Little Hell Flames: On D. H. Lawrence's Poppy Philosophy

Bright Red Poppy (SA/2021)

 

 

This morning, a large bright red poppy has burst into flame at the top of my garden and it naturally triggers thoughts of Sylvia Plath's famous short verse* and, of course, D. H. Lawrence's philosophical remarks on the flower in his Study of Thomas Hardy** ...

 

Whilst for Plath the red poppy is a symbol both of pain and the release from pain (of sleep, of death), for Lawrence, the poppy reminds us that there is more to life than the will to self-preservation; that man - like flower - achieves his consummation or fourth-dimensional splendour by wasting himself, with no thought of the morrow.   

Even an old man, afraid of the coming winter, who warns the young against behaving like a "reckless, shameless scarlet flower" [8], can't resist watching as the poppy unfolds into being. For he knows in his innermost heart, where there is no fear, that the poppy's blaze of colour is what matters most; that even "the latent seeds were secondary" [8] and that without its outrageous redness, it is just another herbaceous plant growing wild by the roadside.  

 

And it is better that we too blossom like the poppy, rather than "linger into inactivity at the vegetable, self-preserving stage [...] like the regulation cabbage, hide-bound, a bunch of leaves that may not go any farther for fear of losing market value" [12]. For if we cannot flower into being, then we will thrash destruction about ourselves until we are rotten at heart. 

Lawrence concludes:

"The final aim of every living thing, creature, or being is the full achievement of itself. This accomplished, it will produce what it will produce, it will bear the fruit of its nature. Not the fruit, however, but the flower is the culmination and climax [...] 

      And I know that the common wild poppy has achieved so far its complete poppy-self, unquestionable. It has uncovered its red. Its light, its self, has risen and shone out, has run on the winds for a moment. It is splendid. The world is a world because of the poppy's red. Otherwise it would be a lump of clay. [...] I tremble at the inchoate infinity of life when I think of that which the poppy has to reveal, and has not as yet had time to bring forth." [12-13]  

 

 

Notes

 

* I'm referring here to 'Poppies in July', rather than 'Poppies in October'. But both poems can be found in Ariel (Faber and Faber, 1965), Plath's second book of verse, published two years after her death and edited (somewhat controversially) by Ted Hughes. (In 2004, a new edition of Ariel was published which for the first time restored Plath's own selection and arrangement of the poems.)  

 

** D. H. Lawrence, 'Study of Thomas Hardy', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press,1985), pp. 1-128. Page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. Note that although I only quote from chapter I, Lawrence it still singing the praises of the red poppy coming into bloom in chapter II: 

 

"His fire breaks out of him, and he lifts his head, slowly, subtly, tense in an ecstasy of fear overwhelmed by joy, submits to the issuing of his flame and his fire, and there it hangs at the brink of the void, scarlet and radiant for a little while, imminent on the unknown, a signal, an out-post, an advance-guard, a forlorn, splendid flag, quivering from the brink of the unfathomed void, into which it flutters silently [...]" [18]    

On Dalí's Queer Fascination with Hitler

Salvador Dalí: The Enigma of Hitler (1939)

Oil on canvas (95 x 141 cm)

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia

I.

A lot of comedians find the figure of the Führer funny; from Charlie Chaplin to Mel Brooks there's a long tradition of laughing at Hitler and the Nazis. But some artists and aristocrats have a queer fascination with fascism and find the Führer rather sexy with his neat mustache and Aryan eye, bright blue.

This is certainly true of the great Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí. He had a thing for Hitler, whom he identified with the misanthropic, misotheistic figure of Maldoror and wasn't shy about admitting so in openly erotic terms: 

"I often dreamed of Hitler as a woman. His flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me..."
  

Such statements, along with his 1939 work, The Enigma of Hitler, were the final straw for André Breton and his fellow Surrealists: it was one thing Dalí airing his dirty laundry in public - including a pair of shit-stained underpants - but to confess an attraction for the German leader on the eve of war, that was beyond the pale.

Thus, Dalí was (finally) expelled from the group with whom he had been affiliated for a decade. His argument that Hitler was merely a manifestation of his own decadent aestheticism didn't really wash. Nor did his insistence that Hitler might himself be regarded as a kind of Surrealist, prepared to launch a war solely for the pleasure of losing and seeing the world in ruins - the ultimate act of gratuitous violence.


II.

Dalí would in later years paint two more pictures of Hitler: Metamorphosis of Hitler's Face into a Moonlit Landscape with Accompaniment (1958) and the charming watercolour entitled Hitler Masturbating (1973). But it's the Engima work, reproduced above, that shows Dalí at his best and most recognisable; many of his favourite themes, symbols and motifs are on display here.   

Critics who like to approach art from a psychoanalytic perspective suggest the picture is all about Dalí's fear of domineering authority figures, or his anxious concerns to do with impotence. And, who knows, maybe they're on to something. However, such readings don't exhaust the work and, intriguing as the psychosexual elements are, I think it's the political nature of the painting that most interests.

For whilst Breton and company insist it glorifies the German dictator, it seems to me far more ambiguous (as all art should be). Thus, one could just as reasonably argue that the painting seems humorously critical of the fact that Hitler threatens to land us all in the soup ...       

Note: readers interested in other recent posts on Dalí can click here and here.

Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence

I. Voir Vence et Mourir

There are not many places in the world I would like to visit, but the small medieval market town of Vence, on the French Riviera, is one of them.

For one thing, Lawrence died in Vence (2 March 1930) and having been to the town in which he was born, Eastwood, I'd like to complete the pilgrimage as it were (fully aware of the fact that his body no longer lies in the local cemetery, having been exhumed, cremated and shipped over to the United States at Frieda's bidding in 1935).

