Her Rich Attire Creeps Rustling to Her Knees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women in Uniforms

I Love Women in Uniform by Griddles

www.deviantart.com

Many men are attracted to women in uniform; nurses, maids, flight attendants, and even officers of the law or girls with guns in military fatigues. The appeal is clearly twofold:

Firstly, there's the fetishistic aspect; the uniform itself has physical allure thanks to the material, the cut, the detailing, etc. all of which is designed to enhance the body and encode gender. 

Secondly, uniforms signify status and allow us to know not only what degree of power the wearer exercises within the legitimate and familiar world of work, but that they are prepared under certain circumstances to submit, to serve, and to obey - and nothing excites the pornographic imagination more than this!

Of course, when a lover puts on a uniform in the bedroom it is divorced from the social context from which it derives meaning and turned simply into a piece of erotic costuming. Nevertheless, a uniform may continue to excite long after it has been diverted from the realm of value and entered the world after the orgy; a world that is not about real power and politics or even sex, but purely a seductive play of appearances.    

All of Us: The War Poems of D. H. Lawrence

The forgetting of war is itself an act of violence: the extermination of memory and of history. And so it is doubtless right that the UK government should officially commemorate the First World War, which began a hundred years ago in the summer of 1914 and resulted in the loss of almost a million British lives.

But commemoration shouldn't mean the construction of an artificial memory which effaces the real, any more than it should involve the commercial and political exploitation of a past event; what Jean Baudrillard would describe as the capturing of leftover heat from a catastrophic occurrence in order to warm the corpse of the present.

Hundreds-of-thousands of dead soldiers, having marched through the mud in the name of King and Country only to end up buried in mass graves or sent home like Clifford Chatterley more or less in bits, should not now be made to march anew in the name of corporate-media spectacle and enforced public sentimentality. 

The Great War was a tragic historical event with causes and consequences open to critical analysis and it should primarily be remembered as such. If, even as it unfolded, it gave rise to art, it is nevertheless mistaken to transform it into a universal myth or some kind of absolute point of reference that everyone is expected to feel moved by - including those who were not even born in the twentieth century, or whose parents have come from countries and cultures that had nothing to do with the conflict.   

In a sense, therefore, the sequence of thirty-one war poems written by D. H. Lawrence entitled 'All of Us' and published in their full, uncensored form last year for the first time, is unfortunately named: for this sense of consensus or national unity has long-since vanished (if in fact it ever existed).

Nevertheless, the poems continue to speak to some of us and speak powerfully; i.e., without mawkishness, but with a good deal of genuine feeling, including horror and anger as well as deep sorrow and their publication provides a far more fitting memorial than that being planned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport which seems to involve the dimming of minds as well as the extinguishing of lights on the home front.

Note: See D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

On the Love of Maids

In a classic episode of Seinfeld, George is fired for engaging in sexual intercourse with a cleaning woman on the desk in his office (Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?). 

Six seasons later, Jerry hires an attractive young woman, Cindy, to tidy up around his apartment and he also ends up sleeping with her (or diddling the maid, as Elaine so memorably describes it).  

Freud would certainly sympathise with both men. For whilst they are in positions of power, they are themselves helplessly caught up in a common psycho-sexual fantasy long established within the pornographic imagination. 

Freud not only commented on this fascination amongst men for the peasant girl scrubbing floors on her hands and knees or doing the laundry, but he shared it himself - so much so that Deleuze amusingly suggests that those looking to develop an interesting research thesis shouldn't bother with complex considerations of psychoanalytic epistemology but simply start here.

Of course, Freud being Freud, he ultimately decides after a crucial moment of hesitation to resolve the question of maids and their erotic charm by considering it in relation to what was to become the central dogma of psychoanalysis: Oedipus. This is unfortunate and mistaken; for despite what his followers may insist, men who love maids do not secretly desire their own mothers. What excites, rather, is the opportunity to exercise social and sexual authority over a woman in a somewhat illicit manner and - as in George Costanza's case - in an inappropriate setting.

What disconcerts meanwhile is knowing that they are screwing around with a figure who is not only indispensable to their desire, but representative of a class which threatens to one day rise up and refuse their subordination; a class who will one day tell them to do their own cleaning.

       

Note: See Seinfeld season 3 episode 12 entitled 'The Red Dot' and season 9 episode 19 entitled 'The Maid'. 

Lawrence Contra Matisse

 Henri Matisse: La Musique, (1939)

Whilst I share Lawrence's high regard for Cézanne, I do not share his loathing of Matisse whom he accuses of being nothing but a clever trickster in paint; one who admitted Cézanne as his master only so that he might betray and then bury him all the more successfully beneath a new form of abstraction that disguised drab cliché with gay colour.

