At school, when we were naughty, our housemaster would summon us in the evening to his room at the top of the stairs. The room had a pungent smell of tobacco and Old Spice; the walls were lined with scouting insignia and trophies. Here Mr P. would settle himself in a deep leather armchair, bend us over his grey-flannel knee and spank our pyjamad bottoms with his large, paw-like hand. Then, accompanying his gestures with soothing words, he would stroke our throbbing backsides until the stinging subsided, hug us, and proffer a biscuit from an always well-stocked tin before packing us off to bed.
Thus are little boys taught to equate pain with pleasure, punishment and ice-cream.
INTRODUCTION
From the 16th to the 19th centuries female children warded off the sin of idleness by embroidering samplers; fumble-finger testaments of painstaking devotion to domesticity and God. Demonstrating her command of every kind of stitch the child would sew onto a small piece of cloth numbers, letters, pictures, and texts from the bible. Linking domestic chores to the precepts of religion this patient labour suggests to us a kind of proleptic penance, ensuring that the child would never forget the laws, proverbs and stitches which should guide her through life.
But what stern precepts these are:
"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
MARTHA SALTER 1651
THE FEAR OF GOD IS AN EXCELLENT GIFT"
"THE LORD HIMSELF HATH
CHASTISED AND CORRECTED ME
BUT HATH NOT GIVEN ME
OVER TO DEATH AS YE MAY
1234567891011121314
MARY ELLIOTT FINISHED
THIS SAMPLER IN THE
FIFTEEN YEAR OF HER
MARCH THE TWENTYEIGHT
1736"
"THIS I HAVE DONE I THANK MY GOD
WITHOUT CORRECTIONS OF THE ROD
ELIZABETH CLEMENTS"
Julia Bardsley has crafted a modern anti-sampler, stitching, gluing and welding objects of such intricacy of craft and mind that they make one’s fingers and brow ache in sympathy. She assembles her objects and displays from heterogenous elements, findings from an alchemist’s laboratory: medical instruments, once hard and bright, wedded to traces of bone, hair or blood; vegetable matter assembled as nature mort subject to real decay and putrefaction; thorns or the claws of birds and crustaceans sprouting in strange places, relics of some medieval experiment in genetic engineering; museum cases housing displaced specimens glowing in phosphorescent light. Bardsley’s assemblages effect transgressive marriages between entities customarily disjoined by the human mind: things pure and things impure; things animate and inanimate; nature and culture, culture and nature. Eerie, sometimes comical, more often disturbing, undoubtedly deviant, Bardsley’s objects are endowed with talismanic presence, as if they are the reliquaries of some expiatory ritual or performance. And like the child’s sampler, they are linked by a series of biblical texts and references which are chalked on a strip of blackboard which runs all around the wall. Each of the 19 titled pieces is self-contained, yet followed consecutively the pieces may also be read as a narrative sequence enacting nothing less than the myth of the Fall. Together the pieces contain references and resonances which echo back and forth between each other, setting up a rich hum of association through which layers of meaning accrue, dancing in the spaces animated by the vibrations of Andrew Poppy’s atmospheric music.
We imagine that the texts must originally have been chalked up for the children who might have occupied the three solitary school desks which stand apart from the rest of the wall-mounted assemblages, stranded expectantly in the middle of the exhibition space: Three Lessons in Spiritual Geography.
What lessons are prepared for these absent children? Which desk did they choose from which to imbibe truth and wisdom? The desk of Heaven, milky-white and frosted? The desk of Hell, charred and blackened? Or the desk which stands between them, through which grows a tree, its roots in a mattress?
1. ROD & CONE
"Without Contraries is no progression…"
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
According to structuralist theory we find meaning in the world by making distinctions, divisions and negations:
is and is not
self and other
male and female
clean and unclean
black and white
We can only know what something is by knowing what it is not. In this fashion God created the world - separating darkness from light, and woman from man.
Julia Bardsley offers us her own myth of origins. A latterday bricoleur, one who makes meaning from whatever lies at hand, she founds a world conceived upon the optics of Rod & Cone, the essential components of vision.
God looked before he spoke, and in Creation he saw that all was good. But in the moment he created distinction he also created the possibility of division and separation.
