In Praise of the Goat

 

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

with curving horns of bronze ...'

 

I. 

 

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

 

Hinson writes: 

 

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

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

 

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

 

 

II. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

  And storm-lightning-slitted eye. 

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

  And when the billy goat mounts her 

  She is brittle as brimstone. 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Notes

 

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

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

     

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

    

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

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

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

 

 

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

Notes on SIG News Issue 3: From Bomber Jackets to the Joy of Punxploitation

It's all working well for him and it's all going smoothly for McQueen

 

NB: this post is a continuation from part one: click here. 

 

 

V. 

The MA-1 - or bomber jacket, as it is better known - was a popular fashion staple in the 1980s; particularly with skinheads, who loved both its utility and hypermasculinity (as did certain gay clones). 

 

However, as Ian Trowell reminds us, what imbued this garment with such great "subcultural crossover potential" [1] was the fact it evaded fixed meaning. This also helps explain its strange longevity.

 

That and the fact that what's good enough for Steve McQueen, is, as a rule, good enough for anyone (although, for the record, I never owned a bomber jacket and wouldn't have dreamed of wearing such). 

 

 

VI.

 

Mike Wyeld and Antony Price are both concerned with subcultural politics. 

 

The former asks whether punk or acid house, for example, has resulted in any long lasting political change. I think we all know the answer to this, even Wyeld, although he wants to keep the dream alive so can't quite bring himself to openly admit it hasn't.

 

Price, on the other hand, is adamant that rave continues to offer a form of "collective resistance to the oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism" [2]. 

 

Unfortunately, Jean Baudrillard has indicated how and why the very idea of resistance in a transpolitical era characterised by the techno-social immersion of the individual rather than their alienation, has become problematic and even a little passé. Speaking in an interview with François L'Yvonnet, Baudrillard says: 

 

"I'm a bit resistant to the idea of resistance, since it belongs to the world of critical, rebellious, subversive thought, and that is all rather outdated. If you have a conception of integral reality, of a reality that's absorbed all negativity, the idea of resisting it, of disputing its validity, of setting one value against another and countering one system with another, seems pious and illusory." [3]

 

Of course, that isn't to say that there cannot exist singular spaces which, at a particular moment, constitute themselves as alternative worlds with their own set of rules. And that's pretty much how Price describes nightclubs:

 

"At their best, nightclubs are places for experimentation, for inclusiveness and exclusiveness, a place to try out different personas, to challenge sexual identity and orientation through both individual and collective freedoms, a space to move outside of the confines of society." [4] 

The problem is, anyone who has actually been to a nightclub recognises that this is mostly bullshit. And even if nightclubs were (at their best) heterotopic wonderlands of transgression and otherness, they still wouldn't offer the kind of head-on socio-political resistance that Price imagines and advocates. 

 

 

VII.

According to Madeline Lucarelli, the practice of witchcraft has been transformed via the establishment of online communities. No longer concerned with the casting of spells and the harnessing of supernatural forces, witchcraft is now all about personal growth and spiritual freedom [5].  

 

Alas, if Lucarelli is to be believed, witchcraft has therefore become a depressingly tame affair; no sex, no scourging, no satanic ritual ... The Dionysian frenzy of the orgy and the blasphemous humour of the black mass appears to have given way to a New Age theology that upholds many of the same woke values that any good liberal might recognise. 

 

Wicca, I'm sorry to say, is now a humanism. And the witch, far from being a figure who inspires terror or offers resistance to hegemonic society, is now merely a Twilight-reading Barbie Goth hardly deserving of the name.

 

 

VIII.

 

Finally [6], we come to Russ Bestley's article on the joy of punxploitation and his deep fascination with Plastic Bertrand's international hit single 'Ça plane pour moi' (1977).

 

Whilst Bestley struggles to say what, exactly, first attracted him to this song, I think I understand (and to an extent share) his love of those songs which have all the energy of punk but which are not weighed down by the spirit of gravity; songs which privilege the joy and laughter of pop over the austere monarchy of rock [7].

Bestley recognises that fun is a vital element of popular culture, even if it is often valued negatively by those commentators whose language succumbs all too easily to moralising imperatives; i.e., the kind of people who are embarrassed by the crude and shallow entertainments enjoyed by the working-class and who will never accept the fact that 'Friggin' in the Riggin'' was a bigger selling-single than 'Holidays in the Sun'.