For Lawrence, Matisse's very virtuosity is grounds for contempt. If he succeeds in producing "grand and flamboyant modern-baroque pictures" thanks to his supreme technical ability, nevertheless his skill means he needn't be humble or even honest as a painter. Instead, Matisse could falsely pride himself on being "a clever mental creature who is capable at will of making the intuitions and instincts subserve some mental concept ... in a sort of masturbation process". 

Whether this criticism is fair or even meaningful is open to debate. But the fact remains that I'd sooner have one of the Frenchman's lovely-looking - and, yes, intelligently conceived, skillfully executed - pictures hanging on my wall, than one of Lawrence's canvases which, whilst not hideous, are - to be fair to the prosecution - often gross as well as inept.           

Note: See D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

Why I Love H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) 

 Photo c.1934 from the Archives of 

Brown University / Associated Press

There are several good reasons to love master of weird fiction H. P. Lovecraft, many of which are presented by Michel Houellebecq in his highly recommended study entitled Against the World, Against Life (2006). 

Primarily, however, it's because of passages such as the following, written in a letter to a friend, in which Lovecraft amusingly sets out his case against religion:

"So far I have seen nothing which could possibly give me the notion that cosmic force is the manifestation of a mind and will like my own infinitely magnified; a potent and purposeful consciousness which deals individually and directly with the miserable denizens of a wretched little flyspeck ... and which singles this putrid excrescence out as the one spot where to send an onlie-begotten Son, whose mission is to redeem those accursed fly-speck inhabiting lice which we call human beings ... It is all so very childish. I cannot help taking exception to a philosophy that would force this rubbish down my throat. 'What have I against religion?' That is what I have against it!"

- H. P. Lovecraft, A Letter on Religion, written to Maurice W. Moe (1918). 

What I Believe

Paul Cadmus: What I Believe (1947-48)

I have always had a certain amount of respect and affection for E. M. Forster. Primarily because he had the decency and the courage to publicly say of Lawrence after the latter's death in 1930 that he was the greatest imaginative novelist of his generation. This contrasts starkly with the often sneering and hostile verdicts of other friends and contemporaries - let alone Lawrence's enemies, of whom there were many.      

Lately, however, I have found myself enjoying again Forster's fiction (with the exception of A Passage to India) and even, dare I say it, some of his essays; such as What I Believe (1938), which opens with the wonderful lines:

"I do not believe in Belief. But this is an Age of Faith and there are so many militant creeds that, in self-defence, one has to formulate a creed of one's own." 

This is pretty much the position I find myself in today. To paraphrase Forster, postmodern irony and cool indifference are no longer enough in a world of religious fundamentalism wherein ignorance and superstition thrive, evolutionary scientists are forced to debate with creationists about the school curriculum, and cosmologists still have to convince many that the earth travels round the sun and is not in fact the centre of the universe.      

It would be nice to remain transpositional and forever defer meaning, but, unfortunately, one is no longer afforded the luxury. Rather, one has today to take up some kind of position - however reluctantly and provisionally - and say clearly what one means (and even mean what one says). This doesn't come easily and it represents something of a philosophical retreat. Insouciance remains I think the great word of tomorrow, but it is for the moment rendered impossible. For we live in the time that we do: extremely unpleasant and bloody in every sense of the word.

Forster thinks the key to surviving such a time is the forging of relationships between people based not on race, nation, or creed, but on fondness and friendship. I tend to agree with him here too. Starting from queer relationships founded upon trust and kindness between strangers, we may be able to build something worth protecting and cherishing. 

But such bonds are often despised today: we are encouraged to rediscover our roots and identify ourselves as members of ethno-tribal communities, or as the chosen followers of a supreme deity. Like Forster, I find this idea repugnant and, like Forster, if I had to choose between betraying my country, race, or god and betraying a friend, I only hope that I would have the guts to stick by the latter.       

So imagine my disappointment when someone I held dear emailed to say that, even at the price of love and friendship, she would sooner kiss goodbye to me or to any other individual with whom she had established a happy alliance, than compromise or abandon her ideals (including her slightly ludicrous fantasy of belonging to and representing a universal underclass to which she owes her ultimate loyalty).   

I should surely not have to remind someone who calls herself Beatrice that Dante placed Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell precisely because they chose to betray their friend Julius Caesar, rather than Rome. 

In Praise of the Pig

Whilst the dietary injunction against eating pork first arose in primitive Judea, it is within the Islamic world where the pig itself has become truly taboo; i.e. both hated and feared. This horror of all things pig is often taken to ridiculous extremes in an attempt to eradicate all thought of an animal that is to the Muslim mind an abomination. 

This is, like all taboos, absurd and something of a shame. For pigs are extremely versatile and loveable creatures; intelligent, social, and, when living in natural conditions, fastidiously clean. They are also, of course, closely related to us. Indeed, according to the American biologist Eugene MacCarthy, who specializes in hybrid evolution, humanity is the result of interspecies breeding between chimpanzees and pigs. 