My primary reason for wanting to go to Vence, however, is to see a place of Catholic worship designed and decorated by an artist whom Lawrence loathed: the Chapelle du Rosaire was built between 1949 and 1951 under the direction of Henri Matisse, who regarded it as his masterpiece.


II. Going to the Chapel

From what I've read and seen, the chapel is not particularly striking from the outside; white walls, a rooftop decorated with a blue-and-white zigzag pattern and an elaborate metal cross. The interior, however, is both a very beautiful religious space and a great modern art space; doubly sacred, if you will.

The altar is made of warm brown stone and was chosen for its resemblance to the colour of bread and the Eucharist. Matisse also designed the bronze crucifix on the altar, the candle holders in bronze, and the small tabernacle. Behind the altar is a large image of Saint Dominic.

For the walls, Matisse designed three murals. Aged 77 when he began work on the chapel, Matisse was in such poor health that he could only work from a wheelchair using a long stick with a brush strapped to his arm. The images he drew on paper were then transferred to the ceramic tiles by skilled craftsmen.

On the side wall there are abstract images of flowers and of the Madonna and Child, all created in simple black outlines. On the back wall are the traditional scenes known as the Stations of the Cross, depicting the gruesome last days of Christ. Whereas these fourteen scenes are usually depicted individually, Matisse cleverly incorported them into a single composition.

As much as I admire his minimalist wall designs, what I really love are the three sets of stained-glass windows, upon which Matisse spent a great deal of time. The windows make use of just three colours: an intense yellow for the sun; a vibrant green for vegetation; and a Virgin blue for the sea and sky. The colour from the windows floods the chapel's all-white interior and, via a play of nothing more than lines and light, Matisse miraculously opens what is a very limited space on to infinity.


III. In the Footsteps of Sylvia Plath

For me, Matisse's chapel possesses what Lawrence would have termed a fourth dimensional quality and one can't help wondering what the latter would have made of it had he lived to see it: would he still dismiss Matisse as a clever trickster who masturbated in paint and produced works full of nothing more than willed ambition and the impotent glories of virtuosity ...?

Whilst we can only guess Lawrence's critical response, we can know for sure what the American poet Sylvia Plath thought of Matisse's Chapel, as she recorded details of her visit to it (along with then lover Richard Sassoon) on 6 January 1956 in her journal. She also sent a postcard to her mother the following day from Nice, in which she wrote:

"Yesterday was about the most lovely of my life … How can I describe the beauty of the country? Everything is so small, close, exquisite and fertile. Terraced gardens on steep slopes of rich red earth, orange and lemon trees, olive orchards, tiny pink and peach houses. To Vence - small, on a sun-warmed hill, uncommercial, slow, peaceful. Walked to Matisse cathedral - small, pure, clean-cut. White, with blue tile roof sparkling in the sun - I just knelt in the heart of the sun and the colors of sky, sea, and sun, in the pure white heart of the Chapel."

It sounds so lovely: one can only hope Vence hasn't been ruined in the intervening 60 years by commercial and residential development, tourism, immigration, etc. like many of the other towns in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region.


See: The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol 1: 1940-1956, ed. Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, (Faber and Faber, 2017).

Case Studies from The White Stocking 3: Ted Whiston (An Abusive Husband with a Cuckold Fetish)

Anne Van Der Linden: Le bas blanc (2013)

annevanderlinden.net

I.

We have already discussed how Elsie is a prick tease in pearl earrings; and how her illicit lover and dance partner, Sam Adams, is a stocking fetishist who likes to make love to music, happy to humiliate the husbands and boyfriends of the young girls he preys upon.

But, let's be clear from the outset: Ted Whiston is no angel, or a man deserving of our pity. He's an abusive husband with - I would suggest - a cuckold fetish and a taste for sexual violence. Thus it is that, after Elsie receives a pair of pearl earrings as a Valentine's gift from Sam Adams, Whiston leaves for work brooding, but secretly excited by the idea of his wife being fucked by the older man.

And this is why he behaved as he did at the Christmas party two years earlier, when Adams publicly ravished his fiancée upon the dance floor and then pocketed one of her stockings that she had mistakenly carried with her instead of a handkerchief and then accidentally dropped in front of him. Whiston was angry that she let Adams not only pick up the item in question, but keep it too. However, although he would occasionally speak of the matter afterwards, it was one that he tellingly allowed to go unresolved.


II.

When Whiston gets home from work on Valentine's evening, he's tired and depressed, but ready to engage in a little sadomasochistic sex play with Elsie, who, it seems, is an eager and consensual participant in such. Lawrence writes:

"All day the male in him had been uneasy, and this had fatigued him. She was curiously against him, inclined, as she sometimes was nowadays, to make mock of him and jeer at him and cut him off. He did not understand this, and it angered him deeply. She was uneasy before him.

      She knew he was in a state of suppressed irritation. The veins stood out on the backs of his hands, his brow was drawn stiffly. Yet she could not help goading him."

Almost immediately, he asks her about the white stocking, with vicious resentment in his voice. This is the fetish object that excites and unites him, her, and Adams in a perverse relationship. She leaves the room and when she returns she is wearing the white stockings - most likely stained with Sam Adams's semen - and starts to parade around in front of him, admiring her own pretty legs and lifting up her skirt so that he might better see them and get a flash also of her frilly knickers. 

