Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.
Poets who would never meter their stick or brag of their balls; who would never vulgarly vaunt of their lady’s vaginal grip or be publicly proud of her corpulent tits, succumb to the menace of measurement. Rossetti, while he kisses, counts.
Her arms lie open, throbbing with their throng
Of confluent pulses, bare and fair and strong:
And her deep-freighted lips expect me now
Amid the clustering hair that shrines her brow
Five kisses broad, her neck ten kisses long…
Lately, Yeats approached the problem, and Pound had occasional success, the most notable, I suppose, this passage from Canto XXXIX:
Desolate is the roof where the cat sat,
Desolate is the iron rail that he walked
And the corner post whence he greeted the sunrise.
In hill path: ‘thkk, thgk’
of the loom
‘Thgk, thkk’ and the sharp sound of a song
under olives
When I lay in the ingle of Circe
I heard a song of that kind.
Fat panther lay by me
Girls talked there of fucking, beasts talked there of eating,
All heavy with sleep, fucked girls and fat leopards,
Lions loggy with Circe’s tisane,
Girls leery with Circe’s tisane…
Lovely as this is, the rest of his frankness is in Latin and Greek.
No, they are not well-enough loved, and the wise writer watches himself, for with so much hate inside them — in ‘bang,’ in ‘screw,’ in ‘prick,’ in ‘piece,’ in ‘hump’—how can he be sure he has not been infected — by ‘slit,’ by ‘gash’—and his skills, supreme while he’s discreet, will not fail him? Not an enterprise for amateurs. Even the best are betrayed. Lawrence is perhaps the saddest example.
• • •
There’s the blue skin of cold, contusion, sickness, fear… absent air, morbidity, the venereals, blue pox… gloom…
There are whole schools of fish, clumps of trees, flocks of birds, bouquets of flowers: blue channel cats, the ash, beech, birch, bluegills, breams, and bass, Andalusian fowl, acaras, angels in decorative tanks, the bluebill, bluecap, and blue billy (a petrel of the southern seas), anemone, bindweed, bur, bell, mullet, salmon, trout, cod, daisy, and a blue leaved and flowered mountain plant called the blue beardtongue because of its conspicuous yellow-bearded sterile stamens.
The mad, as we choose to speak of others who do not share our tastes, provide cases galore of color displacement: they think pink is blue, that brown is blue, that sounds are blue, that over-shoes are condoms, and we have only to describe these crazies directly and they will smuggle the subject in all by themselves. Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented room. The techniques, in any case, are similar.
Here is Thick, in The Lime Twig of John Hawkes, beating Margaret:
‘I’ve beat girls before,’ whispering, holding the truncheon in the dark, bracing himself with one fat hand against the wall, ‘and I don’t leave bruises…. And if I happened to be without my weapon… the next best thing is a newspaper rolled and soaking wet. But here, get the feel of it, Miss.’ He reached down for her and she felt the truncheon nudging against her thigh, gently, like a man’s cane in a crowd.
‘It ain’t so bad,’ he whispered.
She was lying face up and hardly trembling, not offering to pull her leg away. The position she was tied in made her think of exercises she had heard were good for the figure. She smelled gun oil — the men who visited the room had guns — and a sour odor inside the mattress…. There was a shadow on the wall like a rocking chair; her fingers were going to sleep; she thought that a wet newspaper would be unbearable.
Then something happened to his face….
His arm went up quivering, over his head with the truncheon falling back, and came down hard and solid as a length of cold fat stripped from a pig, and the truncheon beat into her just above the knee; then into the flesh of her mid-thigh; then on her hips; and on the tops of her legs. And each blow quicker and harder than the last, until the strokes went wild and he was aiming randomly at abdomen and loins, the thin fat and the flesh that was deeper, each time letting the rubber lie where it landed then drawing the length of it across stomach or pit of stomach or hip before raising it to the air once more and swinging it down. It made a sound like a dead bird falling to empty field…. When he finally stopped for good she was bleeding, but not from any wound she could see.
This passage is impossible to overpraise… an example of total controclass="underline" get the feel of it, Miss… a man’s cane in a crowd… a length of cold fat stripped from a pig… a dead bird falling to empty field… she thought that a wet newspaper would be unbearable.
When a character will not oblige by using a truncheon as a penis, the author must manage the shift himself. Flaubert directs our eyes to the room in which Emma Bovary commits her adulteries, and has the sense, so often absent in his admirers, to be content with that.
The warm room, with its discreet carpet, its grey ornaments, and its calm light, seemed made for the intimacies of passion. The curtain-rods, ending in arrows, their brass pegs, and the great balls of the fire-dogs shone suddenly when the sun came in. On the chimney between the candelabra there were two of those pink shells in which one hears the murmur of the sea if one holds them to the ear.
A muff, a glove, a stocking, the glass a lover’s lips have touched, the print of a shoe in the snow: how is it that these simple objects can receive our love so well that they increase it? I answer: because they become concepts, lighter than angels, and all the more meaningful because they began as solids, while the body of the beloved, dimpled and lined by the sheeted bed, bucks, sweats, freezes, alters under us, escapes our authority and powers, lacks every dimension, in that final moment, but the sexual, yet will not remain in the world it’s been sent to, and is shortly complaining of an ache. The man with his fetish, like a baby with its blanket, has security — not the simple physical condition (with locks on the doors who is safe?) but the Idea itself. Those pink shells, the curtain-rods ending in arrows, the great balls of the fire-dogs: how absurd they would be in reality, how meaningless, how lacking in system, all higher connection. It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word.
‘Léa. Give me your pearls. Do you hear me, Léa? Give me your necklace.’
And shortly this remarkable book has begun, like a head between breasts, to surround us with Colette’s unsurpassed sensuality.
There was no response from the enormous bed of wrought-iron and copper which shone in the shadow like a coat of mail.
‘Why don’t you give me your necklace…?’
As the clasp snapped, the laces on the bed were roused and two naked arms, magnificent, with thin wrists, lifted two lovely lazy hands.
‘Let it alone, Chéri…’
The images are chosen as the pearls were: the bed, the light, the sheets, the pearls, the laces which rouse…
In front of the pink curtains barred by the sun he danced, black as a dainty devil on a grill. But as he drew near the bed he became white again in silk pyjamas above doe-skin mules.