and to finding love on the beat.       
     

Note: Brizzi was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment (instructed he'll serve a minimum of 24 years). 

The (Displaced) Task of the Translator 3: On the Limits of Zeitgeistiness - A Post by Simon Solomon

Simon Solomon (aka Dr Simon Thomas)

As the late English poet and essayist Geoffrey Hill insisted, in railing against the problem of our post-Romantic (and/or post-modern) suggestibility, every voice worthy of the name will be organised, at least in part, by a sensibility that combines cultural receptivity and counter-cultural resistance, not to mention a creative misreading of similarly strong precursors. Though the exemplary genius of Hegel's world-historical individuals resided in the propensity of such figures to both suffer and amplify the spirit of their time, the transmissions of the artist - and Kenneth Goldsmith's own thesis depicts translation as indisputably artistic - are not merely barometers, pulse-fingering fashion statements, or 'expressive' of a socio-cultural milieu to which they might even be psychoanalytically reduced. If such zeitgeistiness has its claim, it surely also has its limits. Ultimately, while steeped in their age’s particular species of sadness, the most original artists are Janus-faced, both prophetic and nostalgic, and hence ultimately timeless. While it may be true that the machinic flows of technocapital will one day turn us all into its dehumanised vehicles, there is a (perhaps perverse) love in raging against the machine.

As it transpires, Goldsmith seems not to be wholly in earnest about the disappearance of the subject, when one considers the lingering humanism of his discussion of the musician’s practice of sampling and mixing, emphasising as it does the value of 'mindful recontextualization' in a way that makes him seem to want to have his displaced cake and eat it. I find Goldsmith’s depiction of such techniques of conscious transformation especially congenial in relation to my own emerging translation practice around poetic 'convocations', in which I assimilate fragments from other poetries, films and songs into 'baroque' versions of beloved originals. We can and do beg, borrow or steal from other sources in our work as hipsters, creators or long-suffering makers - and, in an accelerating climate of global exchange, licences and permissions cannot in any case always easily be sought - but should never forget Pound’s modernist credo to 'make it new'. The justification for literary theft is the hunger for innovation ...

Finally, some readers might worry more about the apparent submission of Goldsmith's vision of displaced authorship to a political quietism - the way in which, as he himself concedes, 'the displaced text's entwinement with the latest technology […] aligns it with nefarious capitalist tendencies'. Though his whole point is that what he charmingly calls the 'meatspace audience' is missing the point (since life is less and less 'live' - compulsively played out instead behind or by means of a contemporary surplus of devices, apps and screens), one might wonder if he is not so much throwing the translator’s baby out with the bathwater as electrocuting it in a tsunami of technobubbles.

The ominous promise of a new battened-down all-American protectionism across the pond notwithstanding, if globalised capital is essentially a machine that engenders economic, social and cultural flows, the most interesting individuals, and their art, tend to occur where history slows and condenses. Though Goldsmith's poetics of displacement - a vision that highlights the planet-circling journey undertaken by contemporary translation, and the media by which it is carried - is indebted to our culture of hyper-mobility, there is also (thankfully) a dark art of entrenchment. And it’s not going anywhere …

See: Kenneth Goldsmith, Against Translation: Displacement is the New Translation, (Jean Boîte Editions, 2016).

Note: Simon Solomon (aka Dr Simon Thomas) is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and currently serves as managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He blogs at simonsolomon.ink and a full (non-abridged) version of his essay will shortly be made available here.  

Simon appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm. I am very grateful for his submission of a lengthy text that he kindly allowed me to edit into three separate posts for the sake of convenience. Part 1: Magical Realism without the Magic can be read by clicking here. Part 2: Microdramas of Displacement, can be read by clicking here.