Whiston tells her to stop making a spectacle of herself. But Elsie continues to dance round the room, kicking up her legs and singing as she did so, seemingly indifferent to how this might make him feel. They are, of course, deliberately inciting violent feelings of sexual jealousy and humiliation, as they delve into dark corners of the pornographic imagination. He calls her a whore and tells her to stop acting so shamelessly and yet he clearly delights in her behaviour, just as his abuse excites her: 

"She was rousing all his uncontrollable anger. He sat glowering. Every one of her sentences stirred him up like a red-hot iron. Soon it would be too much." But still she doesn't stop - not until he suddenly - though inevitably - explodes into violence:

"He seemed to thrust his face and his eyes forward at her, as he rose slowly and came to her. She watched transfixed in terror. Her throat made a small sound, as she tried to scream.

      Then, quick as lightning, the back of his hand struck her with a crash across the mouth, and she was flung back blinded against the wall. The shock shook a queer sound out of her. And then she saw him still coming on, his eyes holding her, his fist drawn back, advancing slowly. At any instant the blow might crash into her.

      Mad with terror, she raised her hands with a queer clawing movement to cover her eyes and her temples, opening her mouth in a dumb shriek. There was no sound. But the sight of her slowly arrested him. He hung before her, looking at her fixedly, as she stood crouched against the wall with open, bleeding mouth, and wide-staring eyes, and two hands clawing over her temples. And his lust to see her bleed, to break her and destroy her, rose from an old source against her. It carried him. He wanted satisfaction."

This is the brutal counterpoint of the ecstatic dance scene from earlier in the story, between Elsie and Adams (see part two of this post). Lawrence - supremely skilled at writing scenes of sexual violence in which the erotic aspect of the latter and the obscene cruelty of the former become blurred and indistinguishable - brings things to a disturbing climax:

"He had seen her standing there, a piteous, horrified thing, and he turned his face aside in shame and nausea. He went and sat heavily in his chair, and a curious ease, almost like sleep, came over his brain.

      She walked away from the wall towards the fire, dizzy, white to the lips, mechanically wiping her small, bleeding mouth. He sat motionless. Then, gradually, her breath began to hiss, she shook, and was sobbing silently, in grief for herself. Without looking, he saw. It made his mad desire to destroy her come back.
      She felt that now nothing would prevent him if he rose to kill her. She could not prevent him any more. She was yielded up to him. They both trembled in the balance, unconscious."

After a few moments, Elsie lifts her "tear-stained, swollen face" and looks at her husband with forlorn eyes that cause a "great flash of anguish" to pass over his body. He takes her in his arms and holds her with great tenderness, whilst telling her over and over that he loves her. 

III.

Why does Elsie stay with a man who is willing and able to abuse her in this manner? Is she frightened to leave, or is she only too aware of the practical and financial difficulties of leaving? Does she have a support network of friends and family that might enable her to do so?

I don't know and the story doesn't really tell us. I'm somewhat reluctant to suggest that, maybe, she enjoys the violence - just as she seems to enjoy sexual teasing and manipulation. But we need to recall that Elsie is a consenting adult and it's clearly ridiculous to suggest that women can't enjoy the darker aspects of edgeplay (smacking, punching, strangulation, erotic asphyxiation, etc.).

By her own admission, Elsie is bored by her husband and used to his ways. Maybe she needs the physical stimulation that results from such activities and that violence and fear ultimately result in heightened pleasure or jouissance. Besides, as Sylvia would say, every woman adores a fascist - it just becomes a question of who's the Daddy; Ted Whiston or Sam Adams. 

IV.

As for Ted Whiston, what's his story? Why does he need to imagine his wife involved with Sam Adams and to abuse her before he can find his own sexual satisfaction? In order to answer this, we need to understand something of the appeal of cuckold fetish ...

Traditionally, a cuckold was unaware of what was going on behind his back. But in the world of modern fetish, the cuckold is fully complicit in his wife's sexual infidelity and often in control of the affair, deriving pleasure both from his humiliation and the perverse exertion of power. I think a strong argument can be made to suggest that Ted Whiston belongs to this modern school of cuckoldry. Who knows, maybe he was even the one who suggested she carry a white stocking instead of a handkerchief to the dance and ensnare Sam Adams with it ...?      

Interestingly, it's been suggested that there is a solid biological basis for cuckold fetish; that a man who believes his mate to have been getting jiggy with another male will want to copulate more frequently with her in order to compete with his rival. And copulate more vigorously too; thrusting more deeply, ejaculating with more force, and producing more sperm (suggesting that female infidelity is good for him and good for her).

I suspect that Whiston could hardly even get it up without the thought of Elsie in the arms of Adams. Or, indeed, enjoying the attentions of a black-skinned lover who has bought her affections with a bar of chocolate (the ultimate erotico-racist fantasy of a man like Whiston). 

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The White Stocking', in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, ed. John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 143-64.

The University of Adelaide have made The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914) freely available as an ebook: click here (or here if you want to go straight to 'The White Stocking'). 

For the first of the White Stocking case studies - on Elsie Whiston as a prick tease in pearl earrings - click here.

For the second of the White Stocking case studies - on Sam Adams as a Lothario who makes love to music - click here. 

A Birthday Post

Multi-wasp jumper (black)

A Child of the Jago

It's my birthday ...

But, if I'm honest, the receiving of a gift causes anxiety rather than the joy of anticipation: What lies behind the wrapping paper; "is it ugly, is it beautiful ... has it breasts, has it edges?" More to the point, can I return it without the receipt or bin it without the giver ever knowing?  

