Showing posts with label cipriano. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cipriano. Show all posts

28 Dec 2020

Piquerism and Notes on Knife Play

The Ballard of Jazz the Knife 
(c. 1992)
 
 
I. Opening Remarks 
 
Piquerism - for those of you unfamiliar with the practice - is a perverse sexual interest in penetrating the skin of another person with sharp objects, including pins, razors, and knives. 
 
Most often, the targeted areas of the body are the breasts, buttocks, and genitals and whilst for many lovers it's a form of edge play or risk-aware consensual kink, for the true sadist - who laughs at the idea of obtaining permission or that libertinism should conform to a code of health and safety - piquerism only becomes interesting when it results in extreme suffering and death or is performed post-mortem.   
 
 
II. Biofictional Remarks
 
As a young child, I might be said to have had something of a piqueresque liking for sharp objects myself. I far preferred, for example, pricking balloons with a needle, than inflating them. And once, at school, I placed a drawing pin on a fat girl's chair in order to see if she too would explode with a bang [1].  
 
And whilst I had an extensive range of toy guns, my favourite thing to play with was a plastic dagger with a retractable blade with which I could create the illusion of having stabbed myself through the heart (or knifed a friend in the back).    
 
 
III. Literary Remarks
 
I don't know how D. H. Lawrence felt about this subject, but the following scenes are worth noting:
 
(i) Women in Love (Ch. VI) [2]
 
Pussum has confessed that she's not afraid of anything except black-beetles. She's certainly not afraid of blood ... 
 
So when a man with a pale, jeering face laughs at her, she suddenly jabs a knife across his hand, causing him to leap up, cursing. He glares at her with sardonic contempt as the blood begins to flow from the wound inflicted by this feline young woman. 
 
Birkin looked on with obvious displeasure, but Gerald is aroused by the girl's action. Later, in the taxi home, she sits close to him and grasps his hand in hers; "rapid vibrations ran through his blood and over his brain [...] and all his nerves were on fire, as with a subtle friction of electricity".     
 
(ii) The Plumed Serpent (Ch. XXIII) [3] 

Cipriano strips and publicly executes a group of prisoners with a bright, thin dagger ...

"'The Lords of Life are Masters of Death,' he said in a loud, clear voice. 
      And swift as lightning he stabbed the blindfolded men to the heart, with three swift, heavy stabs. Then he lifted the red dagger and threw it down.
      'The Lords of Life are Masters of Death,' he repeated." 

Later, Cipriano and his fellow revolutionaries indulge in a little fetishistic blood play, dipping their hands into blood collected from the bodies of the executed men in a stone bowl and raising wet, red fists. They then sprinkle some of the blood on a fire in a neo-pagan religious ritual.   

(iii) The Woman Who Rode Away [4]
 
A bored, middle-class white woman goes in search of adventure and to give her heart to the god of the Chilchui Indians ... 
 
Two men grip her arms whilst two others "with curious skill slit her boots down with keen knives, and drew them off, and slit her clothing so that it came away from her". 
 
They also remove the pins from her hair and touch her on the breasts and back. Then they drug her and groom her over the course of several weeks into the role of sacrificial victim. Her captors, the Indians, are superficially kind to her; gentle and considerate. Yet she sensed their cruelty underneath and when the time comes for her to die, they show no hesitation in killing her:
 
"When she was fumigated, they laid her on a large flat stone, the four powerful men holding her by the outstretched arms and legs. Behind stood the aged man [...] holding a knife and transfixedly watching the sun; and behind him again was another naked priest, with a knife."
 
They are waiting for the right moment, when the red sun is about to sink: Then the old man will strike with his flint blade and accomplish the sacrifice ...
 
 
Notes
 
[1] She didn't. And rather than encouraging my scientific curiosty, the teacher, Mrs. Horncastle, gave me a telling off in front of the class and made me apologise to poor, red-faced Mandy Howard.    

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Lines quoted are on p. 73. 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Lines quoted are on p. 380.
 
[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Woman Who Rode Away', in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Lines quoted are on pp. 55 and 70. 
 
For another post involving knife play (and with reference to the case of Sid and Nancy), click here.


28 Oct 2019

A Character Study from The Plumed Serpent: Cipriano (First Man of Huitzilopochtli)

General Joaquín Amaro (1889-1952)
Mexican revolutionary and military reformer


According to an explanatory note in the Cambridge edition of The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence probably based the character of General Viedma - or Don Cipriano - on several real-life figures from the time, including Emiliano Zapata and Joaquín Amaro.

Like the latter, for example, Cipriano was an officer in the Mexican army, of native Indian origin (Zapotec), who possessed a real talent not only for military strategy but also institutional reform. Unlike Amaro, however, Cipriano also had "a little black beard like an impériale" and was fluent in English (having been educated in London and Oxford), even if the language sounded "a little stiff on his soft tongue" [21].

