chapter 2

Chapter 2

Sluts

Returning back in time I live out an episode from My Secret Life . I model my approach on how Walter used to carry on. I do not find it difficult. I begin with a few pleasantries with a girl in a milliner’s shop who respects my money. I soon move onto the subjects of frigging and pissing. She seems to know what I want. She tells me I have a dirty mind. But I know she knows I am entitled to that, because I am a gentleman, and vastly superior to her. I bring her to my pied a terre in Maida Vale, remove her outer and nether garments, her dress and her drawers, caress her bubbies, fiddle with her queynt and insert my pintle.

Thinking of the poor, the lower orders, servants, shop girls, barrow boys and the like. I approve their existence, I like them, They are charming and colourful, (though most of them stink). I would not like this class to be absent. I want to move among them. That is not to say I want to improve their lot. Least of all do I want to reduce my own privilege in any way. I am a gentleman.

(Actually it’s not true that I don’t want to improve them in any way. I do want them to take more baths and showers. Communally, for I want them to see each other naked as they wash.)

A century on, a retired government minister walks into a lap dancing club. He sits at a table, orders a brandy and watches a couple of strippers. Firm bare young breasts and buttocks gyrate. They do not stink at all. He has been having some thoughts about human diversity. Diversity of backgrounds, conflicts, aggression, nationalism &c. Unrealised possibilities and the extent thereof. Social change.

He is looking at mixed race strippers, pole dancers. His awakened sexual feeling is like something sealing the new order. A new doctrine.

The retired minister finds the pole dancing most tasteful . It gives him an opportunity for philosophic reflection, giving instructive insight into eternal realities. As he has grown old the tease aspect of striptease, which he imagines would have tormented the young man, does not trouble him. Girls dancing with clothes on would do so. But this is something present, sexual and alive, in the modern world.

Robert Graves wrote "All school histories aim to glorify existing institutions and efface the memory of those that have been superseded.”

He feels pregnant with a new faith, a programme to bring order out of chaos, allying itself with the very idea of the nation and all the promise it holds. He has an idea of a new emotion, a class feeling perhaps, being given the backing of the whole of society and culture, to combat the sense and fear of a world in fragmentation.

Measure the sexual temperature of society as it rises and falls. Apply the thermometer to the past, all past attitudes and past values.

To understand today we need a new Shakespeare, or at least a new Ibsen

Naturism, alternative to capitalism.

The sexual sphere is a very good example of emotional needs generally, because it is so intense. Consider how such needs are met under capitalism and under socialism. The objection to capitalism originally takes an aesthetic form, Consider striptease as a way of satisfying the desire to look at naked women. Striptease is quintessentially capitalistic, perhaps even more so than prostitution. The retired minister is a capitalist.

For however one thinks of the past, and however interesting the unrealised possibilities, the past is dead. Only the present is alive, and accessible. And that is a very exciting thought once grasped.

Old as I am, he reflects, my career has given me some understanding of this nation. He smiles benevolently at an eyeful of glistening young vulva.

Somewhere in the Persian Empire some 2000 years ago, a man is going to meet his mistress. He is attired like a Rembrandt character, in rich robes and a jewelled turban This part of the empire was a bit of a matriarchy, some satrapy with a mother goddess, and decadent, like the modern USA. He is a magician of middle years. Recently his magic has started to turn bad, and he has been experiencing threats to his potency. With any sexual relations he suffers the torments of the damned.

In a matriarchy, women who do not get what they want become vicious and nasty. They turn into furies, banshees, .hellcats, vixens, demons.

Growing older, his magic is cluttered up with bad karma. Curses have been directed at him, that derive from all sorts of bad feelings. He becomes afraid to wander, like a Melanesian savage who with his evil magic has raised too much hatred and animosity. He is like an old computer. See what has gone with youth. Fortunately not health as yet. He still retains much youthful vigour.

Leaving his wife at home, he takes her with him on a seven day journey by camel train across the desert to the neighbouring capital. They argue about something. She screams at him in the main street in what is to the inhabitants a strange tongue, the familiar litany of her complaints She screeches like an enraged ibis. Passers by pay little attention to the spectacle. Just some crazy foreigners.

How can it end? Life turned bad.

When they are both having a go at him at the same time the torment is at its worst.

