Showing posts with label spectrophilia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spectrophilia. Show all posts

13 Dec 2023

On the Haunting Beauty of Sue Lloyd

Sue Lloyd (1939 - 2011)
 
'The dead they do not die - they seduce from beyond the grave ...'


I. 
 
I mentioned in a recent post written in memory of Brigit Forsyth [1], that, as I get older, I find my desire is increasingly tied to nostalgia and has effectively become a type of spectrophilia - i.e., sexual attraction to ghosts, or, as in my case, the haunting images of dead actresses from the 1960s and '70s (the decades in which I was born and grew up). 
 
One such actress of whom I particularly fond at the moment is Sue Lloyd, who guest starred in many much loved English TV shows during this period, including The Saint (1964 and '67), The Avengers (1965), Department S (1969), Randal and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1970), The Persuaders! (1971), and The Sweeney (1976) [2].
 
Lloyd also regularly appeared as secret agent Cordelia Winfield, alongside Steve Forrest in the British television series The Baron (1965-66), but is perhaps best remembered today for her long-running role as as Barbara Hunter (née Brady) in the British soap opera Crossroads [3].
 
 
II. 
 
Although Lloyd had studied dance as a child and, in 1953, won a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School at Sadler's Wells Theatre, she unfortunately grew just a little too tall (5' 8") to play a swan princess. And so she became a model - even appearing once on the cover of Vogue - and a showgirl, before embarking on an acting career. 
 
Lloyd did also star in a number of films - including alongside Michael Caine in The Ipcress File (1965), Peter Cushing in the cult horror Corruption (1968), and Joan Collins in The Stud (1978) - but I'm not much of a cinephile and really only care (here at least) about her TV work.  
 
But what is it I like so much about Miss Lloyd, I hear you ask ... Well, simply put, she exuded the kind of dazzling beauty and sexual sophistication of the older woman which excited me as an adolescent and continues to work its magic some 50 years later ...
 
As Simon Farquhar writes in his obituary for the star who died in 2011 (aged 72):
 
"There was always something of the ghost of a fading Hollywood glamour queen possessing Sue Lloyd [...] With half-closed eyes, cigarette gravel voice and elegant, haughty poise, she brought an air of smouldering decadence and feline allure to often decidedly mundane productions, as if a world-weary Lauren Bacall was deeming to cross the Atlantic and play with the little people for a while." [4]    
 
 
Notes
 
[1] See the post entitled 'Whatever Happened to the Likely Lasses?' (2 Dec 2023): click here
 
[2] Unlike some other actors, Lloyd was delighted at the cult status much of her television work had acquired, and she happily contributed interviews and commentaries to subsequent DVD releases and responded to fan requests.
 
[3] Lloyd was in Crossroads from 1979 to 1985, so this slightly falls outside the period that interests me and is not really a genre of show that I particularly care for. 

[4] Simon Farquhar, writing in The Independent (30 Oct 2011): click here.


31 Oct 2023

Of Glad Ghosts and Spooky Love Affairs: Halloween With D. H. Lawrence (2023)

 
 
I.
 
The dead don't die, wrote D. H. Lawrence [a], and it's a line that has long haunted my imagination.
 
Sometimes they look on and help (the kindly ghost); sometimes they prevent us from living (the malevolent spirit); and sometimes they engage in non-consensual sexual activity, ranging from the nocturnal masturbation of sleepers to violent spectral rape (the pervy poltergeist).
 
It really depends, I suppose, on how the dead adjust to their posthumous status - some find peace easier than others - and the nature also of the relationship established by the living with those who inhabit the other side; is it respectful and loving, for example, or is there an element of secret resentment for those who have passed and a refusal to let them go? 
 
Lawrence addresses these and other questions in a (longer-than-average) short story written in 1925, entitled 'Glad Ghosts', and published (in two parts) in The Dial the following summer [b].   
 
 
II. 
 
According to one commentator, 'Glad Ghosts' is often misread or simply dismissed as a confused and confusing work [c]. For those of us with a passion for spectrophilia, however, it holds significant interest and makes for an amusing halloween study ...

