"an almost savage torpor", or, plus ca change

 

Wordsworth, from the Prelude to the Lyrical Ballads, written and published in 1800

The Seventeenth Century is barely over and here is William, complaining about what we would think of as the doomscroll or media overload: "the great national events which are daily taking place... a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies", stirred up in the hearts and nervous systems of those who live in cities.

"Hourly gratifies" - how often did broadsheets come out in those days? Perhaps he's talking about gossip, rumors... 

And then William's other complaints about degraded entertainments and hyperstimulation - "frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse". He could be talking about TikTok and Reels, influencers and Love Island, videogames and franchise blockbusters. 

In the Prelude, he proposes Nature and pastoral life as the remedy, a soul-recentering restoration, a resetting of the overclocked sensibility.  Again, very much like wellness and meditation and silent retreats today

"An almost savage torpor" - I'd put that on a T-shirt. That is my existence, distilled. 

Interesting also to learn from the Prelude that Wordsworth - whose poetry today seems like proper fancy stuff - was in fact aiming to write in the language of the common man, plainspoken, earnest, stripped of all affectations, circumlocution, ornamentation and other flashy flourishes

   These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind,

With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man’s life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,—

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things. 

an excerpt from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798

I wonder if Wordsworth would have approved of this tribute? 

Busy bee

Buzzing all day long

What's the hurry?

There's surely something wrong

I can't rest while the sun and the stars are so bright

'Cause your friends are picking flowers

Take away all my light

But you see busy bee

It's all for love

People pick them

You lick them all for love

Lalalalala...

She was a virgin, a humble virgin

She knew of no sin

Her eyes as bright as the stars without light

Spent all the night

 For, nothing spake to me but the fair Face

 Of Hev'n and Earth, when yet I could not speak:

 I did my Bliss, when I did Silence, break.

 

Traherne, "Dumness."'

Chas Jankélévitch

 

 "Above the lake in the valley and the grove along the hillside, high over the sea

and the passing clouds, and even past the sun!

To the farthest confines of the starry vault

mount, my spirit, wander at your ease

and range exultant through transparent space

like a rugged swimmer reveling in the waves

with an unutterable male delight.

Ascend beyond the sickly atmosphere *

to a higher plane, and purify yourself

by drinking as if it were ambrosia

the fire that fills and fuels Emptiness.

Free from the futile striving and the cares

which dim existence to a realm of mist,

happy is he who wings an upward way

on mighty pinions to the fields of light;

whose thoughts like larks spontaneously rise

into the morning sky; whose flight, unchecked,

outreaches life and readily comprehends

the language of flowers and of all mute things.

- Charles Baudelaire, Elevation

* in some translations, rendered as "miasma"

 

Sylvère Lotringer, "The Dance of Signs"

by Friedrich Nietzsche 

 "Shitting, like death, is a great leveller. It renders beluga caviar indistinguishable from tinned ham, a duchess as creaturely as a dog."

Alex Blasdel

For some reason this quote has reminded me of a Brian Aldiss story I never read but always meant to. In my hazy memory,  Aldiss's speculative train of thought had begun with the fact that religions, in their imagery and their ceremonies, often spiritualize bodily functions like eating (as with the communion wafer) and sex. Aldiss wondered: "well, why not  the excretory functions?". So he spun out a story that imagines a form of religion whose rituals are based around defecation.  

Well, it turns out I have garbled this (read about long long ago, probably in The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction). The novel appears to be Aldiss's early effort, The Dark Light-Years  - originally published in 1964 - and here is a summary of its scenario, which involves a disorienting first-contact between humans and an alien race: 

The Utods are an ancient race who live in a distant galaxy -- they have a highly developed biological system that coincides with the rotation of their planet between three distinct suns. Their social, cultural, and religious beliefs all center on the process (and product) of defecation (no joke), which they see as a gift that symbolizes the ultimate cycle of life where bodies enter the carrion stage and feed the trees on the planet, becoming once again part of the universe. So, the Utods basically sit around in wallows of dirt and shit all day.

They are also giant and kind of hippo-like with six retractable arms and two heads, one that talks and one that shits. They are peaceful, but went through a period of revolution in their culture many generations ago where a sect of Utods shunned defecation for cleanliness, invented all kinds of spaceships and things, but eventually died out in a big war between themselves. The remaining Utods kept the technological knowledge and use it to travel to and colonize other hospitable planets.

The humans run across a pod of Utods in their temporary wallow on a planet they are both exploring. When the Utods say something to the humans (their language sounds like high pitched squeaks and screams and comes from all their orifices), they shoot all but two of the group. A scientist on board on the ship makes them capture the remaining Utods for study instead of shooting them. But are they intelligent?

All the shit really makes it hard for the humans to see the Utods as anything less than animals. All the cleanliness makes it really hard for the Utods to see the humans as an intelligent, thinking race. Both groups are at a standstill and while they have a lot of philosophical discussions about what "intelligent life" really is, neither race really makes a breakthrough.

Another precis: 

The Utods are multi-headed multi-limbed hippo-like mud-wallowing creatures which alternate genders.  They live with their lizard-like parasites in large mud and feces filled ponds which they wallow in and philosophize.  They journey between their planets in seedpod spaceships filled with their own filth.  They feel no pain, are pacifists, and are happy.

Some humans encounter a bunch of them and their seedpod spaceship....  The humans of this future time live in ultra-hygienic conditions eating their synthesized foods and drinking non-alcoholic beverages.... The  complete inability of the humans to communicate with the aliens (who have chosen not to communicate) introduces the main theme of the work:  the humans are so repulsed by the filth of the Utods that they are forced to reevaluate the meaning and criteria of the words/concepts sentience, intelligence, civilization, progress — not only as applied to the aliens but ourselves.  Does our conception of civilization completely exclude all other forms civilization might take?

Here's Aldiss's own gloss: 

A novel written in anger following inhumane experiments on dolphins. Space-going men and women find an alien race, the utods, on a planet alien to both parties. The utods enrich their lives and bodies by wallowing in their own droppings, a ceremony incompatible with terrestrial preconceptions: according to the latter “civilisation is reckoned as the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta”. Result: disaster. A serio-comic novel with diverse multi-national characters exemplifying human madness.

It all reminds me a bit of Bataille and the idea that higher mental faculties are built on, or over, lower bodily ones - the secret proximity of elevation and abjection, the lofty and base materialism.   

Soul and arse. 

Noticeable that none of the covers of these editions attempt to pictorialise the Utods or the defecatory concept - the images are completely unrelated. The original Faber and Faber cover below, the designer makes no attempt at all