Rod and Cone. As nature’s means of allowing plenitude of seeing they mean nothing. Nature means nothing. Bardsley’s rod and cone are identically fashioned from stuffed sacking. They are flabby and featureless. But in the duality of their twoness arises the possibility of distinction; the possibility of difference upon which is cast all the sins of the world.
2. ADAM’S CORE & EVE BY ADAM
"From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil"
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
As soon as humans learn distinction they learn to attribute value, the judgement of like and dislike, which some label as good and evil.
Out of a world formed by no more than the elements of rod and cone let us distinguish - why not? - the principle of male and female: Adam and Eve. These are early days; as yet Adam and Eve, male and female, have attracted no specific attributes to themselves. They are equal in the sight of God. But not for long.
See: thread a floppy felt rod with backbone and Hey Presto Adam, upright, proper ….but needy.
So into the frame steps Eve, a cone encased with the ribs grown from Adam’s chest. The male needs the female upon which to project his Otherness, but there is a price to pay - the estrangement of an essential part of himself.
3. THE FALL - version one
God attributed nothing negative to the darkness he had created, nor to the woman he shaped out of man’s rib. Indeed, in the version of Genesis attributed to the author identified as the “Elohist” God created man and woman at the same moment and formed them both in his own image. Thus God must originally have contained male and female within himself.
But according to Hegel, knowledge of the world is only gained through estrangement from what is; through the decisive act of critical thinking by which “what is” is negated. This act of negation is essential to the attainment of consciousness, and hence to progress, but it necessarily entails a Fall - a falling away from the plenitude of pre-conscious oneness with the world into knowledge and distance from the world. This is what the myth of Eden tells us.
Lacan retells the story of Eden as the Fall from the Real to the Symbolic. To name is to identify, which is a way of knowing. But the act of naming makes the thing named forever Other, forcing it to enter into the estranged realm of the symbolic. Bardsley is acutely aware of the symbolic, prising apart the gap between the thingness of things known unselfconsciously and the complex layers of meaning they accrue through language, custom and usage. The puns, metaphors and pseudo-etymologies she employs are themselves a kind of death to the fullness of the object, a sign of decay no less real than the decay which the cluster of hanging apples suffers. Signs themselves must be recognised as signs of sin - si(g)ns of our alienation from nature; “even the noticing beasts are aware that we don’t feel securely at home in this interpreted world” says Rilke in the first Duino Elegy.
Through the symbolic realm of puns, metaphors and pseudo-etymologies Bardsley is able to construct a world of complex references:
Rod & Cone. The rod of vision seen as a rod of correction, the cones of seeing transmuted into ice-cream cones. Hence “Punishment and Ice Cream”.
But take one step further and the cone has assumed the shape of a dunce’s cap, the badge of the malefactor, the scapegoat, the Other who requires shame and correction. Call her Eve.
The dunce’s cap flops over to become a jester’s cap, a fool’s cap, the proud badge of the dunce who is able to turn her folly against the world which excludes her. The Fall as pratfall. Seven easy steps which descend in an inevitable arc to death, represented here by the skull of Yorick.
Thus we are punished for laughter - for the sin of knowing better - the “absolute comic”, which Baudelaire characterised as the essential sign of man’s superiority over nature.
But we are also punished for the laughter by which we learn to live with our own shortcomings - our complacent acceptance of imperfection. Having fallen away from God’s original hopes for us we must be punished for the folly and laughter with which we mock God’s unrealistic expectations. For Erasmus Folly was a most Christian attribute since it offered a reminder of the possibility and need for forgiveness - of oneself and others - and hence of the obligation of humility and tolerance. Freud suggests that humour is essential to individual well-being if humans are to accept their own weakness in the face of the crushing demands of the super-ego.
But beware. Laughter may also be a sign of cruelty: a finger which itself frames the victim or the scapegoat; tarring and feathering indiscriminately. Every joke may sow the seed of a final solution.
4. SINS OF THE MOUTH
Oral pleasure is the first kind of sexual pleasure we know, learned whilst feeding at our mother’s breast. Orality also provides us with our first auto-erotic pleasure, when we learn to substitute our own thumb for the absent breast. It is the discovery of auto-erotic pleasure in the child, says Freud, which forces us to accept that sexual pleasure is not exclusively linked to the ends of reproduction. Since non-reproductive sex is deemed guilty and sinful, then it is through our mouths that sin may be said to enter our bodies and corrupt our souls.
