The Man at Number 6 Meets Constantine Cavafy

Cavafy by Lorenzo Mattotti 

The New Yorker (March 16, 2009)

My next-door neighbour - the man at number 6 - came from another land, across another sea. He did so, presumably, in the expectation of finding another city - a better city - in which to make a home and raise a family. 

He's ended up, however, here on Harold Hill and living in a two-up, two-down former council house; which must feel cramped when you not only have a wife and two young children, but your in-laws and a dog to accommodate. 

And so, he's decided to singlehandedly rebuild the house; extend the kitchen, convert the loft, add a front porch and a new drive, etc. This has meant two years of drilling, hammering, and cement mixing; i.e., two years of noise and dust and having to look out onto what was once a pleasantly overgrown back garden but is now a building site-cum-rubbish dump: Wherever I direct my gaze, the ruins are all I see.

I suppose, if it makes him happy to spend all his free time toiling away and aspiring towards not only a bigger and better home, but a bigger and better life, that's really up to him. Personally, I have no such desire or ambition and don't hope for elsewhere. I'm tempted to tell him that no matter what improvements he makes to the house he remains the man at number 6, with the same wife, kids, and in-laws:

'Tis the same streets in which he'll walk the dog. 
The same district in which he'll grow old;
and inside the same house he'll turn grey. 

Ultimately, if within your own small corner you can't learn to be content, then you'll never be happy anywhere in the world ...

See: C. P. Cavafy, 'The City', Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, (Princeton University Press, 1975): click here. 

Obviously, I'm riffing on this poem in this post and sampling lines from it. Readers should note, however, that I relied upon a new translation of the work by Maria Thanassa (2020) and not the one to which I link here.

There Will Always Be a Moon Over Baotou

Rare-earth waste discharged into Baotou's toxic lake

ChinaFotoPress / Getty Images

I.

Inner Mongolia is a godforsaken, autonomous region of Northern China. It's rich in the kind of resources that the entire world craves; coal, natural gas, and rare-earth elements. Its largest city, Baotou, used to be famous for its deer; now it's mostly known for its steel production, its mines and, of course, its toxic lake which is so inhospitable that not even algae can grow there. 

Officially, the latter is known as the Baotou Tailings Dam and it lies about 20km outside the city. Owned by Baotou Steel, it contains the hellish waste from rare-earth refineries. In 2016, even the Chinese authorities finally had to admit that farmland in the surrounding area had been seriously contaminated, with dire health consequences for the people unfortunate enough to live there.


II.

I recalled this story when listening to someone speaking on the benefits of clean, green energy generated by wind farms. She probably also advocates for solar power with a similar degree of eco-enthusiasm, but I got the impression that her real love was for those giant, sexy steel towers with their fibre-glass blades a-whirring.

She didn't mention the birds and bats that are sliced and diced by those very same blades; nor did she mention the inconvenient truth that, despite many wealthy nations voluntarily despoiling their countryside and coastal areas by erecting monstrous turbines, wind power still makes almost zero contribution to global energy supplies (most renewable energy in fact comes from what some trendy types like to term traditional biomass, but which most of us still refer to as wood).

The problem, as Matt Ridley points out, is not that the wind turbines are inefficient machines; actually, they're marvels of engineering. But, unfortunately, there's a limit to how much power they can produce and their effectiveness is ultimately determined by the wind itself; a fluctuating stream of low-density energy that mankind gave up using long ago, for the simple reason that it's not very reliable or very good.

Oh, and she certainly didn't mention problems to do with resource consumption and environmental impacts - such as the toxic and radioactive pollution generated on a massive scale by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets used in the turbines. If you want to know just how filthy clean energy really is, ask the poor people of Baotou!  

Alas, that's not all - it gets worse for those who love chasing windmills:

"Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. [...] Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of 'clean' renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.

A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you're talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year [...] just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That's about half the EU's hard coal–mining output."