What was once his strength is now under attack because he has changed. He has lost control. Because of this he thinks he might be going to die. For much of his life his magic was aimed at securing his own longevity. He came so close to discovering the elixir of life, But there came a day, when wearied and tormented by the pressures upon him he willed his own death. And this was the genesis of the illness that was going to kill him.

Flying on my magic carpet I go to see him in his house in his walled city. I knock on the gate. A servant admits me and leads me to his master. He greets me in his courtyard. I cannot but notice his melancholy, careworn air.

He greets me courteously and asks me to articulate my request.

“I have come, O learned master”, I say to him, “inspired by a quest for secret knowledge. I desire to travel on the astral planes. I want to explore new worlds. I wish to ascend to the best of all. I want to converse with intelligent spirits Already I have the ability to traverse vast spaced of space and time, driven hither and thither by the lust of my imagination, I need purpose and system”, I tell him. But I did not need to explain. He knew already, who I was and what I wanted. He gives me a manuscript to read and an exercise to perform and asks me to return in a year’s time.

More realistically, a sailor, circa 1920, having sailed from Montevideo where he has enjoyed the brothels. Now he is in a street in Naples, blind drunk, in his prime, with a rock in his hand, having got involved in a fight with some local youths. He means to bash someone on the head with it. Instead one them hits him on the back of his own head and knocks him out. He is picked up and taken on board ship by his mates.

He has spent a lot of money in brothels. He is proud to be British, knowing himself a match for anyone in the world. As he was later to explain to his descendant, then times were better. Then we had our empire, and we were inferior to nobody. We could take arrogant pride. Life was splendid, everything was in its place.

Now he is in his prime. He collects women of different races and nationalities, different shapes and hues. This life is the efflorescence of manhood, life as it should be.

He especially likes the raw, obvious, vulgar, Latin sexuality. The obviousness of the pass.

Reflections upon him lead to what follows, namely a long meditation about the evil of monogamy inspired by two sentences from the Master Therion. Now I forsake the individual to focus upon the Platonic idea of which particular people and things are all only exemplars.. For the idea, the idea their lives perhaps may even exemplify. Different doctrine. What was not but might be. Or canvassed alternatives.

from page 111: "Monogyny is nonsense for any one with a grain of imagination. The more sides he has to his nature, the more women he needs to satisfy it

Including serial monogyny, which is just some other moral constraining order. Stupid objections to lying and deceit. &c &c &c I won’t bore with the whole of it.

In his time at sea he did come across a few warning signs. There was one sailor who used to say mysteriously “The Englishman’s bluff has been called”, though what on earth he meant by that was never clear. Also he had some thoughts about the Yellow Peril. He watched Chinese studying hard, as if ambitious to take over the world.

Back in Blighty he begets two daughters. After several years at sea, he returns home for the last time to bring them up.. One evening he goes upstairs to spank them, and gets his foot caught in the pisspot. And the two sisters dissolved into a fit of hysterical giggles. But he pulls their nighties up and spanks them just the same. Happy days, much compensation for no longer travelling..

The elder one grows up. There are things that enhance life, pleasures, not exactly sexual,. Pleasant, sometimes cruel thoughts that add zest to life. Thoughts that comfort, even titillate her.

That boys get beaten in school, that men fight kill and are killed for her security. That murderers should be hanged. That some notorious killer is being hanged right now as she eats her poached egg on toast at eight o’clock in the morning. The knowledge frightens and awes her, but also attracts and excites.

Society and coercion.

She went through agonies as a girl in the classroom, when her classmates used to get the cane. Yet as she says to her son.

“I don’t mind you getting it when you deserve it.” Ouch! Just suppose I deserved the gallows, as when I murdered women like I want to do when I am in one of my worse moods. She thought murderers should be hanged because they were no use to anyone. But she did tell me she felt sorry for Eichmann, in his glass box in Jerusalem.

And what she eventually wanted and what she got. This female ideal

Her father had been conceived in a pied a terre in Maida Vale. And she would fantasise about that gentleman her grandfather whom she never knew..

He had friends in France who were artists. He spent time in Dieppe and Paris and dabbled a bit himself in landscapes and portraiture. He would eat and drink in cafes which may still be visited today, in the company of poets and artists like Dowson, Degas, Wilde, Sickert. He dressed like a dandy, with expensive tastes. He conceived himself as anti-bourgeois. He was not merely concerned with satisfying crude appetite. His interest was artistic. He was interested in women from an aesthetic viewpoint. He liked them best naked. His behaviour was not the vulgar thing that consorting with prostitutes came to mean in late in the next century.