The mouth is impure not simply because of the sexual pleasure it gives, but because, like the other sexualised parts of the body, it has been endowed with several different functions - for the passage of breath, for ingestion, for speaking, for laughing, for kissing. It is the impurity of the body’s functions which troubles us, breaching our carefully maintained distinctions between spirit and flesh. Words emerge from the same place as burps and belches, which are themselves only top-tier farts.
And words themselves have a capacity to wound, to dent, to deflate, to shatter, a capacity that further belies their claims to occupy the realm of the spirit rather than matter. Writing about the power of hate speech to wound philosopher Judith Butler argues from Lacan that we are constructed as individual subjects by language.
“Language sustains the body not by bringing it into being or feeding it in a literal way; rather, it is by being interpellated within the terms of language that a certain social existence of the body first becomes possible… If language can sustain the body it can also threaten its existence.”
Hate speech, words that wound, jokes at the expense of others, misinterpellate their victims.
But the wildest sin of the mouth is glossolallia - speaking with tongues. Evidence of divine afflatus or the regressive babbling of childhood nonsense? Some would argue that they are the same thing.
5. THE FALL - version two
Many philosophers concern themselves with the problem of evil. Kant, however, hoped to abolish evil as a metaphysical concept, arguing, like St Augustine, that what we call evil should be regarded simply as the “less good”; a falling away from perfection rather than a metaphysical entity in its own right.
But in a late essay, written under the shadow of the French Revolution, Kant revised his view. To act wrongly from free choice must be judged as action undertaken from evil volition. For Kant the metaphor of “Fall” must have seemed too careless. I slipped… tripped… was tripped. But who tripped me?
We all know the answer, whether she acted under the name Eve or Pandora. Yet even patriarchy must concede that half the human race cannot be excluded from the promise of grace on the basis of the misdeed of a distant forebear. Women themselves must therefore be divided between those who do and those who don’t. Hence the dualism of conventional representations of women as Madonna or Magdalen, virgin or whore, meek wife or femme fatale.
The sins of Eve and Pandora were not sexual. Yet Judaic and post-Judaic cultures inevitably conflate morality and sexuality. Within any mercantile or industrial society the concept of morality must be relocated to the personal and domestic sphere, where it may be safely promoted without interfering with the essential freedom of trade and industry to pursue their own goals without ethical constraint or reproach. Within the domestic sphere morality is almost exclusively identified in sexual terms. And since the home is province of women, it is above all women who are made to shoulder the burden of being “moral”. “Man strives for freedom” wrote Goethe, “woman for morality.” By which he meant, of course, sexual morality.
Consider the terms in which the British Prime Minister recently defined a “moral” society, prompted by hysteria over the pregnancy of a twelve-year old girl. Immorality is mow identified as the sexual impropriety of children, carefully veiling the real evils of economic exploitation and injustice which persist unchecked.
6. SIBYLLINE FINGERS
Judaism is a religion built upon exclusion of the Other; it does not seek converts. Christianity, on the other hand, is an inclusive religion; militantly so. To promote the inclusive image of the Christian church the Church Fathers incorporated the Pagan Other in the guise of the Sibyls; female seers to offset against the almost exclusively male profession of the Jewish prophets. From the dimly lit recesses of Paganism the Sibyls predicted the coming of Christ, ensuring that Christianity could lay claim to universal truth beyond the exclusive time and space of Judaism. The Sibyls speak in strange oracular tongues, veiling their knowledge in cryptic codes and signs.
The French feminist critic Julia Kristeva talks about the significance of Sibyls but her meaning remains obscure to me.
7. DUNCE CORNERS
"The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner."
In the moment they gained knowledge Adam and Eve learned both shame and guilt. Anthropologists, however, make a distinction between cultures based on shame and cultures based on guilt.
Shame cultures are those in which a system of abstract morality, as distinct from social taboos and prohibitions, is not yet fully developed. Within a shame culture the maintenance of public esteem is more important to the individual than a quiet conscience. Honour is the most visible attribute of virtue. Fear of humiliation in the eyes of one’s peers is more terrible than fear of God. Criminal transgressions are seen as injuries against persons or clans rather than against the community at large or God, and they are redressed through acts of personal revenge or retribution.