Having said that, it's not really a supernatural sex story; it is rather the tale of kinky but perfectly mundane goings on between a group of unhappy and unfulfilled - some might say repressed or hysterical - poshos happy to indulge in extramarital shenanigans so as to feel better about themselves (and in the case of both women involved, conceive a child).
 
In other words, this is a perversely material tale about the flesh, disguised by Lawrence as a ghost story. Readers are invited to play along with the idea that there might possibly be strange things going bump in the night (and not merely those caught up in a polyamorous love pentangle), but we know that's not really the case.   
 
Anyhoo, let's take a look at the tale a bit more closely ...
 
 
III.
 
Mark Morier is the (Lawrentian) narrator. He's indifferent to his own poverty, but vitally concerned with his own passionate vision which, he felt, "lay embedded in the half-dead body of this life" [174]
 
Mark is friendly - but never flirtatious - with a fellow former art student called Carlotta Fell. She's a beautiful young woman with an aristocratic background and a penchant for painting still lifes. 
 
Mark feels that, despite their differences, he and Carlotta "had a curious understanding in common: an inkling, perhaps, of the unborn body of life hidden within the body of this half-death which we call life [...] a curious abstract intimacy, that went very deep, yet showed no obvious contact" [175].
 
In other words, he wants to fuck her but feels she's out of his league. His suspicion is Carlotta wants to "marry into her own surroundings" [175] rather than take a chance with him. She hates her own class, but is pot-bound within it like a house plant. Perhaps that's what makes her sad: an unconventional soul forced to lead a conventional life. 
 
At twenty-one, Carlotta marries Lord Lathkill (or Luke to his friends): a handsome army officer with dark hair and dark eyes. This is usually a good sign in Lawrence's work, but I'm not sure about that in this case. Later he is described as being "like a tortoise in a glittering, polished tortoiseshell that mirrors eternity" [176]; not conceited, but secure in his knowledge of things. 
 
Having said that, however, there was a sort of fear in his dark eyes and an emptiness: "He was so sure of circumstances, and not by any means sure of the man in the middle of the circumstances. Himself! Himself! That was already a ghost." [177]
 
The problem is he thinks himself and his family unlucky - almost cursed. And sure enough, all three children born to him and his wife die; their twin boys are killed in a car accident and their baby girl perishes from a fatal illness. Following this, they retreat into a life of seclusion, with his elderly mother at the family home in Derbyshire. It's here - at this haunted mansion - that Morier reluctantly goes to visit them ...
 
When he arrives, there's already another couple present; bald-headed, ruddy-faced Colonel Hale and his swarthy young wife, who had "the hint of a black moustache" [183] and hairy limbs. Later, at dinner, Morier will admire her slim, swarthy arms which had "an indiscernible down on them" [185].
 
When Morier is introduced to the dowager Lady Lathkill and this rather odd couple it makes for an awkward encounter. He feels as if he "interrupted them at a séance" [183], which, given the old woman's "leanings towards the uncanny - spiritualism, and that kind of thing" [181] is perfectly possible.       
 
Morier is shown to his room - the so-called ghost room. Apparently the lovely female ghost isn't ghoulish or ghastly in the least and brings good luck. Morier is put in the room to tempt her into appearing, so that the family fortune might be restored. Our narrator doesn't seem to take the idea of a ghost very seriously. In fact, he's thinking more about Carlotta than the latter:
 
"Poor Carlotta! She looked worn now. [...] It was as if some bitterness had soaked all the life out of her, and she was [...] drained of her feelings. It grieved me, and the thought passed through my mind that a man should take her in his arms and cherish her body, and start her flame again. [...] Her courage was fallen, in her body; only her spirit fought on. She would have to restore the body of her life, and only a living body could do it." [183-184]      
 
I think, as readers, we all know what this means and what's going to happen ...
 
It turns out that Carlotta isn't the only one dead in life; her husband and the Colonel too are zombiefied. The latter, for example, is not quite sixty yet has blank staring eyes with "deathly yellow stains underneath" [189] and he seemed to smell. 
 