Back into which, walking along the street one day this common little thing. She recognised him from years back. Drunk was she? She flung her arms round him. Taken aback he missed the opportunity to ask for her phone number. He could not remember her name. a single parent in a new development.

Not her, but the one we were talking about, she very much liked the idea of the nineteenth century gentleman.. She was comfortable and respectable. Now as dead as any, dead for longer than she lived.

Consider her own mother in law. Known now from a photograph. What she wanted. A man, home and family. A life, an ambition. In a way it seems enough.

Veronica, though, despised that too. And all she would do, and all that I wanted, though so opposed to each other.

Cutting a swathe through life.

Another shift to the present, to contemplation of our own lowlifes. In certain moods these can seem preferable, one can feel at home with them. She turned away from me, the nineteenth century girl. I had money, but she did not understand me, thought me weird. And I thought her dirty.

The descendant, with no such rich experience of prostitutes. His attempts with them were unsuccessful for the most part. He freezes. Not being a sailor with a wealth of experience. The 1959 street offences act had cleared them all away from Piccadilly. For one of his generation to have a prostitute was a mixture of the daring and the very shameful. It was not something he could proudly flaunt, like his ancestor of the 1890s. He wanted to be like that, he felt the present as a form of constraint. Fantasies of prostitution.

Veronica had her nineteenth century predecessors, even a previous incarnation. Emmeline, we may call her. To this avatar the values espoused by the gentleman were the worst kind of abuse, a pestilential heresy to be stamped out. He stood for a whole way of life, a higher culture that had to be liquidated. No freedom and tolerance there. Not that I want to be tolerated. It is a badge of honour to be hated by such as Emmeline. She drew inspiration from the pigeons in springtime. The males, with their mating dances and cooings would fill her with a cosmic rage at the whole male principle in nature.

Other contemporaries were more well meaning. Now we introduce the reformer, the writer, the pundit who will write to change the order of things. He has formed an image of paradise in his imagination. He writes and his advice is taken, though it doesn’t turn out ultimately quite as he wished. He was the man who rewrote the rules. Someone else’s ancestor. Everything must change. Society needs to change, socialism is needed. The sailor has it wrong, and so do his daughters.

He constructed a paradise, or what seemed such, from the purity of his rational dream, or so it appeared. The mathematician conceived a pure rational order. His most personal concerns he presented as the voice of a pure reason, a Platonic vision like the truths of mathematics. He fascinates his contemporaries,

And for all his lack of self understanding, it was not that he was entirely wrong. He fascinated those who came after, too, with his….

Actually this one wrote for money. Still though, he would create a rational paradise, where the vileness of prostitution would not be necessary. What he proposed would serve to eliminate it.

As he understood it the profundity of the gentleman, slightly his elder, was only a taste, one might even say a sick sexual taste. The reality was disease ridden harlots who lured and took your money. One needed to eliminate the need for them by providing something better. We must encourage girls to give themselves. To this end we needed good medical care and contraception, enlightenment and education.

After a long struggle and having braved much filthy abuse, he secures his reforms and there are others who come after him.

Some thought paradise had been attained.

When I see a couple of kids

And guess he's fucking her and she's

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,

I know this is paradise

Wrote Philip Larkin. He was very wrong of course. Tongue in cheek he must have been. His paradise, not theirs. There ‘s all sorts of other shit they have to cope with.

Now it is no longer woman as whore, who represents the objectionable wildness.

Feminine contempt is directed towards him There is one who despises all that male pride. She wants to deconstruct, to destroy it.

Sexual culture, prostitution. Whorehouses. Attitudes to women as mothers or whores There was much contempt that was felt for that settlement, and much propaganda directed against it.

Women controlled sexuality, consequent unhappiness. Sexual repression of the English. Seen as immensely complicated. Seduction as a severe test, an ordeal, a challenge.

Si la jeunesse savait, they say. And recently I have been thinking that. But then I realise, remember, that I was always savvy. A group of young people, gregarious, socialising, sexualising. Students, girls dressed provocatively, showing off, trying to attract attention. Easier now than it ever was they say. Always was easy for some. Are they nicer than they used to be? Am I just stronger so they respect me more? Could they be easy to me now? And I think of what I really would want to say, lascivious things I would really want to say to them, that now I could say, now I am older, braver, Lascivious things, really offensive things. They are what I would say…. and actually what I did say when I come to think of it. I could never bring myself to lower myself

A fat proletarian oaf, some sort of builder on his break, sits on a wall drinking a can of beer. He sees Veronica go by. ‘Very nice,’ he says in a coarse jeering manner. Very nice. NICE LITTLE BUM AND ALL’ he shouts after her.