 

I agree with Bestley that 'Ça plane pour moi' amusingly manages to "embody so much of what 'punk' set out to achieve" [8]. So click the link above, roll around with your cat on the bed, and enjoy!

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Ian Trowell, 'Bomber Crew: Storying the Eighties Through the MA-1', SIG News 3 (1 September, 2024), p. 12.  

[2] Antony Price, 'Rave On', SIG News 3 (1 September, 2024), p. 30.

 

[3] Jean Baudrillard, Fragments, trans. Chris Turner (Routledge, 2004), p. 71.

 

[4] Antony Price, 'Rave On', SIG News 3 (1 September, 2024), p. 30.

 

[5] See Madeline Lucarelli, 'The Body, Broom and Sins of the Witch', SIG News 3 (1 September, 2024), p. 22.

 

[6] It should be noted that there are numerous other articles in SIG News 3 that I have not discussed. These include Rachel Brett's piece on fashion's relationship with the colour black (a dark history I have myself written on here); Isabella Chiara Vicco's piece on Jerry Rubin and his metamorphosis from yippie to yuppie; and Shijiao Kou's musicological analysis of 'Hong Kong Garden' (the debut single by Siouxsie and the Banshees). Oh, and there's also my piece on the revolt into red-trousered style.   

[7] The phrase 'spirit of gravity' is borrowed from Nietzsche (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) and the phrase 'austere monarchy' is borrowed from Foucault (The History of Sexuality 1). I have written on rockism contra poptimism and in defence of fun elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark: click here and here.

[8] Russ Bestley, 'Ça Plane Pour Moi': The Joy of Punxploitation', SIG News 3 (1 September, 2024), p. 27.  

 

 

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

SIG News Issue 3

(September 1st, 2024)

 

 

I.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

II.    

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

III.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

IV.

 

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

 

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

 

 

Notes

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

 

This post continues in part two: click here. 

 

 

Pop-Pop-Pop-Popgun

Andy Warhol: Guns (1981-1982)

The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

 

I. 

 

Longtime readers will recall that I have written about hoplophilia elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark, arguing that you don't have to own a gun or be a member of the shooting fraternity to acknowledge the fetishistic appeal of firearms: like it or not, guns are stylish, guns are cool, and guns are deadly. 

 

In short, guns are sexy and excite many different types of people; from Melanie Blanchard, the morbidly curious young female protagonist in Michel Tournier's 'Death and the Maiden' [1]; to the socially and sexually awkward loan manager Mark Corrigan, played by David Mitchell, in the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show [2].

 

 

II. 

 

Andy Warhol was an artist who understood better than most the fascination of firearms and the important role that guns play within American life and culture. He was also someone who experienced the pain and trauma of being shot and almost killed by a madwoman with a snub-nosed pistol [3] and was haunted by the fact of his own mortality (death being a theme he returned to many times throughout his career).

 

So no suprise that his series of paintings entitled Guns (1981-82) should be as brilliant as it is. 

 

I know that many people still think of Warhol primarily as the artist who painted soup cans and portraits of the rich and famous, but he produced so much more - and so much more interesting - work than this; not least his paintings of guns, knives, skulls, and shadows.

 

Rejecting the idea that his work was a form of social criticism or heavy with symbolic meaning, Warhol allows us to admire his pictures and the objects they depict as beautiful in themselves. And maybe that's the genius of Pop Art.      

 

Notes

 

[1] The short story 'Death and the Maiden' can be found in Michel Tournier, The Fetishist and Other Stories, trans. Barbara Wright (Collins, 1983), pp. 109-128. For my post from December 2020 inspired by the tale, click here.    

[2] See 'Jeremy's Mummy', the fourth episode of the fifth series of the British sitcom Peep Show. Directed by Becky Martin, it first aired on 23 May, 2008. To watch the scenes featuring 'Gunny', please click here. To read my post inspired by the episode (also published in December 2020), click here.

 

[3] On 3 June 1968 the radical feminist writer Valerie Solanas fired at Warhol three times with a .32 calibre pistol. The first two shots missed, but the third hit its target and penetrated multiple organs. Warhol survived the incident - after undergoing five hours of surgery - but was never quite the same again, the shooting having a profound effect on his later life and work. 