Unlike Sylvia Plath, I'm never so sure of the uniqueness of the object I'm being handed; uncertain that it'll be just what I always wanted. And unlike Sylvia, I would kind of like something special this year; I'll be pretty pissed off if I'm presented with some old bones, "or a pearl button".  

But how to ensure one receives the perfect present? 

The answer, of course, is to buy it yourself. That way, you always get exactly what you want from the person whom you love most ... In my case, a black woollen multi-wasp jumper from Child of the Jago, complete with an embroidered armband and a golden kilt pin to attach it to the sleeve.  

Happy Birthday - to me!

See: Sylvia Plath, 'A Birthday Present', Ariel, (Faber and Faber, 2010), pp. 42-44. Those who are interested can listen to Sylvia reading this verse on YouTube by clicking here.

Jews of the Wrong Sort: Notes on D. H. Lawrence and Anti-Semitism

Honor Blackman as Mrs Fawcett in The Virgin and the Gypsy 
dir. Christopher Miles (1970)

An angry email arrives in my inbox (not for the first time):

"Dear Stephen Alexander,

I was extremely disappointed to find the expression 'Jews of the wrong sort' appearing in one of your recent posts (Orophobia, 16 Nov 2017), without any word of commentary or any condemnation of this racist phrase borrowed from D. H. Lawrence, a well-known antisemite. This kind of indiscretion brings shame on you and what is, in many respects, an excellent blog."*    

There are several things I'd like to say in response to this ...

Firstly, like Sylvia Plath, I'm someone who writes and identifies as a bit of a Jew, as I make clear in an early post where I reveal that key influences on my thinking include Jacques Derrida, Malcolm McLaren, and Larry David: click here. I'm certain that, for some, these three figures would also represent Jews of the wrong sort, i.e. provocateurs who gaily deconstruct the metaphysical illusions and sentimental ideals by which the majority choose to live.

Secondly, Lawrence - if it is in fact Lawrence speaking in The Captain's Doll and not an anonymous narrator offering either an indirect rendering of the thoughts of the protagonist or their own (ironic) commentary - is, like me, clearly in favour of sardonic individuals who seek to curb the enthusiasm of Bergheil romantics, such as Hannele, and encourage the difficult descent into the what Heidegger terms the nearness of the nearest (even if this risks a fall into gross materialism).

Thus Lawrence's attitude with reference to this question, as to many others concerning race, is ultimately complex and ambiguous (sometimes outrageously inconsistent) and The Captain's Doll is a text that remains highly resistant to any final interpretation.

Personally, I would argue that, for Lawrence, Jews of the wrong sort are people very much of the right sort. That is to say, very much his sort (just as they are my sort). And this is so because his status as an outsider obliged him to identify with groups and individuals whom society often holds in contempt; not just Jews, but also Gypsies, for example.

Thus, in The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930), it's clear where Lawrence's sympathies lie; with a 36-year-old Jewish woman, Mrs Fawcett, who has abandoned her husband and two young children in order to be with a much younger man; and a good-looking traveller, called Joe Boswell, who takes a shine to the 19-year-old daughter of an Anglican vicar.

It's the narrow domesticity and mean-spirited authority of the familial regime that imposes moral restrictions on life in the name of propriety, which Lawrence despises and mercilessly lampoons throughout the novel. He instinctively sides with all those who are, due to their marginalization and difference, implicitly opposed to such. This makes him a far more radical figure than many of his critics wish to concede ...            

See:

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Captain's Doll', in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Virgin and the Gipsy', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones, and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Ronald Granofsky, '"Jews of the Wrong Sort": D. H. Lawrence and Race', Journal of Modern Literature (Indiana University Press), Vol. 23, No. 2 (Winter, 1999-2000), pp. 209-23. 

Judith Ruderman, Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence: Indians, Gypsies, and Jews (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
 
*Note: The author kindly gave me permission to quote from her email, but asked that she remain anonymous.

The Wisdom of Solomon 2: On the Grain of the Voice and Further Remarks on Lunacy

Simon Solomon (aka Dr Simon Thomas)

simonsolomon.ink 

Dublin-based poet, critic and translator, Simon Solomon, has been kind enough to leave several lengthy comments on recent posts and I would like here to respond to some of his points, hopefully demonstrating the same intelligence, humour, and breadth of reading as this rather shadowy figure ...

I: On the Grain of the Voice [See: Bootylicious]

As a matter of fact - and I'm not entirely convinced I said anything in the Bootylicious post that implied otherwise - I'm not affirming "the beauty of male Welsh choirs for their proximity to the coal pits and the dust of Mother Earth". Barthes may love what he terms the grain of the voice, but I don't want to hear the blackness of the lungs, or the phlegm in the back of the throat, thank you very much.

In short, I don't like earthiness: but nor do I like those big, booming voices which tremble with powerful emotion and technical brilliance, or have what people like to think of as soul. If people absolutely must break into song, I prefer they do so quietly in a non-expressive, non-showoffy, slightly hesitant, slightly shy manner (perhaps not always hitting the right notes).

I don't care whether someone has a talent for singing because, ultimately, like Larry David, I can't stand the sound of the human voice; a trick of the larynx that, as you rightly point out Simon, is no longer so impressive in a predominantly visual culture.  

II: Further Remarks on Lunacy [See: On Lunacy]

I'm perfectly happy for you to number yourself amongst the lunatic fringe, Simon. And it's clear from some of your - shall we say more poetic - comments made in response to my post on the Moon and it's supposed effect upon human biology and behaviour, this is where you belong ...