I was nearby. I heard this and disliked it. I saw the class war in it. (I later explain my feeling to a woman friend of mine, hoping for once to ingratiate myself with a feminist thought. “I don’t mind builders”, she said “And you can talk”, she went on, “You do frottage on trains and buses”)

Veronica however…

She turns round and looks at him. The lout feels an unexpected twinge of abashment, even shame. But she smiles at him. Goes up to him, takes out a piece of paper, scribbles her name and telephone number on it, Says ‘Give me a ring’, blows him a kiss then walks quickly away, provocatively wiggling her croup. Well there is something of a contradiction. She enjoyed his lewdness. Worse in fact.

In the beginning Veronica’s intention was to change the settlement. by aggressive morality. In the beginning I said, but there was a beginning, and that was sometime in the 1970s. She would reform the way people meet and relate, making it always more female friendly. As a young woman, she is very left wing, compassionate, concerned. Her heart bled at the very idea of social injustice. Then at one point she encounters a man who attacks her ideas, and she turns on him like a Kali, spitting out venom and promising labour camps for him and his kind.

Return of the cruel mother goddess.

As a student she was a stupid revolutionary. But that was earlier. That environment in the universities of the late sixties. I met her once and poured scorn on her ideas.

We were gathered in a room sitting or lying on the floor smoking joints. In her the cannabis stimulated flights of fancy of silly revolutionary ideas. Ultimately she joined a political party. There she scrambled up the greasy pole, the career ladder. The strange institution entered, in order to get power.

Those who as students had the stupidest ideas in their heads, the most contemptible cotton wool, gain the political power to force some of the consequences of those ideas upon us,.

She was a smiley person, so long as she did not know what you really thought. Pretty in a way, flirtatious, small and slender. Something slightly wrong with her teeth. Maybe she seemed pretty because she smiled so much. Not that there was really anything to smile about. And she would giggle, at stupid little things.

She dislikes conflict. Her power is confirmed by consensus.

Socialism is just about life she would say, to anyone prepared to doubt. It is compassionate and all inclusive. I explained with some passion and in some detail how it would not include me. How I had desires that her so called paradise could not accommodate. As I spoke, her expression grew darker, more uncomfortable. She seemed to agree in the end that I would; not fit. She explained that criminals would still need to be punished, and that in her society my obstinacy would count as criminal. Therefore for such as myself there would need to be special camps, where as enemies of the people we would be worked to death. As she spoke grew angrier. Her mouth spat out venom like the snakes that formed the hair of the Medusa.

Eloquent and inspired she tells me what the male values I espouse amount to. Rape murder, transgression, genocide, massacre, Srebrenica, Drogheda. They were there. The sailor was a pig, that is how she sees him. The gentleman was an unspeakable oppressor, a sort of Dracula figure.

She will reinterpret, revalue the whole of history. She will crush all forms of unacceptable pride, patriotic racist or sexist, All was to change. There is to be a new dispensation, new religion, something like hell for the sinners, ie those of an old way of thinking,

Following through my evil inspiration, I rage in turn at the world she is creating, the vile moral constraint she is imposing. I return her hatred. The hatred takes off.

I go further. I denounce monogamy and morality.

I know Douglas, another young man who lusts after her. He makes a pass at her, is frightened by her. A coward in his courage, and courageous in his cowardice. He visits her in her flat. Always when he goes there there are other men present, oaves of various sorts sizes and hues. Her landlord has accused her of breaking the terms of her lease, so may different men have been seen entering and leaving. But as she told Doug ‘They don’t pay for it’.

One day he meets her for a drink and tells her of his desire, hoping to join the troupe of those who don’t pay for it. She puts him right back in his place. Suggests he wouldn’t be able to get it up, and says how when she needs sexual satisfaction she usually drives her car up the Holloway Road to pick up some black stud. And that it will take a couple of generations at least for happy sexual relations between men and women to become as they should be.

I think Doug is pathetic. He still masturbates to the thought of what he might do with her. The hatred she directs towards me I reflect back, magnified. I am a concave mirror. And I grow angrier and angrier until I feel myself entering a trance.

Chapter 3