The transition from a shame culture to a guilt culture is one in which belief in an abstract principle of morality is inculcated, and in which people progressively learn to internalise moral precepts. However, the assumption of a moral law depends upon belief that the universe itself, or its hidden deities, uphold the moral order. Since virtue is most certainly not invariably rewarded in this world, and since many malefactors scandalously escape the punishment they merit, an explanation for this obvious injustice is sought in the concept of inherited guilt - the guilt of the family in Greek tragedy, of original sin or the mark of Cain in Judaic theology. In a nascent guilt culture the individual learns to assume that misfortune is invariably a sign of defilement or wrongdoing of some kind and that those who suffer unfairly must therefore be paying for inherited sins. Ritual purification offers expiation for guilt, and in the case of communal misfortune, a symbolic victim must be chosen as scapegoat.
In more developed guilt cultures belief in the justice of the deity is maintained by the doctrine that due punishments and rewards will be meted to the individual at the end of time, or in the afterlife. Responsibility for this eventual outcome now rests with the individual. Scrutiny of moral intention takes precedence over the outer form of the virtuous or wicked deed. The guilty conscience is believed to deliver its own punishment.
In secular guilt societies the community itself assumes the task of administering justice on earth. The internalisation of morality is now achieved, Michel Foucault suggested, through the extension of the techniques of discipline to all spheres of private as well as public activity. We live, says Foucault, in a panoptic society in which our minutest reflexes are subject to internalised scrutiny and surveillance; a carceral society in which discipline has replaced punishment - or in which the equivalence of these two terms has been rendered explicit.
But our understanding of the function of punishment in modern society is uncertain and confused. Punishment continues to serve primarily as a deterrent, but this is overlaid with the more liberal intentions of correction and rehabilitation. Yet some social theorists insist that the need for society to exact collective retribution and revenge remains as strong today as in the past. Indeed, they argue, if proven wrongdoers are not openly punished the community may well take the law into its own hands, exacting revenge upon its own chosen scapegoats - Jews, Blacks, Gypsies, Queers. Others may point out that this is precisely what is effected by the criminal justice system anyway.
And we are perhaps less far removed from archaic shame cultures than we believe. Ritual humiliation remains a powerful force within modern guilt cultures. Goya’s unforgettable image of the sinner being displayed wearing the conic hat of the penitent will stir the memory of many victims of the practice of making children stand in the corner as a form of punishment. For whilst the action clearly removes the aberrant child from society in the fashion approved by modern penal theory, it also serves as ritual display and humiliation, which the authorities know to be often more effective as a deterrent than corporal punishment, whose marks can easily become trophies to be flaunted with pride.
8. 5 INCORRECT WOUNDS
"O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree;
I turn my back to thee but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
Think me worth thine anger, punish me,
Burn off my rusts and my deformity,
Restore thine image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou mayst know me, and I’ll turn my face."
John Donne, Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward
It could be said that God made a rod with which to beat his own back as Christ, for the rod is also the rood, the tree which was the cross on which Jesus was crucified.
The sacrifice made by God as Jesus, as man, was supposed to redeem humankind from the sin of Adam. But to non-Christians the gesture simply affirms our sense that justice can only rightly reside on earth rather than in heaven, with humanity rather than nature. In Catholicism and Calvinism alike the offer of salvation absolves people of moral responsibility for their own actions. It sustains the belief that people may justly suffer for the sins of others; that no sacrifice is too great. It upholds the ideology of exemplary punishment, and justifies unjust punishment for the greater good.
The wounds of Christ are, indeed, incorrect wounds.
9. FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
The decaying apples convey a kind of poetic justice, since it was through the fruit of the tree of knowledge that decay and death entered the world.
A kind of poetic justice, I say, since there is really no reason to impute guilt to the humble apple; the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was surely something more exotic. But it is certainly true that the fruit-laden bough of the apple tree which drapes itself over my path offers daily temptation. Hey, if I don’t pluck the fruit it’ll be consumed by wasps or worms anyway, or will fall to the ground and rot.
Prohibition is, of course, always an invitation to transgress. The surrealist critic Georges Bataille explained the necessity of prohibition for human development in his study of taboos, arguing that the greatest mistake is to believe that rational knowledge can be used to banish taboos, for “this presupposes that we can direct the light of the questioning intelligence on to those taboos themselves, without whose existence it would never have functioned in the first place.” The transgression of a taboo does not seek to suppress or destroy it: “transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it.”