My aim in writing this post is not to lend support to the fracking industry or argue for the building of new nuclear power stations. I simply wish to acknowledge the futility of thinking that wind power can make a significant - and wholly innocent - contribution to world energy supply, as many environmentalists seem to believe.

Not only is this naive and mistaken, but, to quote Ridley once more, it's "counterproductive as a climate policy" and results ultimately in toxic lakes and deformed babies.

See: Matt Ridley, 'Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy', The Spectator (13 May 2017): click here. 

See also: Tim Maughan, 'The dystopian lake filled by the world's tech lust', (2 April 2015) on the BBC website: click here. 

Rise of the Xenobots

Image credit: Menno Van Dijk / Getty Images

One of the things that D. H. Lawrence disliked about machines was what he termed their iron insentience.

But such a charge becomes increasingly irrelevant in an age of artificially intelligent cyborgs, silicone sex dolls, and newly created xenobots - i.e., living machines, built by researchers in the United States, using stem cells obtained from African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis).

Beings that, whilst not spawned in the usual manner, are nevertheless organisms composed of biological tissue and not the inanimate and imbecile devices that Lawrence knew, assembled in factories from metal and plastic and held together with nuts and bolts.

Not only are they capable of independent movement, but, when damaged, xenobots can heal their own wounds. Once they have completed their task and the energy in their cells runs out, they die and decay just like other biodegradable objects (including ourselves). Their unique properties suggest xenobots may, in the future, have numerous applications in medicine and in helping safeguard the environment.

The xenobots, which are currently less than a millimetre long, are designed by an evolutionary algorithm on a supercomputer. The program generates random three dimensional forms and then tests each design in a virtual environment. The best are then used to create further designs, so that in this way the xenobots might be said to evolve.

The scientists involved patiently waited for the 100th generation before then selecting a handful of designs to produce in the lab, using tweezers and other tiny tools to sculpt early-stage skin and cardiac cells harvested from frog embryos. The resulting xenobots were placed in dishes of water to keep them alive and where they could be observed gaily swimming about.

The plan is to eventually not only make them bigger, but more complex; to build xenobots with blood vessels and sensory cells, for example, using mammalian tissue so that they can survive on dry land. Of course, once you create new organisms who can experience pain and possess rudimentary cogntive ability (i.e., have nervous systems and tiny brains), then there are obviously ethical issues to be addressed.

Indeed, there are doubtless people reading this now who will be worrying - perhaps not unreasonably - about rapid and profound advances in bio-technology. But that's a discussion for another day. For now, it's just fascinating to consider the implications of man inventing machines that now generate new life forms, throwing the binary oppositions that are usually invoked by vitalists like Lawrence into confusion and disarray. 

See: Sam Kriegman, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin, and Josh Bongard, 'A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (Jan 2020): click here.

Thanks to Thomas Bonneville for bringing this research to my attention.

Why the Case is Never Closed

Whilst it's true that an investigation can in some sense be resolved, a case - like Pandora's box - can never really be closed.

To understand why that's so, one needs to recall the etymology of the word case. It derives from the Latin casus, but that's a translation of the Greek term ptōsis, meaning fall.

Thus, case, in a sense, is another word for fate; that which befalls the individual; an innumerable series of events, some big some small, all of which are determined by other events (and not by any external agency).  

Of course, the word has taken on extended and transferred meanings over the years, but when I use it in the title of posts - as I often do - I'm not simply using it in a legal, medical, or psychoanalytic sense, but as something impersonal and fateful; something over which the individual has no control (the individual, of course, being an unfolding of events in the same way that the author is a complex effect and function of the text).     

On Not Frightening the Horses

The Frightened Horse by Nykos Furcic

As one grows older, one's appreciation for etiquette and decorum - for acting in public at all times with propriety - grows ever more pronounced. Unseemly behaviour now seems uncalled for as well as uncouth.

Indeed, I find myself moving ever-closer towards the sophisticated position adopted by the aristocracy and memorably articulated by the English stage actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell: It doesn't matter what people do so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses. In other words, public appearance matters more than private behaviour.       