Lawrence being Lawrence - that is to say, a racial fetishist with a particular penchant for dark-skinned, dark-eyed foreign men who still have something of the goat-footed god Pan about them - he's very keen to emphasise Cipriano's ethnicity and how, underlying his superficial assurance and good manners, lay something fierce and primitive; he was a man who seemed to be "perpetually suspecting an ambush" [22] and had a savage gleam in his black, inhuman eyes.     

Perhaps that's why Kate, the 40-year-old Irishwoman at the cente of this peculiar work, is both drawn to him and repulsed: Cipriano could appear to be awfully nice and kind, but he also had a "heavy, black Mexican fatality about him" [24] that made her want to get away from him. Like Michael Howard, Cipriano has something of the night about him. His eyes were not merely dark-coloured, they were as black as jewels "into which one could not look without a sensation of fear" [67].    

Kate observes him at the dinner table:

"His face was changeless and intensely serious, serious almost with a touch of childishness. But the curious blackness of his eyelashes lifted so strangely, with such intense unconscious maleness from his eyes, the movement of his hand was so odd, quick, light [...] and his dark-coloured lips were so helplessly savage [...] that her heart stood still. There was something undeveloped and intense in him, the intensity and the crudity of the semi-savage. She could well understand the potency of the snake upon the Aztec and Maya imagination. Something smooth, undeveloped, yet vital in this man suggested the heavy-ebbing blood of reptiles in his veins." [67]

And this is despite the fact his god-father was an English bishop who oversaw his education and welfare and wanted him to become a priest. Still, Kate is also alert to what she imagines to be the "dark, surging passion of tenderness" [71] that Cipriano is capable of. She puts this down to his being an Indian. However, as Lawrence suggests in his next novel that even English gamekeepers can feel such tenderness, perhaps it's rooted more in phallic masculinity than race. 

One day, Kate and Cipriano have tea together. Again, Lawrence can't resist the opportunity to write of the latter's eyelashes and the way that his eyebrows tilted "with a barbarian conceit, above his full, almost insolent black eyes" and it's clear with whom his erotic fascination lies. Indeed, poor Kate is dismissed as "one of the rather plump Irishwomen, with soft brown hair and hazel eyes" [81] - i.e., of no real sexual interest.   

She may have her own feminine charms and mystery, but, for Lawrence, Cipriano is the main attraction; "he had a good deal of magnetic power", undiminished by his years spent in England. Indeed, his education "lay like a film of white oil on the black lake of his barbarian consciousness." Despite his diminutive stature, Cipriano also has real presence and substantial being: "He made the air around him seem darker, but richer and fuller" [82].

For Kate this makes Cipriano curious, but it quickly has the potential to become suffocating. And malevolent - even satanisch.

Although, clearly, his real love is for Ramón (whom he finds both compelling and incomprehensible), Cipriano decides he wants to marry Kate. He looks at her with "a strange lingering desire in his black eyes" [187] and sees her as a fresh-faced flower, despite her age. He doesn't merely want Kate to become his wife, however, he wants her to become the incarnation of a goddess by his side - just as he is the incarnation of the Aztec deity Huitzilopochtli, armed with a serpent of fire.

The absurdity of this idea makes Kate laugh. Kate informs Cipriano that it is her intention never to remarry and that she doesn't much feel like a goddess in a Mexican pantheon. But still she can't help admiring his body: "How dark he was, and how primitively physical, beautiful and deep-breasted, with soft, full flesh!" [201]

For all that, it's Ramón who really tickles her fancy and touches her inside. Cipriano seems only to offer her submission and horror. But then, as he says, why not accept a bit of horror in life; horror is real and belongs to an economy of the whole. He feels a bit of horror for her too; her light-coloured eyes and white hands. Horror is what adds spice to life; it gives the "'sharp, wild flavour'" [236].

Kate is not entirely convinced by Cipriano's uncanny logic, however. In fact, she think's he's simply trying to exert his will and get one over on her: "Really, he seemed sinister to her, almost repellant [...] how could she marry Cipriano, and give her body to [...] death?" [236, 246]    

Ramón sometimes sees something of this deathliness in Cipriano too; he knows him to be a man who thrills at the thought of power and longs for a holy war fought with the entire world if need be. (The German hotel manager who describes their neopagan revolution as just another expression of national socialism isn't far wrong.) If he can appear comical, ultimately the demonical little figure of Don Cipriano is not to be laughed at. 

