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Trickster Makes This World.
Dec. 6th, 2006 09:21 pmAugusta Smithers, upon whose back has been tattooed Mr. Meeson's will, is obliged to display it in court.
"Poor Augusta colored up, and her eyes filled with tears as she slowly undid the dust-cloak which hid her shoulders (for, of course, she had come in low dress). She took off the cloak and the silk handkerchief beneath it, and stood before the court dressed in a low black dress.
"'I am afraid that I must ask you to come up here,' said his lordship. Accordingly she walked round, mounted the bench, and turned her back to the judge in order that he might examine what was written on it. This he did very carefully, with the aid of a magnifying glass, referring now and again to the photographic copy which Doctor Probate had filed in the registry."
There are the facist anarchist boys, the ones for whom everything is too far gone, and everything deserves to be destroyed. Obviously I have major qualms with Western culture, human nature, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum, but I like James Joyce, buttons, Foucault, church architecture, and tea.
Virginia Woolf went to a luncheon at Oxbridge, noted the sole and pheasant eaten, saw a Manx cat, and realized that at a party in nineteen-thirteen, everyone could have said the very same things, but that they would have meant something else entirely. She remembered Tennyson and Christina Rossetti. But there were very real trenches that separated such poets, such sentiment, from modern poetry.
There is the absurdity of the aristocracy. Take the ancient rapist warlords and highwaymen kings, leave them on a low heat to simmer until reduced. The resulting confection is frail but gentile. John Douglas, the Ninth Marquess of Queensberry, and his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, also called Bosie, were ancestors of the Black Douglas. All a family needs do is breed enough, and a warrior of seventy battles, a brave knight of the Crusades, can become the creator of the Queensburry Rules, which I suppose is well enough, but also a family known for suicide and madness, for flying into ineffective rages at the smallest perceived offense, for threatening to whip their enemies in cafes.
However, at the very same time that all of that nonsense was going on, the German and Austrian aristocracies were busy going to university, learning to fence, and butchering the hell out of one another. Dueling was different, there and then. Opponents took turns hacking at each another, five moves for the first man, five moves for the other, repeat, repeat, repeat, until one of them had to end it. The point was not a dance of blocking and progressing. The goal was to stand one's ground, to demonstrate bravery and a high threshold for pain, to show that the hearts of the ancient warriors still beat in the chests of these sons of privilege. More importantly, the point was to be cut, and the point was to be scarred. The Renommierschmiss, the dueling scar, was the permanent visible symbol of all of this, a badge of class and of masculinity. Due to the proper dueling form, the scars all accumulated on one side of the face. Young men could thus appear embattled and traditionally attractive all at once. The Renommierschmiss was the gentleman proving himself a warrior, and the generation desperately, weakly attempting to maintain that they were not different from their greatest grandfathers. The scar was the line where two irreconcilable ethea met.
I am thinking of the boundary between culture and its end, the mark an era makes when it is in its death-throws and insisting upon itself. I am thinking of Hadrian's wall, which was Rome's creation, of course, the stamp of an empire upon a land conquered, but also that empire's edge, proof that something else existed and worked. It was the symbol of dominance, but more so of vulnerability. I'm thinking of Ota Benga, of all of the savages displayed to civilization: taken from their homes, put in "tribal" dress just as foreign to them as to those who would be viewing them, and shown to the public for pennies as a mark of what the land of the conqueror was not. Americans do not pierce their noses, stretch their lips, fail to wear proper trousers. Americans are not black or small. Americans do, however, kidnap people. They put freaks in circuses where they belong, and put human beings in zoos, in cages with apes, for the World's Fair. Conversely, you can find pictures of black men in circus broadsides, dressed in suits and hovering above headlines that proclaim the impossible existence of a dark skinned individual able to speak the King's English. The act of trying to prove the difference between civility and savageness inverts them.
Culture has seduced me through my very distrust of it, and I want to hold that line. I want to cheer on the fall of civilization, but I also want to gather and guard its artifacts, proof that there was good, or at least beauty, in it. Virginia Woolf knew it: "the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish". And perhaps it is as much a prayer as a map: it isn't exactly wondering if it will die if we treat it as if it were dead. It is celebrating the death and rebirth of every society we've called our own. It is going to the funeral of the king specifically to influence succession with our polite conversation. It is collecting the king's bones for use in the spell with which we control the new regime. Bag ladies, junkyard men, and diamond dogs rule the universe thusly.