This isn't - as some commentators mistakenly insist - a sign of bourgeois hypocrisy. It is, rather, an affirmation of hypocrisy as a noble value and social necessity (albeit rooted in performance and pretence).   

The British aristocracy never embraced 19th-century ideals of domestic respectability and sexual morality with the same enthusiasm as the middle-classes, tending to favour libertarian permissiveness over authoritarian puritanism.   

Perhaps that's why the British working class have always loved toffs and why the latter often make such fine actors ...

The Scent of a Woman Called Gwyneth

goop.com

One of the questions that many of us have pondered in recent times is: What does Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina smell like?

Well, thanks to LA perfumer and alchemist Douglas Little - founder of the fragrance brand Heretic, that seeks to develop unique products based upon the mysterious, sensual and feral aspects of nature - now we know!

For Little, in collaboration with Miss Paltrow, has created a provocatively scented candle made with geranium, citrusy bergamot, and cedar absolutes juxtaposed with Damask rose and ambrette seed, to capture the very essence of Gwyneth's sophisticated and warmly seductive vagina.    

Not surprisingly, despite what some cheapskates might regard as a rather expensive price tag ($75), the candle has already sold out, adding a few more pennies to the pot in which Goop has already amassed an estimated 250 million dollars.

So, those critics who like to mock Miss Paltrow had better just "light that candle, breathe deep and accept the facts: this is Gwyneth's vagina. And the rest of us just live in it."*

* This amusing line is by the American journalist Hadley Freeman writing in The Guardian (13 Jan 2020): click here.

The Doll, the Joker, and the Man Who Laughs

Oh, you fools! Open your eyes! 

I am a symbol of your humanity!

As many fans of Batman will know, the appearance of the Joker owes a good deal to Conrad Veidt's astonishing portrayal of the facially mutilated figure of Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs (1928); a silent romantic drama-cum-horror movie directed by the German Expressionist filmmaker Paul Leni (and an adaptation of Victor Hugo's 1869 novel L'Homme qui rit).

But what many readers of Daphne du Maurier don't realise is that her description of Julio - a creepy sex doll in one of her earliest short stories - also appears to be modelled on the above* and anticipates Gotham's most notorious supervillain, right down to the cocked eyebrow:

"His face was the most evil thing I have ever seen. It was ashen pale in colour, and the mouth was a crimson gash, sensual and depraved. The nose was thin, with curved nostrils, and the eyes were cruel, gleaming and narrow, and curiously still. They seemed to stare right through one - the eyes of a hawk. The hair was sleek and dark, brushed right back from the white forehead."

Heath Ledger as the Joker in  

The Dark Knight (2008)**

Notes: 

* Unfortunately, this cannot be the case; the film was released a year after du Maurier wrote 'The Doll' (aged twenty, in 1927).

** Heath Ledger's Joker - unlike Joaquin Phoenix's more recent (equally brilliant) portrayal - makes the relationship to Veidt's Gwynplaine clear by suggesting that the crimson-mouthed smile is the result of disfigurement rather than merely an expression of underlying madness.    
 

See: Daphne du Maurier, 'The Doll', in The Doll: Short Stories, (Virago, 2011), p. 23.

Supermassive Maternal Bodies (With Reference to the Case of Old Granny Saywell)

Fay Compton as Granny (aka The Mater) 

in The Virgin and the Gypsy 

(dir. Christopher Miles, 1970)

I.

It's not only stars that can collapse and form black holes: there are elderly women at the end of their natural life - pushing, eighty, ninety, and beyond - who can also wilfully exert a gravitational pull so strong that nothing and no one can escape from it.

Who knows, perhaps these supermassive maternal bodies exist at the centre of every family (even when bed-ridden or endlessly sitting in an arm-chair); feeding off the energy of their adult children until the latter are burnt out and exhausted, or sent spiralling into depression and thoughts of murder. 


II.

We find one such malevolent matriarch at the dark heart of a family only nominally headed by the forty-seven year old rector, Arthur Saywell, in D. H. Lawrence's short novel The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930).