For some reason, he decides to confide in Morier and tells him of his marriage to his first wife, Lucy, who has haunted him ever since her death, and now prevents him from loving his new young bride; wed for almost a year, they have yet to consummate their relationship. Apparently, she doesn't mind, believing as she does that pleasing the dead is a higher form of duty than pleasuring the living.       
 
Morier - and, indeed, Lord Lathkill - is shocked and disturbed by this. Both think it wrong and the former says he'd simply tell the ghost-wife to go to Blazes! For why love a ghost when you can love a black she-fox - as he thinks the Colonel's wife.
 
Later, over coffee, Morier is aroused by the thought of dark hairs growing on the inside of her "strong-skinned, dusky thighs" [193]; he admires the mysterious fire he detects beneath her resistant passivity. However, it's not just the narrator of our tale who is attracted to Mrs Hale - Lord Lathkill is also keen to dance with her ...  
 
Not that Morier is unhappy having to dance with Carlotta: 
 
"She was very still, and remote, and she hardly looked at me. Yet the touch of her was wonderful, like a flower that yields itself to the morning. Her warm, silken shoulder was soft and grateful under my hand [...] 
      She [...] let the strain and the tension of all her life depart [...] leaving her nakedly still, within my arm. And I only wanted to be with her, to have her in my touch." [194]
 
Having said that, it doesn't stop him from enjoying the next dance with Mrs Hale:
 
"I looked down at her dusky, dirt-looking neck - she wisely avoided powder. The duskiness of her mesmerised body made me see the faint dark sheen of her thighs, with intermittant black hairs. It was as if they shone through the silk of her mauve dress, like the limbs of a half-wild animal [...] [194]
 
Unfortunately for Morier, Mrs Hale only has eyes for Lord Lathkill ... and he's keen to try his luck with the dark young woman. But then the temperature suddenly drops and the spirit of the Colonel's first wife puts in an invisible appearance. Only Lord Lathkill is determined she won't spoil their fun - and he puts on the gramophone, insisting they keep dancing so as to resist the "cold weight of an unliving spirit [that] was slowly crushing all warmth and vitality out of everything"  [197].

It's the triumph of warm flesh and blood over death - something which comes as a moment of revelation for Lord Lathkill: 
 
"'I've only realised how very extraordinary it is to be a man of flesh and blood, alive. It seems so ordinary, in comparison, to be dead, and merely a spirit. That seems so commonplace. But fancy having a living face, and arms, and thighs. Oh my God, I'm glad I've realised in time!'" [200]
 
Pressing the arm of Mrs Hale against his chest, he addresses his wife, who is silently weeping by this stage:
 
"'Don't cry, Carlotta! [...] We haven't killed one another. We're too decent after all. We've almost become two spirits side by side. We've almost become two ghosts to one another [...] Oh, but I want you to get back your body, even if I can't give it you. I want my flesh and blood, Carlotta, and I want you to have yours. We've suffered too much the other way.'" [201]  
 
With this, whilst still holding hands with the Colonel's dark young wife, he hands Carlotta over to Morier, who agrees to help her (again, we all know what this means). But before Morier can fuck Carlotta and Lord Lathkill can bang Mrs Hale who sat in silent remote mystery throughout the above speech, they must first help the Colonel, who reappears in his dressing gown desperate for assistance.
 
Lord Lathkill - like a man with "one foot in life and one in death" [202] knew just what to say: the Colonel should open up his heart and provide a home for poor dead Lucy. He accuses the Colonel of never having worshipped the body of his wife with his body - no matter how awfully good he may have been to her. 
 
In an amusing passage, Lawrence writes: 
 
"The queerest of all accusing angels did Lord Lathkill make, as he sat there with the hand of the other man's wife clasped against his thigh. His face was fresh and naïve, and the dark eyes were bright with a clairvoyant candour, that was like madness, and was, perhaps, supreme sanity." [203] 
 
Lord Lathkill - or shall we call him Luke, a strange, uncanny figure was, in truth, like a man reborn - tells the Colonel that Lucy haunts him and wails in the afterlife because he despised her living body and the only way to end her torment (and his) is to "'take her to your warm heart, even now, and comfort her [...] be kind to her poor ghost, bodily'" [204].  
 