This is another aspect of what Freud would view as the essentially tragic nature of the human condition. Freud recognised that punishment dreams are evidence of the wish-fulfilment of transgression: they “replace the forbidden wish-fulfilment by the appropriate punishment for it.” So Freud contends that the criminal offends more often from the need to draw punishment to expiate an overdeveloped sense of guilt rather than from an underdeveloped conscience.
Alienation is our punishment for transgression, but transgression is itself the condition of our being - the felix culpa
10. LITTLE DEVILS
"Fury at Freedom Plea for Bulger Killers". 29.10.99
Six years on the James Bulger case was forced into our consciousness again when a European court ruled that the boys who killed Jamie Bulger did not receive a fair trial. And yet again seven years on, when Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector for Prisons suggested that an adult prison would be an unsuitable place for the young offenders to be transferred to. Each time a wretched frenzy of hate is whipped into action against the two disturbed and probably brutalised ten-year olds who committed the disturbing and brutal act, a sure reminder that the European judges were almost certainly right: the media-induced hysteria which swept the country at the time of the killing; the grotesque spectacle of the showcase trial; the public demands for life sentences for the children (300,000 thousand people signed a Sun petition stating that “a life sentence should be for life”); the gratuitous upping of the sentence by a Tory Home Secretary whose party was already on the skids - all of these aspects of the case suggest that there was no way in which the boys in question could ever have received fair and proper attention. Moreover, they suggest that the case threw red-hot demons at some very raw nerves in our psyche - that there was something far more troubling to be learned from the event than those who brandished it as a benchmark sign of the decline of discipline and morality in our society will ever be able to admit.
The two boys were just ten years old when they killed Jamie Bulger - only a few months above the age at which children in this country are deemed to be old enough to stand trial for murder: to be fully mature enough to know the difference between good and evil, to recognise the implications of their act, and to receive life sentences. The fact that the boys failed to show the remorse required of them might be taken as evidence that they were, indeed, not able to recognise the true implications of their deed. The press and the court chose to take it as evidence of their wickedness.
Every hour of every day adults somewhere wittingly abuse, torment or neglect children. They do so physically, they do so sexually, they do so psychologically: by indifference, by lack of praise or affection. Children are locked in cupboards, or are left alone at home whilst their parents go on a bender or holiday. They are deliberately scorched with hot irons or have their fingers crushed in doors. They are sent away to boarding schools run by scoutmasters, or they are simply walloped for showing too much interest or curiosity in things. Those men who rape eighty-year old widows demonstrate a fear and hatred of women that far exceeds the explanation of untramelled or unrequited lust. Theodor Adorno and Camille Paglia both argue that men’s hatred of women is a symptom of masculine culture’s dominance over, and suppression of, nature. Somewhere within them adults must nurse a similar hatred of children.
A deep, troubled and of course guilty hatred. For everything within our culture tells us that children are innocent and defenceless beings who demand and deserve our love and affection. So children are the Other who cannot be, must not be, acknowledged as such. Women, Jews, blacks, queers, artists … we misfits will in the end learn how to take care of ourselves. But children - who will take care of them? The burden of adult guilt at the great mountain of crimes which are committed against children was loaded directly onto the hapless boys who battered little Jamie Bulger to death in clumsy parody of the cruelty they saw all around them. The guilt, perhaps, of all the adults along the two-mile route from the shopping centre to the railway embankment who failed to stop when they saw a toddler in evident distress being dragged along the road by two older boys. The guilt of a nation in which people give more money to charities dedicated to the prevention of cruelty to animals than to charities for the prevention of cruelty to children.
Quite simply, in branding children “Little Devils” we project our own sense of guilt and shame upon them as scapegoats. We hate them for their perpetual reminder to us of what we once were, or imagine we were, and their reminder of how we have failed to become what we promised as children. Yet we also hate them for the blatant, unknowing sexuality which they display, and for rousing our own forbidden desires for them, neither of which can we admit openly. So we portray them to ourselves as “the beast in the nursery”, the worm in the bud who must be expunged or exorcised. In popular fiction children are often the means through which evil enters the world, the fifth column of Satan: in the folk fable of the changeling; in films like The Exorcist and Don’t Look Now. In The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby the devil specifically infiltrates through the birth of a child, finding the chink into our world offered by the aperture of sex and excrement within the female body, grotesquely parodied in Sigourney Weaver’s virgin birth of the monster in Alien 2.