When next they meet, Kate again notices the physical presence of Cipriano:

"Cipriano  made her a little uneasy, sitting beside him. He made her physicaly aware of him, of his small but strong and assertive body, with its black currents and storms of desire. The range of him was very limited, really. The great part of his nature was just inert and heavy, unresponsive, limited as a snake or lizard is limited. But within his own heavy, dark range he had a curious power. Almost she could see the black fume of power which he emitted, the dark, heavy vibration of his blood, which cast a spell over her." [310] 

Once Kate has tuned into the ancient phallic Pan mystery, she can conceive of marrying Cipriano, with his small hands, slanting eyes, and the "tuft of black goat's beard hanging light from his chin" [311] ... Not to mention his huge erection that rises suddenly in the twilight when the power of his blood is up and to which Kate is obliged to submit with supreme passivity, as beneath an over-arching absolute.

This, for all its highfalutin religio-literary language, is Lawrence (as narrator) simply indulging his BBC fantasies. He uses the character of Kate as a kind of sexual go-between between himself and the figure of Cipriano. It's odd to say the least, but something he often does in his fiction.      

Eventually, Cipriano achieves his deification and becomes-Huitzilopochtli. Even his soldiers can see the change in him; as if he has grown wings with dark feathers, like an eagle. And how does he exercise his second strength? Again, strangely - but not surprisingly, knowing Lawrence - he makes all his men cook and clean and do their own laundry, grow vegetables and paint the barracks. 

Doing chores and jobs about the place was Lawrence's idea of fun - and Cipriano's method of instilling some discipline in his men. For that was what was needed; not machine discipline, of course, imposed by outside authority, but sacred inner discipline. He also encourages them to dance the old dances to the beat of the drum, so that they might gain power over the living forces of the earth. This they do semi-naked, smeared with oil and red earth-powder, their limbs glistening with sweat.  
 
Cipriano loved to dance and loved also to watch his men dancing by firelight. He also enjoyed making long marches across the wild Mexican country and camping out beneath the stars. If he and his soldiers captured any bandits, Cipriano would strip them and tie them up. Those he judged to be beyond redemption he would stab with a knife to the heart, saying "'I am the red Huitzilopochtli'" [366].

Work - Dance - March - Camp - Kill: this, then, was the life of a soldier under the command of General Viedma. His was an elite force who threw off the drab uniform of regular troops and "dressed in white with the scarlet sash and the scarlet ankle cords, and carrying the good, red and black sarape" [366] (when not naked and displaying their dark and ruddy bodies).   

If all this sounds a little insane - like something from Apocalypse Now - that's because it is. Things don't get any less disturbing when Cipriano as the Living Huitzilopochtli has his coming out ceremony. To the sound of drums and brightly-coloured fireworks, he emerges from the church in his black and scarlet sarape carrying a torch and with "three green parrot feathers erect on his brow" [372].

Meanwhile, the semi-naked Men of Huitzilopochtli dance around like demons. After a song or two, the ceremony climaxes with an execution of prisoners, two of whom have their necks broken by guards and three of whom are stripped and blindfolded before Cipriano personally stabs each of them in the chest - once, twice, and three times for luck! This is followed by acts of blood play within the church (no women allowed) that make, if I'm honest, pretty uncomfortable reading.

No doubt Kate is right and Ramón and Cipriano act in good faith and all sincerity - but that's the problem, isn't it? Fascists and religious fanatics always believe in the rightness of their own deeds and their eyes always sparkle with conviction. And Kate is surely mistaken to believe that it's okay if Cipriano kills people and commits numerous other atrocities because his "flame is young and clean" [394] and he is of the gods.    

Inevitably, the novel ends with a kind of war. This releases a certain thrilling energy into the air, but "there was a sense of violence and crudity in it all, a touch of horror" [420], which rather made Cipriano happy "in his curious Indian way" [421]. Strangely, denying his wife Kate clitoral orgasm - or "the white ecstasy of frictional satisfaction" [422] - in the name of the greater sex also makes him happy.   

In sum, then, what are we to think of Don Cipriano, the First Man of Huitzilopochtli and fascist religious fanatic who loves dancing and dressing up almost as much as he loves killing helpless prisoners with a knife?

I said at the beginning he's a kind of composite character made up of various figures, and these surely include fictional psychopaths like Colonel Kurtz, as I hinted earlier. Indeed, it's interesting that Lawrence uses the phrase heart of darkness at one point, as if remembering Conrad's magnificent short novel and anticipating Francis Ford Coppola's movie 55 years later.   

The following, said by Kurtz, could quite as easily have been said by Cipriano discussing his own followers, or, indeed, Heinrich Himmler referring to members of his beloved SS: "You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling ..."

It's a little depressing to think that, for a while at least, Lawrence was to insist The Plumed Serpent was his greatest achievement and that he meant every word of it ... 


See: D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. 

Note: readers who liked this post might find an earlier one, on the queer love affair between Ramón and Cipriano that lies at the heart of Quetzalcoatl (the early version of The Plumed Serpent), also of interest: click here.