So whilst, obviously, I'd rather be beneath the stars with Sylvia Plath than Roger Scruton, I'm not sure I'd want to attend a dinner party made up of "myth-making mavericks". Nor would I choose to consult with the latter if I wanted to learn something factual about the Moon (i.e., about the real body orbiting the Earth and not the spooky object that some think is made of cheese).

Can you not at least concede the possibility that one might discover something more amazing about the Moon from astronomers and physicists, than from artists and poets? Or do you really believe that even William McGonagall has more to offer us than, for example, Brian Cox?

Actually, despite the two studies you cite, there really is scant evidence for any significant lunar effect on either surgical or criminal activity and the thirty-three-year old article by C. P. Thakur and Dilip Sharma is - I would have thought - clearly nonsense. See Eric Chuder, Bad Moon Rising: The Myth of the Full Moon (2014), which explains why this is so.

As I indicated in the post, there are many people - including politicians, doctors, and police officers - who believe in the lunar effect; just as there are many otherwise perfectly respectable and perfectly reasonable individuals advocating alternative therapies, including homeopathy.

Your argument from intuition that because the Moon's gravity "can move something as vast as an ocean" it must be able to affect "our small and frangible human bodies", is the exact opposite of how things actually work - a kind of pataphysical denial of reality or, at the very least, a misconception regarding the laws of physics in relation to scale.

(Just so you know, the gravitational pull of the moon on a human body is less than that exercised by a mosquito on your arm; measurable, but bordering on the infinitesimal. Or, to put it another way, when a mother holds her new born baby in her arms, she exerts approximately twelve millions times more tidal force on the infant than the moon overhead.)  

Finally, yes, of course, the human body is an open system; otherwise, as you rightly say, we'd "all be living like autists, psychotics and sad, solitary sacks" (in fact we'd not be living at all, as we obviously need to eat, breathe, and excrete waste materials to sustain our existence and these activities require openness and exchange).

But it's quite a leap to then say there are "no such things as individual bodies" and humanity is "one collective cosmic contagion"... This may be true at a philosophical-libidinal-psychic level, but it's certainly not the only truth. For there's also the truth of singular being; that I am I, you are you, and I am not you, you are not me, and that the Universal Oneness of Humanity is a lie (and a dangerous one).

Every man and every woman is a star, wrote Aleister Crowley. Which means, according to Lawrentian protagonist Rupert Birkin:

"'At the very last, one is alone, beyond the influence of love. There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional relationship. So it is with you. But we want to delude ourselves that love is the root. It isn't. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does not meet and mingle, and never can.'"

- D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love

In other words, if you want to live a cosmic life, burning like a tiny sun or as cold and mysterious as the Moon, then you must become starkly inhuman; beyond speech and feeling, beyond responsibility and obligation, beyond understanding ...

We don't need to open ourselves up to others, Simon, or serenade them by the light of the silvery moon; we need, rather, to come into a strange conjunction or equilibrium with them as singular beings. Or something like that ...

Note: readers interested in part one of this post - On Sincerity, Authenticity, Black Sheep and Scapegoats - should click here.

Fatal Attraction: Notes on Hybristophilia

Jeremy Meeks: the model prisoner who stole a million hearts

Following a recent post on criminals and capital punishment [click here], I received two emails from concerned readers. The first expressed outrage and disappointment that I could write such reactionary rubbish:

"You Sir, are a disgrace and your views - even if endorsed by D. H. Lawrence - border on being no more than a crude form of neo-fascism."

The second sought to convince me that even the most dangerous of serial killers has a soul to be saved and that this can be accomplished not through harsh punishment, but through Love - and not just the redeeming love of Jesus, but the carnal affection of a good woman:

"As a trained sex therapist who has worked with many violent men, I know a lot of their anger stems from feelings of inadequacy and that these issues can best be dealt with in the bedroom, rather than the prison cell."     

These latter remarks got me thinking about hybristophilia; a paraphilia in which the amorous subject is attracted to individuals who have committed an illegal act or atrocity and sexually aroused by the thought of their misdeeds. Many high-profile felons receive explicit fan-mail, love letters, and indecent proposals from women who, for one reason or another, can't resist the dubious appeal of a bad boy - even at the risk to their own safety or future happiness.   

There's doubtless a number of reasons that might explain this phenomenon; some women want to share in the notoriety; some women want to nurture the inner child or find the hidden beauty within even the most bestial of souls; some women want to engage in a fantasy relationship that can never be consummated; others simply want to piss off their friends and family.

According to Sylvia Plath - who, admittedly, was a poet and not an evolutionary psychologist - every woman adores a fascist; the swaggering alpha male with a brute, brute heart. And, who knows, perhaps there's something in this; something which also helps to explain the eroticised male attraction to strong leaders and gangsters; a fatal attraction displayed, interestingly, even by sensitive artists and philosophers, whom one might have hoped would know better.

Thus Nietzsche, for example, getting all flustered over the thought of blonde beasts and his insistence that the criminal is actually a type of healthy human being made sick due to unfavourable circumstances ...  

 

Floraphilia Redux (With Reference to the Case of Rupert Birkin)

Floraphilia 

YouTube (2009)

 

Flowering plants don't just grow in soil: they are also rooted in our hearts and blossom in our poetry; from Wordsworth's daffodils to Sylvia Plath's poppies. We love flowers and our love is like a red, red rose; just as the columbine is the emblem of our foolishness, the marsh-lily the symbol of our corruption and the narcissus conveys our conceit.

In language, as in art, we have formed an unnatural alliance with flowers and some, like Oscar Wilde, fervently hope that in the next life they might even become-flower - which is to say, beautiful but soulless. Here, I would like to examine this literary-erotic entanglement with flora and the manner in which we, like insects, become implicated in their sex games just as they are utilized in ours ...