The (Displaced) Task of the Translator 2: Microdramas of Displacement - A Post by Simon Solomon

Dede Koswara, aka the Human Tree Man

Image Source: thechive.com

While we may be culturally instructed by Kenneth Goldsmith's undoubted flair for mediating the technological imaginary (albeit in a way that is perhaps already somewhat well-rehearsed, and which is, for me, more originally evoked by the writings of Jean Baudrillard), I feel more moved as a poet by his microdramas of displacement from real life. In his collection of anecdotal horrors and subcutaneous wonders - including, for example, the poignant story of a buried bullet beneath a boy’s face, its impact site permanently cauterised by the heat of the missile, that 'remains comfortably embedded' for the rest of his natural existence - there is a strange rapture of estrangement or post-modern beauty.

What Goldsmith ultimately discloses by telling us the story of a tree that grew around a metal grate erected to protect it until it became, in his luminously lyrical language, 'the guardian of the grate, swallowing it whole, nestling it deep within its core', is a beguiling phenomenology of incorporation: notes towards how we learn to take in and 'live with' foreign matter that have obvious affinities with literary (re)composition. I wondered what Goldsmith might make of less successful manifestations of human embodiment - such as the Indonesian carpenter, Dede Koswara, whose monstrous condition, a fantastically rare skin disorder called Lewandowsky-Lutz dysplasia (aka ‘Tree Man Syndrome’), caused bark-like cutaneous horns to sprout from his hands and feet and led to him being shunned by his community as an accursed object.

While doubtless more than a sliver of Schadenfreude attaches to such cases, in picking up his own bâton and running with it, Goldsmith extends his project into an inter-disciplinary revisionist thesis, in which acid rain is rebranded as 'displaced weather', petroleum as 'displaced prehistory', the melting ice caps as 'displaced Ice Age' and the Great Pacific garbage patch (aka the Pacific trash vortex) as 'displaced geography'. If this is a schtick of sorts, it is a thrilling one - though thrilling, perhaps, in the manner of a totalitarian music. By contrast, the niceties and decencies of the translator’s traditional craft - its meticulous attunements to the minutiae of syntax, the localities of diction and the pathos of distance - are derisively likened by Goldsmith to the cult of ‘slow food’. To pursue such an obsolescent quest now, on Goldsmith's thesis, is to be a wilful reactionary (though possibly a reactionary who enjoys better digestion), indulging a 'bourgeois luxury', 'faux-nostalgia' and 'a boutique pursuit from a lost world'. The good faith of the translator, that suspiciously friendly idealist forever trying to meet people halfway, is ultimately rotten to the core.

Among a raft of concerns here, one might wonder what place authentic nostalgia - or just real history - could play in such Goldsmith's vision of our creative dispossession, since translation is inescapably also a tradition, not merely a metamorphic instrumentality. Perhaps, indeed, the translator, at their finest, is a kind of time-travelling cultural attaché, drawn back like the former English Laureate Ted Hughes to the shape-shifting mythology of the ancient world, retracing and reimagining their embedded civilisations to keep the culture’s collective unconscious awake.

In a way that stirs my desire to unsettle the strategic dualities of his thought, Goldsmith views displacement as a binary trader, harnessing what can be displaced and jettisoning what cannot, while eschewing what he calls the 'messy questions of morality, ethics and nuance' in favour of 'the craft of the kludge'. Leaving aside the manifold ways in which both literature and life are endlessly (if not necessarily) entangled in such varieties of disorder, I would be interested to learn more about those poetogenic entities the author thinks by implication might defy displacement - about what, in other words, might not get lost in translation ...


See: Kenneth Goldsmith, Against Translation: Displacement is the New Translation, (Jean Boîte Editions, 2016).

Note: Simon Solomon (aka Dr Simon Thomas) is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and currently serves as managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He blogs at simonsolomon.ink and a full (non-abridged) version of his essay will shortly be made available here.  

Simon appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm. I am very grateful for his submission of a lengthy text that he kindly allowed me to edit into three separate posts for the sake of convenience. Part 1: Magical Realism without the Magic can be read by clicking here. Part 3: On the Limits of Zeitgeistiness (Or How to Have Your Displaced Cake and Eat It), can be read by clicking here.