11. A GOOD LEATHERING
One source for our attitudes to children may be traced back to the Old Testament, and most particularly to the Book of Proverbs.
At first Proverbs seems very different from other Old Testament texts. In place of the more familiar tone of Old Testament prohibitions, warnings and curses it offers a sequence of homilies that are humane and moderate: a document of civic as much as religious advice, full of sensible moral precepts; a collection of homely aphorisms which any Home Secretary might wish to keep at his or her bedside.
Addressing herself to a young man about to embark on life Wisdom urges him to listen to her so as to gain self-control, moderation, foresight, diligence, humility and respect. Sure, she lets rip a few colourful biblical warnings and curses on those who refuse to listen to her, and she bangs on predictably about the lures of certain kinds of women. But the tone of the book is in general mundane and practical, and directed above all at the moral improvement of the adult.
And yet, like an insistent drum, the text beats home another message - “spare the rod and spoil the child” … “chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying”…Even the Authorised Version finds the reiteration of these precepts more than it can stomach, often choosing to translate the Hebrew word for correction as “instruction” and thus concealing the real intent of the message.
Herein lies the origin of so many of our beliefs about the value of corporal punishment. And of course, it undermines the whole premise of the Book of Proverbs: that virtue is to be gained through wisdom and self-control. Punishment of the child is recommended as a pre-emptive act against the sins he will otherwise commit as an adult. Above all, punishment is recommended so that the adult may secure obedience and respect. It is not the soul of the child which is at stake, but the peace of the adult.
Recently two American evangelists caused a mild furore over their doctrine that young children should be hit regularly as “the only way to instil lifetime obedience.” The Book Proverbs still extends its insidious shadow.
12. DUAL PRINCIPLE
The cadaceus - the staff with two snakes entwined - is the emblem of Hermes, bearer and interpreter of mysteries. In alchemy it is also a symbol of opposites reconciled and united.
In his discussion of the relevance of the traditional symbolism of alchemy to psychology Carl Jung suggested that recognition of the negative is essential to psychic well-being:
"Without the experience of opposites there is no experience of wholeness… For this reason Christianity rightly insists on sinfulness and original sin."
Jung’s emphasis upon the possibility of attaining wholeness is troubling to both the existential and the post-modern consciousness alike. If wholeness implies the recognition and acceptance of true difference then its premise seems reasonable. But the universal categories of difference with which Jung works are derived from cultural constructions which imprison those to whom difference is attributed. Held in place by the balance of opposites rather than the play of difference, Jung’s definitions of wholeness implies the transcendence or sublimation of difference in the passage towards higher consciousness. As with the Hegelian dialectic it tends to violate the particularity of difference. Citing Hegel and Kierkegaard, the French critic Paul Ricoeur puts this dilemma most clearly:
"It is not possible for me to aim at completeness without running the risk of losing myself in the indefinitely varied abundance of experience or the niggardly narrowness of a perspective as restricted as it is consistent. It is ineluctable that I lose the wealth in order to have unity, and vice-versa…. Who can realise himself without excluding not only possibilities, but realities and existences, and consequently, without destroying? Who can join the intensity of friendship and love to the breadth of universal solidarity? It is a tragic aspect of existence that the history of self-awareness cannot begin with the sympathy of the Stoics, but must start with the struggle of master and slave, and that, once having consented to itself and to the universal, it must plunge anew into self-division."
13. OTHER WISE
In Madness and Civilisation Foucault combines stately panoptic sweep with loving attention to the pathos of the overlooked to describe how during the Renaissance the discourse of madness inhabited a region between the aura of saintliness with which it was endowed in the middle ages (akin, perhaps, to the divine madness extolled by Plato) and the discourse of pathological otherness to which it is confined in the modern era. During the Renaissance madness was identified with a special form of ironical high reason. Assigning a functional role to madness, the Renaissance imagination kept familiar with it, allowing folly to dance constantly at the margins of reason, not so as to bind the boundaries more firmly, as did the discourses of madness which emerged in the modern period, but to remind humankind that the boundaries are always in play.