What are flowers?

Flowers are the obscenely colourful sex organs of the flowering plant and they are what distinguishes angiosperms from other earlier forms of seed producing plant. Without flowers, an angiosperm would be just another gymnosperm: all leaf and naked of seed. Arguably, the same is true of people: they either blossom into full being like a bright red poppy, or they remain closed up within a mass of foliage and growing fat like a cabbage.

What is pollination?

Pollination is the process by which one plant receives the pollen from another: it is the botanical term for fucking. Some angiosperms are pollinated abiotically by the wind, some by water. And some rely upon small animals, such as bats or hummingbirds. But the majority, around 80%, exploit the labour of roughly 200,000 different types of insect. It is, if you like, a perfectly natural form of artificial insemination.

But insect pollination might better be viewed as a form of paid sex work, rather than erotic enslavement. Because when plants are fucked by insects the latter get something sweet in return for their services: nectar. However, this is not to say that the insects are entering into the relationship with full consent (whatever that might mean in the world of bugs and bees and cigarette trees) and most seem blissfully unaware that they are playing such a crucial role in plant reproduction.

Further, there are instances of male insects being sexually duped by a plant with sex organs that have evolved to look like the female of their species. The insect is attracted not by the pretty colours or the alluring scent of the flower, nor even the promise of a sugary drink, but by the prospect of being able to mate. The French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari discuss this in A Thousand Plateaus, with particular reference to the case of an orchid and a wasp. However, they argue that it should be understood in terms of becoming and not in the more conventional terms of mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.

The question remains, however, what this aparallel evolution or game of becoming, has to do with us: how are we implicated in the sex life of flowers? The answer is hay fever. For what is the allergic reaction to pollen suffered by many millions of men, women and children other than a sexually transmitted condition? Every spring we are sexually pestered by flowering plants that promiscuously allow their sperm-producing cells to be carried by any passing breeze into the eyes, ears, nose and throat of any passing creature.

As with herpes, there is presently no cure for hay fever. However, an article in The New Scientist several years ago suggested that 'organic masturbation' with fruit and vegetables might alleviate the problem. It turned out to be an April Fool's Day joke. But, many a word spoken in jest ... The revenge of the flowers starts with a runny nose, but who's to say in what humiliating circumstances it might end?

Of course, not all plant-human penetration is non-consensual. Whilst no one wants a nose full of pollen, many men and women are happy to insert carrots, cucumbers, and courgettes into those places usually reserved for cocks, tongues, fingers, and toys. But just because a woman might choose to insert a banana into her vagina, it doesn’t necessarily mean that she is on the road to building a body without organs, or that she's had done with the judgement of God.

In D. H. Lawrence's novel, Women in Love, the central male protagonist, Rupert Birkin, is a confirmed floraphile, as this scene illustrates:

"He was happy in the wet hill-side, that was overgrown and obscure with bushes and flowers. He wanted to touch them all, to saturate himself with the touch of them all. He took off his clothes, and sat down naked among the primroses [...] then lying down and letting them touch his belly, his breasts. It was such a fine, cool, subtle touch all over him, he seemed to saturate himself with their contact.
      But they were too soft. He went through the long grass to a clump of young fir-trees [...] The soft sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles. There was a thistle which pricked him vividly, but not too much, because all his movements were too discriminate and soft. To lie down and roll in the sticky, cool young hyacinths, to lie on one's belly and cover one's back with handfuls of fine wet grass, soft as a breath, soft and more delicate and more beautiful than the touch of any woman; and then to sting one's thigh against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one's shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch-trunk against one’s breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges - this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying. Nothing else would do, nothing else would satisfy, except this coolness and subtlety of vegetation travelling into one’s blood. How fortunate he was, that there was this lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, waiting for him, as he waited for it; how fulfilled he was, how happy!"

Lawrence continues:

"Really, what a mistake he had made, thinking he wanted people, thinking he wanted a woman. He did not want a woman - not in the least. The leaves and the primroses and the trees, they were really lovely and cool and desirable, they really came into the blood and were added on to him. He was enrichened now immeasurably, and so glad.
      ... Why should he pretend to have anything to do with human beings at all? Here was his world, he wanted nobody and nothing but the lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, and himself, his own living self.
      It was necessary to go back into the world. That was true. But that did not matter ... He knew now where he belonged. He knew where to plant himself, his seed: – along with the trees, in the folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves. This was his place, his marriage place. The world was extraneous."

It might be suggested that in this extraordinary scene Birkin is in the process of forming a rhizome between himself and the vegetal world, similar to that formed between the wasp and the orchid. It's a deterritorialization of sex from its traditional object and aim; a setting free of desire to roam and eventually reterritorialize on all kinds of new things, in all sorts of strange new ways. The great and intoxicating truth that Birkin demonstrates is that we can form loving relations not just with anyone - but anything and everything.

Admittedly, it's not love in the conventional and orthodox sense of the word, which is to say love that has been sanctioned by God and which involves the right persons doing the right things at the right time in the right place with the right organs - a model that is so restrictive and so reductive that it makes one want to immediately run outside and commit acts of erotic atrocity like Diogenes in the market place.

However, let it suffice for me to point out to those law-abiding individuals who think that love should circulate exclusively within a system of moral legislation, that were it not for Eve daring to consort with serpents and eat of whatever fruit she pleased, then none of us might have attained to carnal knowledge, or experienced the full range of earthly delights. Ultimately, love is tied to transgression and to crime - not to obedience or conformity with social convention.