Granny, "who was over seventy and whose sight was failing," [6] became the central figure in the household after the vicar's wife had scandalously run off with a young man, leaving her husband with two young girls and an ageing parent to care for (a task in which he was helped by Aunt Cissie, a pale and pious woman, also over forty, who was "gnawed by an inward worm" [6]).      

They called her The Mater - granny, not Aunt Cissie - and she was "one of those physically vulgar, clever old bodies who had got her own way all her life by buttering the weaknesses of her men-folk" [6], particularly her son, the rector. Maternal instinct provided her with the great clue to his being and she was able to exploit and manipulate him to maximum effect - though always, of course, in the name of Love.*

With her delinquent daughter-in-law - She-who-was-Cynthia - out of the picture, The Mater "climbed into the chief arm-chair in the rectory, and planted her old bulk firmly" [6] into it, determined to never again be dethroned or to see her son remarry.

Not only did the silver-haired Mater tremble with hate at the thought of She-who-was-Cynthia, so too did she secretly despise her granddaughters, Lucille and Yvette; "children of that foul nettle of lust" [7]:

"Her great rival was the younger girl, Yvette. Yvette had some of the vague, careless blitheness of She-who-was-Cynthia. But this one was more docile. Granny had perhaps caught her in time. Perhaps!
      The funny thing was, Granny secretly hated Lucille, the elder girl, more than the pampered Yvette. Lucille, the uneasy and irritable, was more conscious of being under Granny's power, than the spoilt and vague Yvette." [7-8]
   
So, Granny - The Mater - was not a warm, kindly soul: she only pretended to be. And gradually, having left school and returned home, the girls realise that under her "old-fashioned lace cap, under her silver hair, under the black silk of her stout, short, forward-bulging body, this old woman had a cunning heart, seeking forever her own female power" [8].

Nor was it physically pleasant to be around the old woman, particularly at meal times when Granny - who loved a bit of pork - would quickly devour her special dishes of "beef-tea and rusks, or a small savoury custard" [10], half-spilling the food as she did so. "The girls ate with repulsion [...] Yvette's  tender nose showing her disgust" [11]. 

And, of course, when you live with the old - as with cats - the rooms are never fresh, no matter how many windows you open; everything smells of Granny and cabbage and "degenerated comfort which has ceased to be comfortable and has turned stuffy, unclean" [10]. Home is where the heart is, they say, but it's also where you'll find that awful domestic sordidness which is so fatal to any joy in life.  

No wonder poor Lucille and Yvette can't stand being at the rectory, The Mater presiding from her arm-chair "with her stomach protruding, her reddish, pendulous face, that had a sort of horrible majesty" [13] like Queen Victoria, or an old toad.

What the girls minded most, however - even more than her gross physical complacency - "was that, when they brought their young friends to the house, Granny was always there, like some awful idol of old flesh, consuming all the attention." [14]

But what could be done? You couldn't actually say to poor old Granny: "'lie down and die, you old woman!' She might be an old nuisance, but she never really did anything. It wasn't fair to hate her" [17].

Having said that, Yvette can't help imaginging Granny being strangled by a wolf-like gipsy woman, putting an end to her horrible persistence and parasitic agedness.** Fortunately, however, it doesn't come to this - The Mater meets her Maker after a terrible flood washes her away, the waters advancing upon her "like a wall of lions" [69] roaring.

Her gipsy lover, Joe Boswell, saves Yvette - but poor Granny has no one to pull her to safety; she is last seen in the hallway "her hands lifted and clawing, as the first waters swirled round her legs, and her coffin-like mouth was opened in a hoarse scream" [70].

The next time Yvette sees her, Granny is bobbing up "like a strange float, her face purple, her blind blue eyes bolting, spume hissing from her mouth" [71]. The gipsy also looks at her with contempt and thinks her not deserving of help: Lebensunwertes Leben, as some would say ...