"In farces and soties, the character of the Madman, the Fool, or the Simpleton assumes more and more importance. He is no longer simply a ridiculous and familiar silhouette in the wings; he stands centre stage as the guardian of truth - playing here a role which is the complement and converse of that taken by madness in the tales and satires. If folly leads each man into a blindness where he is lost, the madman, on the contrary, reminds each man of his truth; in comedy where each man deceives the other and dupes himself, the madman is comedy to the second degree: the deception of deception; he utters, in his simpleton’s language which makes no show of reason, the words of reason that release in the comic, the comedy."
Don Quixote is the greatest figure of this kind of comic madness, whose sublime delusions of chivalry champion dreams and ideals which the material world dares not acknowledge. Shakespeare’s fools caper more precariously on the borders between reason and chaos. The wisdom of the Fool in King Lear is unable to prevent the catastrophes of untrammelled reason or madness that always squat where clear-eyed folly falters.
14. THREE LESSONS IN SPIRITUAL GEOGRAPHY
Do the three desks offer choice or reward?
Rather I think they offer a critique of the choices and rewards on offer.
One of Rilke’s most mysterious images nudges the memory. Rilke’s almost narcissistic sensitivity to the cost exacted by the dualisms of the human mind found its most complete expression in the Duino Elegies, where again and again Rilke returns to childhood as an image of completeness. In the fourth elegy Rilke ponders on what the child can teach the adult, endlessly vacillating between living the given moment and the consciousness of other possibilities, or of the dues of past and future. The child knows how to hold all things in the present, says Rilke, surrendering itself fearlessly to the contradictions which terrorises the adult.
"Who’ll show the child just as it is? Who’ll place it
within its firmament, with the measure
of its distance in its hand? Who’ll render the child’s death
out of grey bread grown hard, - or leave it there,
within its round mouth, like the core
of a sweet apple ?…..The minds of murderers
can easily be fathomed. This, though: death,
the whole of death, even before life’s start, to hold it
so gently and so free from all malice,
transcends description."
15. INSTRUMENTS OF PERPETUAL PASSION
The word passion means suffering, which should be the negation of pleasure. Yet Freud teaches us how closely linked are pleasure and pain in the ingenious cathectic detours which pleasure takes in its search for fulfilment.
The counter-reformation urged catholic worshippers to contemplate the corporeal wounds of Christ and the instruments of his passion as a spiritual exercise. And only a catholic poet such as Richard Crashaw could have emulated in words the quivering sexual intensity of Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa at the moment of her impalement upon the angel’s loving dart:
"O how oft shalt thou complain
Of a sweet and subtle pain!
Of intolerable joys!
Of a death, in which who dies
Loves his death, and dies again,
And would for ever so be slain!
How kindly will thy gentle Heart
Kiss the sweetly-killing dart!
And close in his embraces keep
Those delicious wounds that weep
Balsom to heal themselves with…"
Hymn to Saint Teresa
Freud characterised these complex trade-offs of desire and repression as an economy of the instincts in which the losses of the body may be written off against the profit of the spirit (and vice-versa). The ruses of desire are so quick to outwit, or more often to co-opt, the prohibitions of the mind.
16. DEVIANT D(r)OLL KIT
In Frankenstein Mary Shelley takes a feminine scalpel to her husband’s depiction of Prometheus as heroic transgressor, suggesting that an arrogant masculine hubris underlies all such myths of scientific progress. Mary Shelley’s deep misgivings about the man’s assumption of power over nature of were anticipated by a couple of years in E.T.A Hoffmann’s tale of a mechanical doll which is so lifelike that a young man falls despairingly in love with it.
Any act of representation is in effect a gesture of appropriation, a reconstitution of the other in one’s own terms. But the romantic artist, like Dr Coppelius or Dr Frankenstein, goes further, assuming the Godlike power of creation ex nihilo. The modern scientist likewise holds in his hand all the parts of a kit for assembling beings of his own design; a kit for the eradication of deviancy and difference.
17. THE HARROWING
Childhood, we learn, is a historically constructed concept. According to the French historian Philippe Aries adults did not hold a view of childhood as a distinctive state until the modern age. In earlier times the child was seen simply as an adult in embryo. The medieval categorisation of the “ages of man”, upon which Shakespeare so notably drew, did not characterise distinctive states of being so much as symbolic typologies which corresponded to the pattern of rise and fall to which all things are subject. Not until the nineteenth century was the modern notion of childhood, with all of the appurtenances which accompany it in our imagination, fully developed.