In fact, one might argue that the highest forms of love are precisely those branded as paraphilias in which strange connections are sought out and one dreams of establishing an inhuman relationship with alien forces, or heterogeneous terms and territories. Quite clearly, Birkin is caught up in a process of becoming-plant via a series of perverse participations none of which involve imitation or identification. It's a question of extracting from his own sex the particles that best enter into proximity with those emitted by the plants and which produce within him a micro-florality.

If usually when we love we do so in order to seek out ourselves, that's almost certainly not the case here. For Birkin is not depositing his sperm amongst the foliage in the same way as he might come inside a woman and one suspects that he isn’t even that concerned with his own functional pleasure or the banality of orgasm. What really excites Birkin, even more than the delicious touch of the plants on his bare skin, is that he might enter into a new way of being and release the flows and forces and strange feelings presently overcoded by his humanity. Or, put more simply, that he might blossom and unfold into his own poppiness.

The problem with having a human being as a lover, is that their body often doesn’t serve to set anything free; rather, it gives impersonal desire personal expression and in this way it acts as a zone of containment, or a point of blockage - a dead end if you like, no matter how you choose to penetrate it. In other words, the anus is a cul-de-sac and, as Bataille reminds us, the vagina is a freshly dug grave.

There is, I admit, something utopian in this belief that we might discover via molecular-desire a new world in which we each contain an infinite number of impersonal selves and the anthropomorphic representation of sex is shattered once and for all: a future in which love will no longer mean boy-meets-girl, but boy becomes-girl, boy becomes-animal, boy becomes-plant, etc. But, even after the orgy, it surely remains true to say that perversions make happy.

This, however, is not to argue that the only way to form an intimate relation between yourself and the world of plants is to roll around naked like Birkin in the wet hill-sides, saturated with a mixture of pollen and semen. Nor does it mean having to masturbate with the contents of your vegetable drawer. For art also serves as a method of becoming and when Van Gogh paints sunflowers "he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as a man, and the sunflower, as sunflower". The canvas acts as a zone of proximity wherein something is exchanged between the two terms: the artist becomes-object, just as the object becomes pure line and colour.

This is the power of painting: it gives us the third thing, which, in this case, is a kind of human-flower hybrid that blossoms in the fourth dimension as a form of perfected relationship and becoming "where no Kodak can snap it". And, for Lawrence, our life hinges upon this relationship formed between ourselves and the world around us. Via an infinite number of different contacts we enter into the kingdom of bliss.

Alas, it’s not easy to come into touch in this way. To form a new relation with the world is invariably painful, if only because it involves the breaking of old connections and loyalties and this, as Lawrence reminds us, is never pleasant. But, nevertheless, we live in bright red splendour like the poppy via acts of infidelity and not by staying true to old attachments like a fat green cabbage forever stuck in the same old cabbage patch.

See:

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 106-07.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Morality and the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 171.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Art and Morality', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, p. 168.

Note: A much longer version of this work was first presented at Treadwell's, London, on 19 June, 2012.

Non est Consummatum

She's done it again.
My mother: Lady Lazarus.
Back from the hospital, back from the brink.

A sort of slow-walking miracle,
With skin as dry as a Nazi lampshade.
Still smiling with a full set of teeth.

If dying is an art like everything else,
Then it's one like cooking she does exceptionally badly,
Suspended in a grey twilight of forgetfulness.

Note: I have obviously sampled Sylvia Plath's magnificent poem 'Lady Lazarus', first published (posthumously) in Ariel (Faber and Faber, 1965). Although this has been done without permission, I hope it shows my affection and admiration for Plath whose writing so often provides inspiration and, indeed, solace in times of crisis.      

On the Art of Death and Disappearance in the Case of David Bowie

Bowie makes good his disappearance in the video 

for Lazarus (dir. Johan Renck, 2016)

The poet and critic Simon Solomon is right to refer the case of David Bowie back to Sylvia Plath's notorious claim that dying is an art, like everything else. For there was something very beautiful and stylized about his passing (as indeed there was about Plath's own exit from this world).

But what most philosophically fascinates about his death, apart from its obvious vitality and aesthetic appeal, is the manner in which he effected a disappearance and grasped the opportunity to die liberated from every identity and free of all stereotypes, in this way accomplishing what we might term (for want of another, slightly less Heideggerian term) an authentic death.

That is to say, one that had been imagined and carefully coordinated in every detail; one in which the mortal subject claimed his death for himself and affirmed his own dark singularity, becoming, as Bowie says, a blackstar, exerting an invisible and irresistible attraction and influence.

Bowie, in other words, accepted the challenge of death. He knew what it involved and made a choice. And, to his credit, he died at the most difficult time of all - which is to say at the right time, before his ideas ran dry and he had nothing left to say. How many of his contemporaries and fellow performers shamefully linger on - already dead-in-life, like zombies, unhappily full of self-assertion.

These people will, of course, eventually die, but they'll die too late and with biological banality. Unlike Bowie, their spirit and their virtue will not shine darkly after death. And because they do not know how to die and remain unwilling to disappear, they will never rise like Lazarus out of the ash with red hair.    


Read: Sylvia Plath, 'Lady Lazarus', in Collected Poems, (HarperCollins, 1992): click here.

Play: David Bowie, 'Lazarus', from the album Blackstar (ISO Records, 2016): click here.

On the Poetry and Politics of the Mushroom

Mushrooms - Sylvia Plath, by petropicto on deviantart.com

http://petropicto.deviantart.com/art/Mushrooms-Sylvia-Plath-417454440  

Whether D. H. Lawrence might fairly be described as a mycophobe is debatable, but it's certainly the case that all things fungal - including the beastly bourgeois parasitically flourishing amid decay - cause a violently hostile reaction, as we see, for example, in the following lines of verse:

How beastly the bourgeois is

especially the male of the species -

Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable -

and like a fungus, living on the remains of bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his own.