 

 

The Hopi Indian Series: Indian Time

Indian Time (SA/2024)

 

 

I. 

 

Writing in the 1930s and '40s, linguist Benjamin Whorf argued that the Hopi conceptualise time very differently from white Americans and that this difference was basically linguistic in nature; i.e., that it correlated with certain grammatical differences between English and the Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Hopi.

 

Whorf claims that the Hopi have "no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions" that refer directly to what we call time, concluding that they therefore possess "no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at equal rate, out of a future, through the present, into a past" [a].

 

I would have thought that's a fairly uncontroversial thing to say, but, apparently, it gave rise to a debate within academic circles known as the Hopi time controversy. 

 

Whilst for theorists this may revolve around the complex question of linguistic relativity, it is usually understood by the lay person to simply address the issue of whether or not a redskin can ever be enslaved to the clock in the same way as those with pale faces. 

 

I suspect it's because this becomes an ethno-racial question - and not merely a grammatical one - that controversy creeps in. At any rate, during the 1960s Whorf's work increasingly fell out of favour amongst linguists and anthropologists and when in 1983 Ekkehart Malotki published his massive 600-page study on the concept of time in the Hopi language, it seemed that Whorf's work was refuted once and for all [b].  

 

 

II.

 

Now, I'm not a linguistics expert and don't speak a word of Hopi. 

 

Nor am I particularly concerned to restore Whorf's reputation, although it might be noted that the concept of linguistic relativity was revived in the 1990s when Malotki's own study was subjected to criticism from those who did not consider his work to have invalidated Whorf's claims.

 

As a Lawrentian, however, Whorf's work continues to resonate sympathetically; for he's basically repeating what Lawrence observed during his stay in New Mexico in the 1920s, when he came into contact with Native Americans and expressed an interest in their religious beliefs and understanding of the universe. 

 

And so, without wishing to sound like a New Age hippie who subscribes to any myth so long as it seems to reveal the supposed limitations of Western thought, I'd like to take a closer look at what Lawrence wrote, thereby challenging the Kantian idea that time and space are universal categories underlying all human thought. 

 

For despite what Malotki says, it seems clear that not everyone is as clock-observant and time-obsessed as the Germans, for example.   

 

 

III. 

In Mornings in Mexico [c], Lawrence describes the white man as "some sort of extraordinary white monkey, that, by cunning, has learnt lots of semi-magical secrets of the universe, and made himself boss of the show" [36]. 

 

And one of these secrets is the secret of time:

 

"Now to a Mexican and an Indian, time is a vague, foggy reality. There are only three times [...] in the morning, in the afternoon, in the night. There is even no mid-day and no evening. 

      But to the white monkey, horrible to relate there are exact spots of time, such as five o'clock, half-past nine. The day is a horrible puzzle of exact spots of time." [36]

 

The white monkey, says Lawrence, has a perverse passion for exactitude; for time is money and every second counts. And he insists that everyone should be as enslaved to the clock as he is; always fretting about what happened yesterday or anxious about what might happen the day after tomorrow; living and dying to the same monotonous rhythm: tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock ... 

But, according to Lawrence, the Native American is essentially different from us: "The Indian is not in line with us. He's not coming our way. His whole being is going a different way from ours." [61]

 

Again, I don't know how true that is, but there are times, like today, when I admire Lawrence's attempt to learn something from the Indian and appreciate what he calls in Apocalypse [d] the "pagan manner of thought" [96] which allows the mind to "move in cycles, or to flit here and there" [97].

 

Challenging the Western concept of time, Lawrence writes:

"Our idea of time as a continuity in an eternal straight line has crippled our consciousness cruelly. The pagan conception of time as moving in cycles is much freer, it allows movements upwards and downwards, and allows for a complete change of the state of mind, at any moment. One cycle finished, we can drop or rise to another level, and be in a new world at once. But by our time-continuum method, we have to trail wearily on over another ridge." [97]

Anyway, I have to stop here: it's dinner time ... 

Notes

 

[a] Benjamin Lee Whorf, 'An American Indian model of the Universe', in Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll (The Technology Press of MIT, 1956), pp. 57-64. Lines quoted are on p. 57. The essay was written c.1936.  