And this he does - to miraculous effect! "The passionate, compassionate soul stirred in him and was pure [...] [205]
 
Luke and Dorothy - for that, it turns out, is the living Mrs Hale's name - retire for a night of passion. And Morier goes to his room in the hope and expectation of a visitor in the night ... And it's at this point that the story becomes a little unclear as to what actually happens: is it the ghost of silence, or is it Carlotta who comes under cover of darkness ...? 
 
Even the narrator seems uncertain. But see what you think, dear reader, on the basis of the following passages:

"And softly, in silence, I took off my things. I was thinking of Carlotta: and a litte sadly, perhaps [...] I could have worshipped her with my body, and she, perhaps, was stripped in the body to be worshipped. But it was not for me [...] to fight against circumstances.
      [...] Desire is a sacred thing, and should not be violated. 
      'Hush!' I said to myself. 'I will sleep, and the ghost of my silence can go forth, in the subtle body of desire, to meet that which is coming to meet it. Let my ghost go forth, and let me not interfere. There are many intangible meetings, and unknown fulfilments of desire.'
      So I went softly to sleep, as I wished to, without interfering with the warm, crocus-like ghost of my body. 
      And I must have gone far, far down the intricate galleries of sleep, to the very heart of the world. For I know I passed on beyond the strata of images and words, beyond the iron veins of memory, and even the jewels of rest, to sink in the final dark like a fish, dumb, soundless, and imageless, yet alive and swimming. 
      And at the very middle of the deep night, the ghost came to me, at the heart of the ocean of oblivion, which is also the heart of life. Beyond hearing, or even knowledge of contact, I met her and knew her. How I know it I don't know. Yet I know it with eyeless, wingless knowledge. 
      For man in the body is formed through countless ages, and at the centre is the speck, or spark, upon which all his formation has taken place. It is even not himself, deep beyond his many depths. Deep from him calls to deep. And according as deep answers deep, man glistens and surpasses himself.             
      Beyond all the pearly mufflings of consciousness, of age upon age of consciousness, deep calls yet to deep, and sometimes is answered. It is calling and answering, new-wakened God calling within the deep of a man, and new God calling answer from the other deep. And sometimes the other deep is a woman, as it was with me, when my ghost came. 
      Women were not unknown to me. But never before had woman come, in the depths of night, to answer my deep with her deep. As the ghost came, came as a ghost of silence, still in the depth of sleep.       
      I know she came. I know she came even as a woman, to my man. But the knowledge is darkly naked as the event. I only know, it was so. In the deep of sleep a call was called from the deeps of me, and answered in the deeps, by a woman among women. Breasts or thighs or face, I remember not a touch, no, nor a movement of my own. It is all complete in the profundity of darkness. Yet I know it was so. 
      I awoke towards dawn, from far, far away. I was vaguely conscious of drawing nearer and nearer, as the sun must have been drawing towards the horizon, from the complete beyond. Till at last the faint pallor of mental consciousness coloured my waking. 
      And then I was aware of a pervading scent, as of plum-blossom, and a sense of extraordinary silkiness - though where, and in what contact, I could not say. It was as the first blemish of dawn. 
      And even with so slight a conscious registering, it seemed to disappear. Like a whale that has sounded to the bottomless seas. That knowledge of it, which was the marriage of the ghost and me, disappeared from me, in its rich weight of certainty, as the scent of the plum-blossom moved down the lanes of my consciousness, and my limbs stirred in a silkiness for which I have no comparison. 
      As I became aware, I also became uncertain. I wanted to be certain of it, to have definite evidence. And as I sought for evidence, it disappeared, my perfect knowledge was gone. I no longer knew in full. 
      Now, as the daylight slowly amassed, in the windows from which I had put back the shutters, I sought in myself for evidence, and in the room. 
      But I shall never know. I shall never know if it was a ghost, some sweet spirit from the innermost of the ever-deepening cosmos; or a woman, a very woman, as the silkiness of my limbs seems to attest; or a dream, a hallucination! I shall never know." [208-209]
      
Only, I think we can know: because when Morier leaves that morning Carlotta says goodbye and whispers: "'At last it was perfect!'" [209] - and I don't think she's referring to their efforts on the dance floor.
 