But within our views of childhood there co-exist contradictory images: little angels, little devils. The child is on the one hand deemed innocent and unknowing, on the other s/he is deemed to be a wicked little beast. Aries observes this pattern of confusion emerging in the later seventeenth century, when the idea that children need special “coddling” is combined with the developing belief that children need to be disciplined and restrained from an early age to tame their innately unruly passions.
This confusion about childhood arises from association of children with nature, and thence from our more fundamental confusions about nature itself. For we are uncertain whether nature is benign and innocent, or ravenous and destructive. Children pay the cost for our own confusions about our relationship to nature.
Within modern discourse the greatest and most passionate proponent of the beneficence of nature was, of course, Rousseau. “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil…” Rousseau asserts in the characteristically provocative opening to Emile, his revolutionary treatise on education. “…he will have nothing as nature made it, not even man himself, who must learn his paces like a saddle-horse, and be shaped to his master’s taste like the trees in his garden.”
Rousseau soon sees through arguments for inflicting pain as insurance against future delinquency:
"What is to be thought, therefore, of that cruel education which sacrifices the present to the uncertain future, that burdens a child with all sorts of restrictions and begins by making him miserable, in order to prepare him for some far-off happiness which he may never enjoy. The age of harmless mirth is spend in tears, punishments, threats and slavery… What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness? Love childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts."
Rousseau is under no illusions about the childhood; he is aware that the child is essentially amoral. But like Kant, whose own thinking was transformed for ever by his reading of Emile, Rousseau believes that if people obey laws and precepts out of habit or fear of punishment alone they can never attain the greatest human dignity of being able to make moral choices freely. And the attempt to instil a moral conscience into the child before she is at an age to reason the consequences of her deeds simply instils moral confusion:
"Most of the moral lessons which are or can be given to children can be reduced to the following formula:
Master: You must not do that.
Child: Why not?
Master: Because it’s wrong.
Child: Wrong! What is wrong?
Master: What is forbidden you.
Child: Why is it wrong to do what is forbidden?
Master: You will be punished for disobedience.
Child: I will do it when no one is looking.
Master: We shall watch you.
Child: I will hide.
Master: We shall ask you what you were doing.
Child: I shall tell a lie.
Master: You must not tell lies.
Child: Why must I not tell lies?
Master: Because it is wrong, etc.
That is the inevitable circle. Go beyond it and the child will not understand you."
Do we not recognise here the terms of God’s wager with Adam in Eden?
We cannot afford to be complacent about the gains of a liberal system of child-rearing which is still largely based on Rousseau’s wise and benign guidance. As the right to chastisement slips away from the would-be guardians of law and order these turn to the well-proven methods of the past, brandishing sanctions that lie well beyond even the reach of liberal reformers:
"Dwindling belief in redemption and damnation has led to loss of fear of the eternal consequences of goodness and badness. It has a profound effect on personal morality - especially criminality."
John Patten, Conservative Secretary of State for Education, 1992
18. (PLIMP) SOUL BAGS
Compulsory gym and sports were a perpetual torment to me as a child. Having read Foucault in later life I can now see how physical exercise served primarily as a disciplinary practice, a regimen for unruly bodies and pubescent desires.
The Platonic and Christian discourses of body and soul sustain impossible divisions of flesh and spirit, mind and matter. The spirit is imprisoned in the body like a bird in cage; Donne’s human being is nothing more than “a soul in a sack”.
In City gyms damned souls labour long unprofitable hours to strengthen their fraying sacks, flimsy armour against sight of the corruption within.
19. FORMULA FOR REVERSAL
Suspended between nature and culture, at the junction of land, air and water, Prospero broke his rod and abjured the power by which he had held the quicksilver forces of nature in place.
And again, at the junction of land, air and water … in the middle section of To the Lighthouse night descends on the beach and Virginia Woolf describes the moment of beneficent stillness which suspends desire and offers, in release from longing, guilt and toil, a glimpse of redeeming completeness:
"It seemed as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking, which, did we deserve them, should be ours always. But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only."
Only ever a glimpse of redemption, but a glimpse whose message is too important for us to wait an eternity for the capricious beneficence of divine goodness to reveal. Part the curtain for yourself.
© Nick Till 1999