 

[b] Ekkehart Malotki is a German-American linguist, known for his extensive work on the Hopi language and culture and his refutation of the claim (some might say myth) that the Hopi have no concept of time. 

      Malotki published two large volumes, the first in German; Hopi-Raum: Eine sprachwissenschaftliche Analyse der Raumvorstellungen in der Hopi-Sprache (Gunter Narr Verlag, 1983), and the second in English; Hopi Time: A Linguistic Analysis of the Temporal Concepts in the Hopi Language (Mouton Publishers, 1986). 

      This latter work provided hundreds of examples of Hopi words and grammatical forms referring to temporal relations and Malotki demonstrated that the Hopi do, in fact, conceptualize time as structured in terms of an ego-centered spatial progression from past, through present into the future, despite what some - including, as we shall see, D. H. Lawrence - choose to believe and despite not having any word in their native tongue that exactly corresponds to the English noun 'time'.  

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, Mornings and Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Page numbers given in the post refer to this edition.  

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge University Press, 1980). Page numbers given in the post refer to this edition. 

 

 

To read other posts in the Hopi Indian series, click here and/or here.

 

 

The Hopi Indian Series: Kachina Dolls

Hopi Kachina dolls (aka Katsina figures)

Bowers Museum (Santa Ana, California) 

For more info click here. 

 

 

I.

 

As torpedophiles will know, I'm a big fan of all types of doll: from wooden dolls to rag dolls; sex dolls to voodoo dolls. But I think my favourite dolls at the moment are Hopi kachina dolls - once described by Paul Éluard as the most beautiful things in the world [1] ...

 

 

II. 

 

Typically carved from the root of the cottonwood tree and traditionally given to young girls (and new brides) of the Hopi tribe, kachina dolls represent the immortal beings - the katsinam - that control various aspects of the natural world, such as rainfall, and act as messengers between humans and the spirit world.  

 

Whilst, invariably, these fabulous-looking dolls are now sold as examples of Native American folk art to the public, they still, I think, retain something of their powerful magic - although they obviously do not speak to us as they do to the Hopi, for whom they are sacred objects with more than merey a decorative function or an aesthetic charm.

 

Having said that, it should be pointed out that the figures only began to take on a more naturalistic look and have a professional finish once white Americans began to take an interest in buying and collecting them during the twentieth-century. I'm not quite sure what it tells us about the Hopi, or the transformative effects of the free market, but an attention to detail was only shown once there was money to be made.

Elders of the Tribe may not have been very happy at first, but even they were impressed that as the carvings became more extravagant and consumer demand went up, prices also rose significantly. From once selling for a few cents by the roadside, some kachina dolls carved by those recognised as genuine artists can now fetch up to $10,000.

 

So, having said earlier they still retain something of their powerful magic, let me now qualify that by adding that this could simply be the allure of commercial value; i.e., more capitalist authenticity than religious authenticity.   

 

Notes

 

[1] Paul Éluard writing in a letter to his wife in late May 1927. See Lettres à Gala (Gallimard, 1984), p. 22. A bilingual (English/French) edition ed. Pierre Dreyfus, trans. Jesse Browner, was published by Paragon House in 1989.  

      The Surrealists, of course, were well-known for their love of work produced by indigenous peoples (or what was known at the time as primitive art).

 

 

To read other posts in the Hopi Indian series, click here and/or here.  

 

 

The Hopi Indian Series: Snake Dance

Hopi Snake Dance (Oraibi, Arizona)

Photo by George Wharton James (1898)

 

 

The most celebrated of traditional ceremonies amongst the Hopi is the annual Snake Dance, during which performers handle live snakes. 

 

Never one to miss out, in August 1924 D. H. Lawrence travelled the seventy miles or so from his home in Taos, New Mexico, to the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona in order to enjoy the spectacle, which he first described in a brief satirical sketch written on the journey home. 

 

He later wrote a revised - more serious, more philosophical - version of the essay, of which he was particularly proud. 

 

Here, I would like to comment on both texts, beginning with the first of these, entitled 'Just Back from the Snake Dance', which appeared in Laughing Horse (September 1924), and then discussing 'The Hopi Snake Dance', which was first published in Theatre Arts Monthly (December 1924) [a].   

 

 

Just Back from the Snake Dance 

This short piece opens with Lawrence asking himself a rhetorical question that we have probably all asked ourselves at one time or other: Why on earth does one bother to go to such events ...?