The tale finishes with (the miraculous) news revealed in a slightly nudge-nudge, wink-wink manner from Lord Lathkill that Carlotta has given birth to a blonde-haired son (Gabriel); and that Dorothy Hale is also a new mother, to a "'black lamb of a daughter, called Gabrielle'" [210]
 
As for the Colonel, he became a pig farmer - as well as a father to another man's child. Not that the latter fact seems to bother him, Lord Lathkill assuring Morier that the former is a good sport (i.e., a cheerful cuckold) and that whenever they meet they look one another in the eye with understanding.   
 
 
Notes
 
[a] D. H. Lawrence, letter to John Middleton Murry (2 Feb 1923), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 375. 
      The deceased in question was Katherine Mansfield, Murry's wife, who had died on 9 January 1923, aged 34. 
 
[b] The Dial, vol. lxxxvi (July-August 1926), pp. 1-21 and 123-141. Here, I am referring to the story as published in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 174-210.   

[c] See Ben Stoltzfus, 'Lacan's Knot, Freud's Narrative, and the Tangle of "Glad Ghosts"', in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 32/33 (2003-2004), pp. 102-114. To read on JSTOR, please click here
      For Stoltzfus, the ghosts are "metaphorical knots of dysfunction", not actual presences from beyond the grave, and the tale is best understood in psychoanalytic terms. Lawrence uses poetic language, he argues, to "unveil unconscious states of mind" [105]. 
 
 
For an earlier post on the theme of spectrophilia - written with reference to Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights - click here.
 
 

28 Sept 2023

Notes on Hauntology and Ghost Modernism

Artcodex: Venn Diagram (2013) [1] 
 
 
It was Derrida who coined the neologism hauntology in a 1993 lecture on Marx, to refer to the manner in which old ideas, hopes, memories, and dead authors come back to haunt us like ghosts; opening up an uncanny space for thought in which socio-cultural elements from the past, present, and future collapse into an atemporal zone [2].   
 
The term has since been invoked by thinkers in many different fields; not just philosophy, but also the visual arts, music, anthropology, politics, and literary criticism [3]. Indeed, I recall that when I was researching a paper on spectrophilia some years back, I also spoke of hauntology in relation to another Derridean term - différance (i.e., the difference and deferral of meaning, origin, and presence) [4].
 
Arguably, however, it was the English cultural commentator Mark Fisher [5] who popularised Derrida's term and, in the process, made it very much part of his own critical vocabulary. 
 
For Fisher, the key idea is one of lost futures and he argues that postmodernism and neoliberalism between them cancelled the revolutionary promise of modernism and Marxism; gradually (but systematically) depriving artists, activists, and theorists of the resources necessary to produce the New. 
 
In other words, Fisher bemoaned cultural and political stagnation; the endless repetition and recycling of old ideas that were given, at best, a novel form of repackaging. In contrast to the nostalgia and retro-aesthetics of postmodern culture, Fisher promoted hauntology as a means of overcoming the impasse of the perpetual present and he refused to abandon the desire for a better future (or to remain forever pining for a future that failed to arrive). 
 
Discussing the political relevance of the concept, Fisher wrote:
 
"At a time of political reaction and restoration, when cultural innovation has stalled and even gone backwards [...] one function of hauntology is to keep insisting that there are futures beyond postmodernity's terminal time. When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past." [6]
 
To be honest, I have certain reservations about this ... 
 
And when I see members of Artcodex drawing Ven diagram wall installations in order to manifest collective hopes and fears and organise their thoughts to do with modernism, postmodernism, and what they playfully term ghost modernism, it intensifies these reservations. For I simply don't share their longing to revisit the grand narratives of modernity and see how ideals of utopia and universality might be made relevant to the 21st-century [7].         
 
For me, incredulity remains the key and postmodern irony the melody ...
 