Even, surprisingly - but, then again, not so surprisingly - Aunt Cissie is there to cry out at the end: "'Let the old be taken and the young spared!'" [77]

David James Gilhooly:  

Frog Queen Victoria (1989)

Notes

* It's important to note that The Mater exerts her malevolent will over other women too and not just the men-folk within her circle. Thus, Aunt Cissie - her daughter - is also a victim:

"Aunt Cissie's life had been sacrificed to The Mater, and Aunt Cissie knew it, and The Mater knew she knew it. Yet as the years went on, it became a convention. The convention of Aunt Cissie's sacrifice was accepted by everybody, including the self-same Cissie. She prayed a good deal about it. Which also showed that she had her own private feelings somewhere, poor thing. She had ceased to be Cissie, she had lost her life and her sex. And now, she was creeping towards fifty, strange green flares of rage would come up in her, and at such times, she was insane.
      But Granny held her in her power. And Aunt Cissie's one object in life was to look after The Mater." [8]

** And, later in the story, Yvette openly admits her true feelings for Granny:

"It was Granny whom she came to detest with all her soul. That obese old woman, sitting there in her blindness like some great red-blotched fungus [...] her Yvette really hated, with that pure, sheer hatred which is almost a joy." [63]

"The look Yvette most hated, was the look of that lower jaw pressing relentlessly up, with an ancient prognathous thrust, so that the snub nose in turn was forced to press upwards [...] The will, the ancient, toad-like obscene will in the old woman, was fearful, once you saw it: a toad-like self-will that was godless, and less than human! It belonged to the old, enduring race of toads, or tortoises. And it made one feel that Granny would never die. She would live on like those higher reptiles, in a state of semicoma, forever." [63]

Again, this seems harsh - until, that is, you have first-hand experience of such old people oneself ...  

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Virgin and the Gipsy', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 5-78. All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.

On Genetic Sexual Attraction (With Reference to the Case of Jinnie Blair)

Image: someecards.com

I.

The tale of Shelagh Money, the nineteen-year-old actress who goes by the stage-name of Jennifer Blair, is another of Daphne du Maurier's short stories that continues to intrigue long after it's been read.

Particularly as it anticipates the (pseudoscientfic) idea of genetic sexual attraction, a term coined in the late 1980s by Barbara Gonyo, an American woman forced to give up her baby son for adoption, but who developed amorous feelings for him when, twenty-five years later, she tracked him down.

Wishing to understand (and justify) her incestuous urges - that she describes as wonderful and frightening - Gonyo came up with the concept of GSA and even though there's very little hard evidence for this as an actual phenomenon, Greek myth, psychoanalysis, and pornography all attest to the fact that sexual attraction can (and does) occur between individuals who are related in some manner.

As does 'A Border-Line Case' ...


II.

Shortly before his death, Shelagh Money's father expresses a wish that he might see his estranged friend, Nicholas Barry, once more, in order to shake him by the hand and wish him luck in the future.

In order, also, that he might be forgiven for not recommending his pal for promotion when he had the opportunity to do so and thus inadvertently playing a part in Nick's decline in later years; years spent as a recluse living in Ireland and soured by disappointment.  

Despite having been told that Nick was "mad as a hatter" [108] and a border-line case, Shelagh decides to track him down in order to inform him of her father's death and of his regret that their friendship had ended in acrimony.

"Shelagh had acted on impulse. She knew she always would. It was part of her character, and had to be accepted by family and friends. It was not until she was on her way, though, driving north from Dublin in the hired car, that her journey, hastily improvised, took on its real meaning. She was here on a mission, a sacred trust. She was carrying a message from beyond the grave." [111]

When Shelagh finds herself at Nick's island home and is waiting in his study to meet him, she notices a photograph in a blue leather frame. It was a photograph of her mother on her wedding day:

"There was something wrong, though. The groom standing beside her was not Shelagh's father. It was Nick, the best man [...] She looked closer, baffled, and realised that the photograph had been cleverly faked. Nick's head and shoulders had been transposed on to her father's figure, while her father's head [...] had been shifted to the lanky figure behind, standing between the bridesmaids. It was only because she knew the original photograph on her father's desk at home [...] that she recognised the transposition instantly. A stranger would think the photograph genuine." [125]

Naturally, this is rather disconcerting to the young woman. Why - and who - was Nick hoping to deceive? If the answer was himself, then, thinks Shelagh, he must be at least a little crazy: "What was it her father had said? Nick had always been a border-line case ..." [125]

Shelagh feels a strange sense of revulsion and apprehension come over her: "The room that had seemed warm and familiar became kinky, queer. She wanted to get out." [125]

Unfortunately, before she can leave, in walks Nick - or the Commander, as his staff refer to him. When he asks her name she instinctively replies Jinnie, even though nobody except her father had ever called her that (presumably as a dimunitive of her stage-name, though one might have expected that to be Jennie, rather than Jinnie, which is usually short for Virginia): "It must have been nerves that made her blurt it out now." [127]

They talk - some might even describe their exchange as a flirtatious form of banter. She notices he has an attractive smile; not in the conventional sense, but in her sense, and she recalls her mother saying that Nick was always great fun at parties. He reminds her of someone: and she reminds him of someone.

The next day, she decides that Nick is very different from the resentful figure her father described. They have a little picnic together, sat side by side on his boat - hard-boiled eggs and chicken - and she's relaxed enough to discuss her sex life with him: "'I'm not really permissive. [...] I don't strip down at the flick of a hat. It has to be someone I like.'" [139]

Well, Shelagh must have really liked Nick, because shortly after this she finds herself with her shoes off and drinking whiskey with him in the back of a grocer's van, where they have a highly charged sexual encounter amongst the loaves of bread and tinned goods.

"It's body chemistry, she told herself, that's what does it. People's skins. They either blend or they don't. They either merge and melt into the same texture, dissolve and become renewed, or nothing happens, like faulty plugs, blown fuses, switchboard jams. When the thing goes right [...] then it's arrows splintering the sky, it's forest fires, it's Agincourt." [148]

Shelagh decides that she has, in fact, just experienced the fuck of her lifetime: "'I shall live till I'm ninety-five, marry some nice man, have fifteen children, win stage awards and Oscars, but never again will the world break into fragments, burn before my eyes [...]'" [148]

She only hopes that her father's ghost will forgive her for what she's done - and hopes to do again before the night is over: "'It was one way to settle your last request, though you wouldn't have approved of the method.'" [150]

Shelagh also realises that she's fallen hook, line and sinker for Nick. He sees their relationship, however, more in terms of love-hate: "'Attraction and antagonism mixed. Very peculiar.'" [152]

In fact, their relationship is more peculiar than either yet know: for it turns out that shortly after her parents were wed, Nick called one evening, unexpectedly. His friend was out, so he got his friend's wife - Shelagh's mother - drunk and "'had a rough-and-tumble with her on the sofa'" [153].

Being, perhaps, a bit naive or slow on the uptake, Shelagh still doesn't grasp what this might mean. Indeed, even though she describes this act of adultery as revolting, she still wants desperately to stay with Nick in Ireland: "'What I really want,' she said, 'deep down, is stillness, safety. The feeling you'd aways be there. I love you. I think I must have loved you without knowing it all my life.'" [154]

She says this, fearful that Nick will kick her out of the van and effectively abandon her by the roadside - which is pretty much what he does: "'I sacrifice the lamb that I do love to spite my own raven heart [...]'" [155]. Having made his poetic farewell, he does invite her to visit him again, any time she likes ...