 

For not only does it involve a bumpy car journey, but Hopi country, declares Lawrence, is hideous - "a clayey pale-grey desert with death-grey mesas, sticking up like broken pieces of ancient, dry, grey bread." [185] 

 

Lawrence is not overly impressed with the pueblos either; little grey houses mostly in a state of "disheartening ruin" [185]. 

 

Nor does he think much of the spectators who have come in their black motor cars to watch: "Americans of all sorts" [185], including women in trousers and a "negress in a low-cut black blouse and a black sailor hat" [185] who seems to catch his eye in particular.  

 

Not that, according to Lawrence in this account, there is much to see: 

 

"No drums. No pageantry. A hollow muttering. And then one of the snake priests hopping slowly round with the neck of a pale, bird-like snake nipped between his teeth, while six elder priests dusted the six younger, snake-adorned priests with prayer feathers, on the shoulders, hopping behind like a children's game." [186]

 

That doesn't sound great, although things do liven up a little as several more snakes of different size and species are introduced into proceedings, including rattle snakes. Lawrence writes:

 

"When all the snakes had had their little ride in a man's mouth [...] they were all gathered, like a lot of wet silk stockings [...] and let to wriggle all together for a minute [...] Then - hey presto! - they were snatched up like fallen washing, and two priests ran away with them westward, down the mesa, to set them free among the rocks, at the snake-shrine (so called)." [186]

 

And that was it; the show - and Lawrence calls it a show, regarding the snake dance as little more than a circus performance put on for the amusement of white Americans - was over, and he can't decide which were the more harmless; the nice clean snakes or the long-haired Indians. 

 

His disappointment with the latter - muttering queer gibberish, dangling snakes, and selling "clumsy home-made trinkets" [187] - is matched only by his obvious contempt for those who come to have a fun day out at the former's expense, knowing nothing and caring less about the Hopi's religiosity.      

 

 

The Hopi Snake Dance

 

As mentioned, Lawrence is far more thoughtful - and far less dismissive - in this essay on the Hopi Snake Dance than in his earlier piece. Here, to his credit, he attempts to understand it from the religious perspective of the Hopi, rather than "the angle of culture" [80], or simply as a crude form of public entertainment.  

 

And Lawrence rightly acknowledges that the snake dance is actually the culmination of more than a week's preparation and that there were other ritual activities taking place during this time:

 

"They say that the twelve officiating men of the snake clan of the tribe have for nine days been hunting snakes in the rocks. They have been performing the mysteries for nine days, in the kiva, and for two days they have fasted completely. All these days, they have tended the snakes, washed them with repeated lustrations, soothed them, and exchanged spirits with them." [84]

 

Lawrence describes the Hopi as a "dark-faced, short, stocky, thickly-built" [80] people, who have chosen to make their home in a "parched grey country of snakes and eagles, pitched up against the sky" [80]. 

 

And he identifies their religion as a form of animism in which all things - objects, places, plants creatures - are in some sense alive, although they are separate and distinct and do not share One Spirit: "There is no oneness, no sympathetic identifying oneself with the rest." [81-82]

    

Like Lawrence, I'm attracted to this idea - particularly in its impersonal aspect and the fact there is no dualist division into spirit (or mind) and matter. And like Lawrence, I rather admire the fact that the Hopi have retained a gentleness of heart, despite being faced with the challenging task of surving in a world that is "all rock and eagles, sand and snakes and wind and sun" [83]. 

 

When the snake-priests start to do their thing, Lawrence again comments on their physicality; they are all "heavily built, rather short, with heavy but shapely flesh, and rather straight sides [...] They have an archaic squareness, and a sensuous heaviness" [85-86].

 

This, combined with the "wild silence of concentration" [86] that is typical of the Native American, briefly cancels the "white-faced flippancy" [86] of the spectators. Well, that's true for a few seconds at least; until their impatience gets the better of them. Anxious as they are to see the snakes, they quickly get bored with the dancing and chanting and mummery. 

 

And soon enough, there were plenty of snakes on show:

 

"Snake after snake had been carried round [...] dangling by the neck from the mouth of one young priest or another [...] some very large rattle-snakes [...] two or three handsome bull-snakes, and some racers, whip-snakes." [90]

 

Lawrence seems to admire the bodies of the snakes as much as he does the bodies of the men; "one was struck by their clean, slim length of snake nudity" [90]. 