 
Notes
 
[1] This wall installation with three intersecting circles representing Modernism, Postmodernism, and Ghost Modernism was developed by the art collective Artcodex whilst in residency at Transparent Studio (Brooklyn, NY) in Feb-Mar 2013. 
      Painted directly on the wall with blackboard paint, people were invited to use the chalk and erasers made available to list the things they associated with modernity, postmodernity, and ghost modernity, whilst rubbing out any earlier entries with which they disagreed. Then, in April of that year, they created a larger version of the Venn diagram for exhibition, alongside other works exploring the theme of ghost modernism (see note 7 below). 
 
[2] See Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf, (Routledge 1994). 
      The work was first presented as a series of lectures during a conference on the future of Marxism held at the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. Despite being an important concept in the book, the word hauntology appears only three times. For Derrida, the words hauntology and ontology are homophonous when spoken in French. If the latter is the philosophical study of being, then, in Derrida's mind, hauntology is a state of non-being that forever shadows ontology. I mentioned Derrida's text in a post published on Torpedo the Ark earlier this month in response to a 6/20 paper by John Holroyd: click here.
 
[3] As might be imagined, there is little agreement about what the concept of hauntology means exactly and different writers, working in different fields, have used it in different ways. Here, I will argue that it was the English cultural theorist Mark Fisher who popularised Derrida's term and made it very much part of his own critical vocabulary.   
 
[4] A Treadwell's paper entitled 'Spectrophilia' and due for presentation on 7 October 2014 was, unfortunately, cancelled at the last moment. Although I was more interested in notions of the queer gothic, perverse materialism, and the role played by ghosts in fictional works such as Wuthering Heights, I touched on hauntology as a philosophical concept and discussed Freud's notion of the uncanny. Some of my introductory remarks to this paper were recently published on TTA: click here.
 
[5] Mark Fisher - also known under his blogging alias k-punk - was an interesting figure; a writer, critic, theorist, etc., who cared passionately about politics, music and popular culture. Arguably we had this and quite a few other things in common; for example, we both belonged to that haunted generation born in the 1960s and both studied for a Ph.D in modern European philosophy at Warwick in the 1990s. 
      However, for one reason or another, he and I never crossed paths, nor even exchanged a single email. Someone did once jokingly suggest I was a poor man's Mark Fisher, but, even if that were true, the fact remains, dear reader, that he's dead and I'm alive (although, considering our topic in this post, such a distinction is meaningless and Fisher might now be said to haunt TTA).
 
[6] Mark Fisher, 'The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology', in Dancecult, Vol. 5, No. 2, (2013), p. 53. Click here to read as a pdf online. Readers who are interested might like to also see Fisher's article 'What Is Hauntology?' in Film Quarterly Vol. 66, No. 1 (Fall 2012), pp. 16-24 (click here to read on JSTOR) and his book Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zero Books, 2014). 
 
[7] I'm referring here to Artcodex; the name used by Vandana Jain and Mike Estabrook for their work produced in collaboration with many other artists. Via a number of different projects, the aim is to create spontaneous communities that are able to explore issues within contemporary culture. Click here to visit the Artcodex website. 
      As for ghost modernism, Artcodex claim this started off as simply a pun or funny term of phrase "that came in the middle of the night" and which was then adopted for the title of a 2013 exhibition at the Quartair Gallery in The Hague (NL): click here
      However, as we have seen, the concept of hauntology has been around since 1993 and Mark Fisher was already using the term ghost modernism in a blog post published in July 2008: click here. Indeed, Fisher readily admits that Marshall Berman anticipates the idea in his classic 1982 work All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. I'm sure members of Artcodex are aware of this, but, as far as I can see no acknowledgment of such a genealogy is given on their website and that seems something of an oversight to me; credit where credit is due, and all that ...
   

24 May 2019

Personal Love Counts So Little: Further Reflections on the Queer Case of Lou Carrington

Emerald Green Sacred Sex Graffiti (2015)
by Deprise Brescia / fineartamerica.com
 


As torpedophiles will recall, D. H. Lawrence's short novel St. Mawr is the story of a young woman who, having quickly exhausted the limits of love in a conventional (all-too-human) sense, embarks on an affair with a stallion.

However, her search for a form of transpersonal sex doesn't end in the stable. For ultimately, even a relationship with a handsome bay horse doesn't quite meet her needs. She yearns for something else, something bigger, something that can only be found perhaps beneath the radiation of new skies.