Heartbroken back in London, she throws herself into rehearsals for a production of Twelfth Night. A package arrives from Ireland, containing an old photograph, of Nick, in costume as Cesario. An accompanying letter explains:

"'I have been burning some papers [...] and came across the enclosed photograph amongst a pile of junk in the bottom drawer of my desk. I thought it might amuse you.You may remember I told you that first evening you remided me of someone. I see now that it was myself!'" [161]

"She looked at the photograph again. Her nose, her chin, the cocky expression, head tip-tilted in the air. Even the stance, hand on hip. The thick cropped hair. Suddenly she was not standing in the dressing-room at all but in her father's bedroom [...] He was staring at her, an expression of horror and disbelief upon his face. It was not accusation she had read in his eyes [shortly before he died], but recognition. He had awakened from no nightmare, but from a dream that had lasted twenty years. Dying, he discovered truth." [161]

Now she had discovered it also: but she doesn't seem to find anything very wonderful or liberating in it. On the contrary, she stares at herself in the mirror with horror and rips the photograph apart, throwing the pieces into the waste-paper basket:

"And when she went back on to the stage it was not from the Duke's palace in Illyria that she saw herself moving henceforth [...] but out into a street [...] where there were windows to be smashed and houses to burn [...] where there were causes to despise and men to hate, for only by hating can you purge away love, only by sword, by fire." [162]

See: 

Daphne du Maurier, 'A Border-Line Case', in Don't Look Now and Other Stories, (Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 101-162. All page references given in the text refer to this edition. 

For those who would like to read more on GSA, see Alix Kirsta's piece in The Guardian (17 May, 2003): click here. 

Ailurophilia: On Baudelaire's Erotic Fascination with Cats

Théophile Steinlen's 1896 design for the famous 
Parisian nightspot Le Chat Noir

Poets, like witches and philosophers, love cats and many have written odes to their mysterious companions, including Rilke, who imagines himself suspended like a prehistoric fly in the golden amber of his cat's eyeball.* However, it's Baudelaire who is perhaps most famous for his obsessive love of cats.**

And it's Baudelaire who best understands not only their Satanic-nocturnal nature, but also their undeniable eroticism, equating the feline with the feminine (and vice versa) until it becomes impossible to know at times if he's writing about his favourite pet or his favourite mistress.

Either way, both seem to promise those things he valued most: poetic truth and sensual pleasure; the former being something that develops out of the fleshy materiality of the latter, rather than pre-existing as some kind of disembodied ideal.      

Here's one of Baudelaire's cat poems that hopefully illustrates what I've been attempting to say, followed by my own attempt at a translation into English that invariably loses something in the process, but which, hopefully, adds something that isn't found in other translations ...

Le Chat

Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon coeur amoureux;
Retiens les griffes de ta patte,
Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,
Mêlés de métal et d'agate.

Lorsque mes doigts caressent à loisir
Ta tête et ton dos élastique,
Et que ma main s'enivre du plaisir
De palper ton corps électrique,

Je vois ma femme en esprit. Son regard,
Comme le tien, aimable bête
Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard,

Et, des pieds jusques à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum
Nagent autour de son corps brun.


The Cat

Come not with claws, beautiful cat,
As you leap into my affection;
Allow me to plunge into your eyes
Of metallic crystal.

When my fingers gently stroke along
Your head and supple spine,
My hand thrills with the pleasure
Of touching your body electric.

I sense the same spirit as in Her: her gaze
Like yours, dear creature, is one of cold
Intensity, piercing like a banderilla.

And, from head to toe,
A subtle yet dangerous perfume,
Envelops her dark skin.


Notes

* See Rilke, 'Black Cat' in Duino Elegies (1923): click here to read online. 

** If memory serves me correctly, Baudelaire devoted no fewer than three poems to cats in Les Fleurs du mal (1857) and they make appearances in many of his other poems too. As might be expected, therefore, the theme of Baudelaire's cats has proved a popular - and fertile - one amongst literary critics and theorists (Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss famously co-authoring a structuralist reading in 1960, for example).

To read an online edition of Les Fleurs du mal provided by Project Gutenberg, click here. 

Alternatively, visit fleursdumal.org - a site dedicated to Baudelaire and his work that not only contains every poem of each edition of Les Fleurs du mal, but a selection of English translations (for those, like me, whose French isn't very good). 

For another post on the love of cats, click here.