And even so, he's stale, he's been there too long.
Touch him, and you'll find he's all gone inside
just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.

...

Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp England
what a pity they can't all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.

Contrast these lines in which Lawrence identifies male members of the English middle-class as members of the fungus family (a large group of eukaryotic organisms that include yeasts, moulds, and mushrooms and which are distinct from plants and animals, even though they often have a symbiotic relationship with these other life forms), with what Sylvia Plath writes in her very beautiful if slightly menacing poem 'Mushrooms':


Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,
Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!
We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.


What's immediately striking is how Plath has a much more positive view of fungus; she sees in it the revolutionary hope of the future and relates it not to a decadent ruling class, but, on the contrary, to a subversive underclass who will one day come to fruition and bear spores.

This image of a soft-body of people rising up, is said by feminist critics to refer to the emancipation and empowerment of women and I like this interpretation as it's one that offers great promise and is not merely threatening. There's also none of the hysteria that one finds in Lawrence's verse.  
        

References: 

D. H. Lawrence, 'How beastly the bourgeois is -', The Poems (Vol. I), ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (CUP, 2013). 
Sylvia Plath, 'Mushrooms', The Colossus and Other Poems, (William Heinemann, 1960).    

Domesticity Kills

 Photo by Annabel Mehran from a fashion spread entitled 

'Last Words' in the 2013 Fiction Issue of Vice Magazine.

Styled by Annette Lamothe-Ramos. 

To be trapped between a rock and a hard place may sound like an unpleasant dilemma, but for the poet and philosopher it's infinitely preferable and far less dangerous than being caught between a cushion and a soft place. Or, as in poor Sylvia's case, a gas oven and a pile of dirty nappies.

It's unfortunate, but domesticity and parenthood invariably prove fatal to many an artist. For just as home-cooking makes fat and sharing a marital bed destroys desire, so all life's little comforts and the endless daily chores involved in keeping house and bringing up baby crush the spirit faster and more effectively than Domestos kills germs.   

I would seriously warn any younger readers of a sensitive and creative persuasion against performing any of the following activities on a regular and voluntary basis: hoovering the carpet, mowing the lawn, walking the dog, watering the plants, washing the dishes, making the bed, having kids, changing the curtains, wearing slippers, visiting parents, and shopping at Sainsbury's.    

Start by avoiding these things and, perhaps, you'll manage to preserve a little freedom and sanity and keep from slitting your wrists.

Good luck!

Fragments of Remembrance

Gathered here are six little fragments of text written in remembrance of authors who have, at one time or another, meant something special to me. Arguably, they might be read as an attempt to bear witness to the uniqueness of the relationship that one has with the writers and the books that one loves. And, indeed, with the dead.

Not that these somewhat incomplete and unfinished verses constitute anything so grand as a poetry or a politics of mourning. In writing them, I think I simply (and at the risk of banality) wanted to record an affection, rather than produce art or pass judgement.

In Memory of Anaïs Nin 

Many types of flow - of madness and literature, desire and disintegration - 

traversed the queer forest of her body in which gay little birds twittered 

obscenely and dark poppies blossomed.

In Memory of Henry Miller

A boy from Brooklyn: a pornographer: a mystic.

A son-of-a-bitch quoting Nietzsche in an East Coast accent,
whilst parading round Paris with a personal hard-on like the
happiest man alive.

In Memory of Friedrich Nietzsche

Bones, a few biographical details, the odd photograph,

and a small number of books: the remains of a dead

philosopher.

And yet he is more alive now, in death,
than he was in life, having become that
posthumous individual he said he would.

And this childless man is today father to us all.


In Memory of Sylvia Plath

I do not like the English summer, unfolded
into green completion and the smugness of
strawberries and cream.

Intolerable the seasonal stupidity of the natives;
one yearns for the first breath of autumn and
the fresh reassurance of rain.

Even, like a spinster, I long for winter,
so scrupulously austere.

In Memory of Marinetti

When I think of Marinetti
hurling defiance at the stars
beneath a violent electric moon,

I think of a bald-headed little man
in a bow-tie masturbating whilst
erect on the summit of the world.

Instinctively, one can't help but smile
at how quickly this ludicrous lover
of the machine and the manifesto
became passé.


In Memory of the Marquis de Sade

A monster, say his jailers.
Perhaps.

But, if so, then a monster of generosity
and good will, in whose name sex and
death entwine to produce a singular
form of love.

On Being a Bit of a Jew

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

I think I know what she means. 

And I think that, like Sylvia, I might also confess to being a bit of a Jew. 

How could it not be so when I have spent a lifetime under the influence of (amongst others) Malcolm McLaren, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Derrida and Larry David and grew up believing Rhoda Morgenstern to be the most beautiful woman in the world?

As Susan Sontag notes, the Jews are (along with homosexuals) the greatest creative minority in contemporary urban culture; creative, that is, of a sensibility - an admittedly old-fashioned and problematic term, by which she means an emotionally and aesthetically informed way of looking at the world and thinking about the self. 

I suppose I would call this a style. And whereas Sontag identifies moral seriousness as being the crucial component, I think for me Jewishness is about an abrasive, provocative, sometimes vulgar often anarchic humour that is fundamentally anti-deutsch (with German also being understood as a style, characterized by a sluggish digestive system and an Aryan eye, bright blue).