"Poor Augusta colored up, and her eyes filled with tears as she slowly undid the dust-cloak which hid her shoulders (for, of course, she had come in low dress). She took off the cloak and the silk handkerchief beneath it, and stood before the court dressed in a low black dress.
"'I am afraid that I must ask you to come up here,' said his lordship. Accordingly she walked round, mounted the bench, and turned her back to the judge in order that he might examine what was written on it. This he did very carefully, with the aid of a magnifying glass, referring now and again to the photographic copy which Doctor Probate had filed in the registry."
There are the facist anarchist boys, the ones for whom everything is too far gone, and everything deserves to be destroyed. Obviously I have major qualms with Western culture, human nature, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum, but I like James Joyce, buttons, Foucault, church architecture, and tea.
Virginia Woolf went to a luncheon at Oxbridge, noted the sole and pheasant eaten, saw a Manx cat, and realized that at a party in nineteen-thirteen, everyone could have said the very same things, but that they would have meant something else entirely. She remembered Tennyson and Christina Rossetti. But there were very real trenches that separated such poets, such sentiment, from modern poetry.
There is the absurdity of the aristocracy. Take the ancient rapist warlords and highwaymen kings, leave them on a low heat to simmer until reduced. The resulting confection is frail but gentile. John Douglas, the Ninth Marquess of Queensberry, and his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, also called Bosie, were ancestors of the Black Douglas. All a family needs do is breed enough, and a warrior of seventy battles, a brave knight of the Crusades, can become the creator of the Queensburry Rules, which I suppose is well enough, but also a family known for suicide and madness, for flying into ineffective rages at the smallest perceived offense, for threatening to whip their enemies in cafes.
However, at the very same time that all of that nonsense was going on, the German and Austrian aristocracies were busy going to university, learning to fence, and butchering the hell out of one another. Dueling was different, there and then. Opponents took turns hacking at each another, five moves for the first man, five moves for the other, repeat, repeat, repeat, until one of them had to end it. The point was not a dance of blocking and progressing. The goal was to stand one's ground, to demonstrate bravery and a high threshold for pain, to show that the hearts of the ancient warriors still beat in the chests of these sons of privilege. More importantly, the point was to be cut, and the point was to be scarred. The Renommierschmiss, the dueling scar, was the permanent visible symbol of all of this, a badge of class and of masculinity. Due to the proper dueling form, the scars all accumulated on one side of the face. Young men could thus appear embattled and traditionally attractive all at once. The Renommierschmiss was the gentleman proving himself a warrior, and the generation desperately, weakly attempting to maintain that they were not different from their greatest grandfathers. The scar was the line where two irreconcilable ethea met.
I am thinking of the boundary between culture and its end, the mark an era makes when it is in its death-throws and insisting upon itself. I am thinking of Hadrian's wall, which was Rome's creation, of course, the stamp of an empire upon a land conquered, but also that empire's edge, proof that something else existed and worked. It was the symbol of dominance, but more so of vulnerability. I'm thinking of Ota Benga, of all of the savages displayed to civilization: taken from their homes, put in "tribal" dress just as foreign to them as to those who would be viewing them, and shown to the public for pennies as a mark of what the land of the conqueror was not. Americans do not pierce their noses, stretch their lips, fail to wear proper trousers. Americans are not black or small. Americans do, however, kidnap people. They put freaks in circuses where they belong, and put human beings in zoos, in cages with apes, for the World's Fair. Conversely, you can find pictures of black men in circus broadsides, dressed in suits and hovering above headlines that proclaim the impossible existence of a dark skinned individual able to speak the King's English. The act of trying to prove the difference between civility and savageness inverts them.
Culture has seduced me through my very distrust of it, and I want to hold that line. I want to cheer on the fall of civilization, but I also want to gather and guard its artifacts, proof that there was good, or at least beauty, in it. Virginia Woolf knew it: "the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish". And perhaps it is as much a prayer as a map: it isn't exactly wondering if it will die if we treat it as if it were dead. It is celebrating the death and rebirth of every society we've called our own. It is going to the funeral of the king specifically to influence succession with our polite conversation. It is collecting the king's bones for use in the spell with which we control the new regime. Bag ladies, junkyard men, and diamond dogs rule the universe thusly.