Thus it is that Lou ends up living on a small tumble-down ranch near Santa Fe. She hasn't got and doesn't want a man in her life: "She wanted to be still: only that, to be very, very still, and recover her own soul. [...] Even the illusion of the beautiful St. Mawr was gone." [137]

Lou adopts an asexual - almost anti-sexual - position, beyond man and beast, with spooky-erotic elements of spectrophilia:

"Because sex, mere sex, is repellent to me. I will never prostitute myself again. Unless something touches my very spirit, the very quick of me. I will stay alone, just alone. Alone, and give myself only to the unseen presences, serve only the other, unseen presences." [138]

Unable to bear the triviality and superficiality of her human relationships - and finding that even a fling with a horse can only take you so far - Lou decides she will model her life henceforth on that of the Vestal Virgins:

"They were symbolic of herself, of women weary of the embrace of incompetant men, weary, weary, weary of all that, turning to the unseen gods, the unseen spirits, the hidden fire, and devoting herself to that, and that alone. Receiving thence her pacification and her fulfilment." [138-39]

And these unseen presences are manifested in the landscape of her new home; "it seemed to her that the hidden fire was alive and burning in this sky, over the desert, in the mountains. She felt a certain latent holiness in the very atmosphere ..." This despite the tourists in their motor-cars, the "rather dreary Mexicans" and the Indians lurking with "something of a rat-like secretiveness and defeatedness in their bearing" [140].   

The question is: how do you come into touch with the spirit of place? That is to say, how does one polarise oneself with the vital effluence of the environment? It requires, as Lou recognises, submission above all else. One must consent to be seized by a new electricity and undergo a transformation of self - not just psychologically, but physically, as one's bones, blood, and flesh are all subject to a new molecular disposition.

It's a slow and terrible process in which one is essentially violated from behind and below by the destablising malevolence of the world. Loving a man, or a horse, is a piece of cake in comparison. Those environmentalists who, in their naive idealism and anthropocentric conceit, think there's nothing easier or more beautiful than communing with nature are laughably mistaken.

The earthly paradise they dream of is, in reality, inhuman and uncaring; not only does man not exist for it, but neither does a merciful deity watching over man. In the American Southwest: "There is no Almighty loving God. The God there is shaggy as the pine-trees, and horrible as the lightning." [147] Jesus isn't going to help you against the intense savagery of a world that contains mountain lions, pack-rats, porcupines, tumbleweed, and black ants in the kitchen cupboard.    

This is something that Lou, like the woman from New England who owned the ranch before her, will have to learn: that the dark gods and fanged demons to whom she wishes to submit were "grim and invidious and relentless, huger than man, and lower than man" [150].  

Whether she does learn - and whether she finds that something bigger that she desires (and which she conceives in terms of sacred sexuality) - isn't something we can say for sure, as Lawrence ends the story of Lou Carrington at this point, concluding with a little speech from the latter to her mother, in which she insists on her determination to henceforth keep herself to herself:

"'There's something else for me, mother. There's something else even that loves me and wants me. I can't tell you what it is. It's a spirit. And it's here, on this ranch. It's here, in this landscape. It's something more real to me than men are, and it soothes me, and it holds me up. I don't know what it is, definitely. It's something wild, that will hurt me sometimes and will wear me down sometimes. I know it. But it's something big, bigger than men, bigger than people, bigger than religion. It's something to do with wild America. And it's something to do with me. It's a mission, if you like [...] to keep myself for the spirit that is wild, and has waited so long here: even waited for such as me. Now I've come! Now I'm here. Now I am where I want to be: with the spirit that wants me. And that's how it is. [...] And it doesn't want to save me either. It needs me. It craves for me. And to it, my sex is deep and sacred, deeper than I am [...] It saves me from cheapness, mother. And even you could never do that for me.'" [155]


Notes

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

For the earlier post in which I discuss Lou Carrington's affair with St. Mawr, click here.

For a post in which I discuss Lawrence's understanding of the spirit of place, click here

4 May 2014

Audrey's Ghost

Framestore Chauffeur ad for Galaxy/Dove (2013) 
dir. Daniel Kleinman 


I have to confess that upon first viewing the Galaxy TV ad which appears to star Audrey Hepburn alongside male model-of-the-moment Nick Hopper, I thought it was just a particularly lovely lookalike.