This is a sensational claim, obviously, which has received a good deal of criticism and scorn from the scientific community, but the fact remains that we do share a great deal of DNA with our porcine cousins and this has allowed for successful organ transplant between pigs and people.

Perhaps it is this closeness which lies at the heart of the religious belief shared by many millions that the pig is diabolical and that - in the words of Christopher Hitchens - heaven hates ham. In a provocative passage, Hitchens counters the modern 'secular' explanation of the original Jewish prohibition to do with health and safety: 

"According to many ancient authorities, the attitude of early Semites to swine was one of reverence as much as disgust. The eating of pig flesh was considered as something special, even privileged and ritualistic. The simultaneous attraction and repulsion derived from an anthropomorphic root: the look of the pig, and the taste of the pig, and the dying yells of the pig, and the evident intelligence of the pig, were too uncomfortably reminiscent of the human. Porcophobia - and porcophilia - thus probably originate in a nighttime of human sacrifice and even cannibalism at which the 'holy' texts often do more than hint. Nothing optional [like bacon sandwiches or sodomy] is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate."

- Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great, (Atlantic Books, 2008), p. 40.

In sum, the pig is a noble beast, dear to the hearts and palates of Europeans, and we should ignore demands by Muslim zealots to remove all traces of the pig from our culture. We should also, however, seriously reconsider our own treatment of the pig and end the disgusting cruelty of factory farming. They deserve better than to be vilified by those who allow religious superstition to distort their relationship to the animal world and they deserve more than being confined, separated from their young, and forced to live in their own waste. 

Why Being Offended Doesn't Justify Bear Attacks on Children

Despite what Larry David argues with the neighbourhood cops in a classic episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm (S2/E3), it's difficult to fully accept that being called a bald asshole by some local teenage girls constitutes a hate crime. It's impertinent, yes - and one can see that it might be hurtful to more sensitive members of the bald community - but it hardly warrants police action or being accorded the same degree of seriousness as the use of racial slurs for example, or homophobic abuse. 

Still, Larry's demand that a form of official reprimand be forthcoming - if only a stern word with the parents - is as nothing compared to what happens when the prophet and miracle-worker Elisha is also mocked for being a bald asshole in the second Book of Kings, 2:23-24. 

Making his way to the town of Bethel, about ten miles from Jerusalem, Elisha is accosted by a large group of youths who make fun of his baldness and challenge him to ascend unto heaven in a whirlwind like his master Elijah: Rise up baldy! they jeer. In response, Elisha calls down swift and savage retribution upon them: God bringing forth two she-bears from the woods who maul over forty of the youths.

It sounds insane and, of course, like most of the Bible, it is insane - not to mention morally indefensible; a divine act of psychotic overreaction and disproportionate cruelty at the behest of a delusional fraudster who is today venerated as a saint!

When will religious people learn that whilst they have the right to be offended, they don't have the right not to be offended; nor to extract violent and bloody revenge upon those who are deemed to have caused offence - be this in the form of suicide bombings or the unleashing of wild animals.

       

Women Who Hum Are the Hope of the Future

Un Colibri

The troubling thing about living in a fully digital age is that whilst technology has been consummated, men, women and children have all effectively been disqualified; they have lost not only their independence but also their imagination. For who dares to daydream or fantasise when they have movies on demand; who needs to whistle a happy tune when they are connected to an i-Pod which streams non-stop music into their ears? 

Baudrillard refers to this as a form of existential unemployment and fears that the obsolescence of our species is racing towards a terminal phase in which our fate will no longer be in our own hands, but determined exclusively by machines to which we have transferred decision-making in a symbolic act of capitulation:

"In the end, human beings will only have been an infantile illness of an integral technological reality that has become such a given that we are no longer aware of it ... This revolution is not economic or political. It is an anthropological and metaphysical one. And it is the final revolution - there is nothing beyond it. In a way, it is the end of history, although not in the sense of a dialectical surpassing, rather as the beginning of a world without humans."

- Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2010), p. 80. 

This pessimistic conclusion contrasts starkly with the laughable idealism of those who retain their faith in the future and believe in the unlimited morphological adaptability of our species and its becoming-cyborg. Faced with an obvious inferiority to their own smart phones, transhumanists accept voluntary servitude; rather than disappear altogether, they choose to be biologically engineered and cloned. In other words, ashamed of their own mortal imperfection, the machine-ticklers are prepared to make themselves sexless and loveless; beings who pass through life knowing nothing of joy or sorrow and whose nights are no longer shaken by terror or ecstasy.  

At this point, as Nietzsche would say, I cannot suppress a sigh and one small hope; a hope that there might still be others in this world like the young French woman I met recently who, when sitting quietly and contentedly in the corner of a book-filled room, thinking her own thoughts, almost inaudibly started to hum ...