 

But most of all, amidst all the crudity and sensationalism - "which comes chiefly out of the crowd's desire for thrills [92] - he admires the courage of the snake-priests; "one cannot help pausing in reverence before the delicate, anointed bravery" [92-93] of those who commune with serpents and immerse themselves in the mystery of the latter. 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Both of these texts can be found in D. H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge University Press, 2009):  'The Hopi Snake Dance', pp. 77-94 and 'Just Back from the Snake Dance', pp. 183-187. All page numbers given in this post refer to this Cambridge edition.

 

 

To read other posts in the Hopi Indian series, click here and/or here.    

Get Off Your Knees and Hear the Insect Prayer: Notes on the Ant People

Get Off Your Knees and Hear the Insect Prayer

 

I. 

 

When I came across a reference the other day to the Ant People, I immediately thought of the Adam and the Ants slogan: Ant Music for Sex People: Sex Music for Ant People [1]. 

 

I had long believed that this line simply referred to those whom the cultural commentator Peter York once described as the "'extreme ideological wing of the Peculiars'" [2] - i.e., those who used to hang around Sex - and, secondly, to those who were hardcore fans of Adam and the Ants.

I now discover, however, that existing long before Adam and Marco ever walked through the doors of 430 King's Road, were a legendary race of highly advanced beings (possibly of extraterrestrial origin) known as the Ant People, and venerated by the Hopi Indians; a tribe of Native Americans who have lived on the high arid mesas of northern Arizona for thousands of years [3]. 

 

 

II. 

 

According to Hopi legend, in times of global catastrophe, it was the Anu Sinom, or Ant People, who come to their rescue and offered them sanctuary in underground caves, which essentially formed a natural network of subterranean prayer chambers, or what the Hopi call kivas (a word which etymologically means beautiful dwelling place).      

 

No wonder then that the Hopi refer to the Ant People with their elongated skulls, almond-shaped eyes, tiny waists, and long skinny arms and legs, as their friends: Anu-naki.  

 

And one can only hope that if members of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil are correct in their dire predictions of a coming eco-apocalypse, that we palefaces will have some benevolent insects come to our rescue (although I doubt it and don't think we deserve such).    

 

Notes

 

[1] This line is a refrain in the Adam and the Ants track 'Don't Be Square (Be There)', found on the album Kings of the Wild Frontier (CBS Records, 1980): click here.   

[2] Peter York, writing in an article entitled 'Them', Harpers & Queen (October 1976), quoted by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 329. 

[3] See Gary A. David, 'The Ant People of the Hopi' (13 October, 2013) on the website Ancient Origins: click here.

 

 

Reflections on the Lovely Lady Christabel

Lorrie Millington: Lady Christabel (1983)

 

 

I.

 

I have to admit, my knowledge of the English Romantic poet Coleridge is fairly limited; I know he was pals with Wordsworth; I know he helped introduce the English-speaking world to German idealism; and I know he was fond of opium. 

 

If pushed, I suppose I would also admit to knowing he was an influential literary critic and dreamed at one time of establishing an egalitarian community on pantisocratic lines. 

 

Oh, and I know of course that he's the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and Kubla Khan (completed in 1797, but not published until 1816). 

 

However, it's the long narrative poem Christabel that fascinates me at the moment and which I would like to briefly reflect on here ... 

 

II.

 

Christabel consists of two parts; the first writen in 1797 and the second in 1800. [1]

 

The story concerns a central female character - Christabel - who one day goes into the woods to pray by a large oak tree. There, she encounters a strange young woman named Geraldine, who claims to have been abducted from her home by men on horseback. 

Sympathetic to Geraldine's plight, she takes her home with her and they spend the night together, sharing a bed (this despite a number of supernatural signs that Christabel might have been well-advised to take as warnings). 

Whilst Christabel remains somewhat enchanted by Geraldine, she gradually begins to realise the latter's malign (possibly inhuman) nature. Her father, however, is completely enthralled by the latter and orders a grand procession to celebrate her rescue.

 

Somewhat frustratingly, that's where the (unfinished) poem stops; it appears that Coleridge couldn't quite make up his mind about how to end it.    

 

III.