But then, watching it for a second and third time, the realisation dawned that there was more going on here than initially met the eye; that it was in fact a commercial reliant upon the very latest in visual effects and, although filmed on the Amalfi coast, it was ultimately an Uncanny Valley production.

And, sure enough, upon investigation, it turns out that the ad does use CGI in order to create what is not only a chocolate lover's fantasy, but a spectrophile's wet dream.

The only concern, perhaps, is what it tells us about our digital culture; is there not something cadaverous beneath the technological wizardry?  

Why have cotton when you can have silk?

Why have live actors when you can have dead icons?

 

23 Apr 2014

Her Rich Attire Creeps Rustling to Her Knees

Image from phantomseduction.tumblr.com

Manufacturers of extremely beautiful and limited edition handmade silk knickers Strumpet and Pink make use of an intriguing tagline or company slogan in their advertising: Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees

For those who don't know, this is taken from a famous verse by Keats entitled The Eve of St. Agnes, written in 1819 and published the following year. Considered by many to be amongst his finest poems, it gripped the literary and pornographic imagination of the 19th century telling the tale as it does of a pair of illicit lovers, Madeline and Porphyro.

Keats based his poem on the popular belief that a young girl could summon a future husband to her if she performed certain magical rites on the eve of the feast day of Christian martyr Agnes of Rome, patron saint of virgins. These rites include going to bed without supper, stripping naked and then lying flat on the bed with eyes wide shut facing the heavens, hands kept firmly under the pillow at all times. 

No matter what she experiences, Madeline is instructed by a wise woman to remain silent and supine; only then is the man she yearns for guaranteed to appear - in dream form if not actually in the flesh - and he would come with kindness, kisses and good things to eat for his bride-to-be. 

Originally, Keats played up the erotic aspect of this tale, but his publishers obliged him to tone it down fearing they would be at the centre of a public scandal. Even so, there remain plenty of controversial and kinky aspects: for having secretly stolen into Madeline's bedroom on this very night, Porphyro hides in the closet from where he spies on the girl as she says her prayers, lets down her hair, takes off her jewellery, and then removes her clothes: 

"Anon his heart revives: her vespers done, / Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees; / Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one; / Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees / Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees."

Porphyro continues to play the peeping tom and to perv on Madeline as she lays on the bed in a semi-conscious state, gently trembling with the cold and anticipation. She has never looked more beautiful to him than at this moment, naked in the moonlight; he is entranced by her and the sound of her breathing. He also continues to be fetishistically fascinated by her discarded clothes and gazes long upon her empty dress. 

Finally, believing Madeline to be fast asleep at last, Porphyro creeps out from his hiding place and approaches the bed. His plan is for them to enjoy a midnight feast together of rare exotic delicacies that he has brought along with him, including candied fruit, quince jelly, and spiced syrup. Unfortunately however, he has trouble waking her and when Madeline does rouse she mistakenly thinks him to be part of a dream and pulls Porphyro onto the bed with her - the poem thus taking a sudden diversion into the problematic area of sexsomnia. 

Only after they have consummated their relationship does Madeline fully wake-up and, although feeling vulnerable and violated, she tells Porphyro that she cannot hate him for his actions, as her heart belongs to him. Concerned, however, that, having fucked her, he might now simply abandon her, Madeline seeks some reassurance: she tells him that if he leaves her now she'll be damaged goods; like a forlorn bird with a broken wing. Happily, Porphyro declares his love for her and the two of them elope into the night - like two phantoms.

I'm not sure really what to say about the poem; at 42 stanzas it's certainly lengthy and, at times, slow in pace and dull to read. Nevertheless, its combination of supernatural elements and illicit sexual activity qualify it as an interesting example of queer gothic verse. And although it might seem as if Madeline is both object and victim, it could be of course that the whole thing is just her spectro-masturbatory fantasy; that she simply imagines a fair knight who comes to carry her off to a far-away land and make her his wife against the wishes of her parents - doesn't every girl?