 

This poem appeals to me for its queer gothic character, founded upon a number of perverse and supernatural elements, and I'm not surprised to learn that Shelley and Byron were both obsessed with Christabel. If it gave the former nightmares, the latter was delighted by its sapphic undertones (the relationship between Christabel and Geraldine is implicitly sexual).   

 

Other writers who have fallen under the poem's spell include Edgar Allan Poe [2], Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [3], Renée Vivien [4], and A.S. Byatt, who names a fictional romantic poet Christabel in her award-winning novel Possession (1990).  

 

Unsurprisingly, Christabel also became favourite reading amongst feminists; the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, for example, named her daughter in honour of the poem's eponymous heroine (though she might have been more appropriately named Geraldine in my view) [5].   

 

 

IV.

Finally, a brief note on the image used to illustrate this post ...

Initially, I was going to reproduce Julia Margaret Cameron's 1866 photograph named after Coleridge's poem and depicting the titular character [6]. 

But then I remembered that in an old photo album kept in a box in the attic, I still had a picture sent to me by the artist, model, dancer, and writer Lorrie Millington [7] over forty years ago, of a mannequin named Lady Christabel with whom she shared a house in Leeds. 

 

In the summer of 1984, I began writing a 20,000 word novella entitled 'The Girl in the Mystery Castle', about Miss Millington and her relationship with the lovely Lady Christabel and it has always been my intention to one day complete this tale.

 

However, as this now seems very unlikely, I have decided to share the photo here ...

 

If one looks closely enough, one will see that Christabel is wearing a wig that has been braided pirate style and has an Apache war stripe painted across her nose, the reason being that Lorrie and I were both Ant People back in the early-mid '80s.   

 

Notes

 

[1] Coleridge planned on adding three further parts, but these were never completed. The work was published in a pamphlet in 1816, alongside Kubla Khan and another poem, The Pains of Sleep (written 1803). Christabel can be read on the Poetry Foundation website: click here. 

 

[2] Poe's poem 'The Sleeper' (1831) is said to be inspired by Christabel. It can be read on the Poetry Foundation website: click here.

 

[3] Le Fanu based the character of Mircalla, the Countess Karnstein, on Geraldine. See my post of 13 April 2020 on the topic of vampiric lesbianism in which I discuss Le Fanu's novella Carmilla (1872): click here.  

[4] Vivien's 1904 novel L'Etre Double, a lesbian romance, was also inspired by Coleridge's poem Christabel. See my post of 9 October 2013 in praise of sapphic decadence in which I discuss the work of Renée Vivien: click here.

 

[5] I'm not a fan of the militant idealism and the terrorist tactics advocated by Pankhurst, which invariably collapse into the black hole of fascism. See the post dated 17 February 2024 on suffragettes and the BUF: click here. 

 

[6] For more details and to view the photograph, please visit the Met Museum website: click here. And for a post dated 23 June 2023 written with reference to Cameron's photography, click here.  

 

[7] For a post dated 18 April 2015 written in memory of Lorrie Millington, click here.

Beneath the Wheel

 

Stephen Alexander: Beneath the Wheel (2024) 

 

I.

 

If any image brutally encapsulates the idea of tragic irony, then it is surely the one above.

It shows a young hedgehog seeking refuge beneath a parked car in a residential area of east London in which almost every last garden and green open space has been concreted over and built upon, leaving this lovable little creature with nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. 

 

He might not know what fate has in store for him, but, sadly, we as viewers have a pretty good idea ... 

 

 

II. 

 

When I was a child in the 1970s, there were over 30 million hedgehogs snuffling around UK gardens; now it is believed there are probably no more than a million. Mostly this is due to the loss and fragmentation of habitat and the widespread use of pesticides. But many hedgehogs were (and still are) killed on the roads each year.   

 

In that same period, the UK human population has grown by ten million and the number of cars has increased from 27 million to 33 million. Personally, I would rather there were fewer people, fewer cars, and many, many more hedgehogs.

 

To paraphrase D. H. Lawrence: I think in this world there is room for me and a hedgehog. And I think how easily we might spare a million or two humans and never miss them. Yet what a gap in existence, the furry face of that cute little mammal with a pig-like snout. [1]

 

 

Notes

 

[1]  I'm paraphrasing the final verse of Lawrence's poem 'Mountain Lion'. See The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 352.