BY VIRTUE OF BEAUTY: TOWARDS A DEFINITION
Ode on a Grecian Urn
John Keats
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loath?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal---yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unweari-ed,
Forever piping songs forever new;
More happy love! More happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting, and forever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! With brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"---that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Efua Theodora Sutherland
Shall we say
Shall we put this way
Shall we say that the maid of Kyerefaso, Foruwa, daughter of the Queen Mother, was young as a deer, graceful in limb? Such was she, with held head high, eyes soft and wide with wonder. And she was light at foot, light in all her moving.
Stepping springily along the water path like a deer that had strayed from the thicket, springily stepping along the water path, she was a picture to give the eye a feast. And nobody passed her by but turned to look at her again.
Those of her village said that her voice in speech was like the murmur of a river quietly flowing beneath shadow of bamboo leaves. They said her smile would sometimes blossom like a lily on her lips and sometimes rise like sunrise.
But the butterflies do not fly away from the flowers, they draw near. Foruwa was the flower of her village.
So shall we say
Shall we put this way, that all the village butterflies, the men, tried to draw hear her at every turn, crossed and crossed her path? Men said her, ‘She shall be my wife and mine, and mine, and mine.’
But suns rose and set, moons silvered and died and the days passed Foruwa grew more lovesome, yet she became no one’s wife. She smiled at the butterflies and waved her hand lightly to greet them as she went swift about her daily work:
‘Morning, Kweku,
Morning, Kwesi,
Morning, Kodwo,’
but that was all.
And so they said, even while their hearts thumped for her:
‘Proud!
Foruwa is proud…and very strange.’
And so the men when they gathered would say:
‘There goes a strange girl. She is not just stiff – in – the – neck proud, not just breasts – stuck – out – I – am – the – only – girl – in – the – village proud. What kind of proud is hers?’
The end of the year came round again, bringing the season of festivals. For the gathering of the corn, yarn and cocoa there were harvest celebrations. There were bride – meetings too. And it came to the time when the Asafo companies should hold their festival. The village was full of manly sounds, loud musketry and swelling choruses.
The path – finding, path – clearing ceremony came to an end. The Asafo marched on towards the Queen Mother’s house the women fussing round them, prancing round them, spreading their clothes in the way.
‘Osee!’ rang the cry. ‘Osee!’ to the manly men of old. They crouched like leopards upon the branches.
Before the drums beat
Before the danger drums beat, beware!
Before the horns moaned
Before the wailing horns moaned, beware!
They were upright, they sprang. They sprang. They sprang upon the enemy. But now, blood no more! No more thundershot on thundershot.
But still we are the leopards on the branches. We are those who roar and cannot be answered back. Beware, we are they who cannot answered back.
There was no excitement outside the Queen Mother’s courtyard gate.
‘Gently, gently,’ warned the Asafo leader. ‘Here comes the Queen Mother.
‘Spread skins of the gentle sheep in her way.
Lightly, lightly walks our Mother Queen.
Shower her with silver,
Shower her with silver for she is peace.’
And the Queen Mother stood there, tall, beautiful, before the men and there was silence.
‘What news, what news do you bring?’ she quietly asked.
‘We come with dusty brows from our path – finding, Mother. We come with tired thorn – pricked feet. We come to bathe in the coolness of your peaceful stream. We come to offer our manliness to new life.
The Queen Mother stood there, tall and beautiful and quiet. Her fan – bearers stood by her and all the women clustered near. One by one the men laid their guns to her feet and then she said:
‘It is well. The gun is laid aside. The gun’s range is silenced in the stream. Let your weapons from now on be your minds and your hands’ toil.
‘Come, maidens, women all, join the men in dance for they offer themselves to new life.’
There was one girl who did not dance.
‘What Foruwa!’ urged the Queen Mother. ‘Will you not dance? The men are tired of parading in the ashes of their grandfathers’ glorious deeds. That should make you smile. They are tired of the empty croak: “We are men, we are men.”
‘They are tired of sitting like vultures upon the rubbish heaps they have piled upon the half – built walls of the grandfathers. Smile, then, Foruwa, smile.
‘Their brows shall now indeed be dusty, their feet thorn – pricked, and “I love my land” shall cease to be the empty croaking of a vulture upon the rubbish – heap. Dance, Foruwa, dance!’
Foruwa opened her lips and this was all she said, ‘Mother I do not find him here.’
‘Who? Who do you not find here?’
‘He with whom this new life shall be built. He is not here, Mother. These men’s faces are empty; there is nothing with them, nothing at all.’
‘Alas, Foruwa, alas, alas! What will become you, my daugther?’
‘The day I find him, Mother, the day I find the man I shall come running to you, and your worries will come to an end.’
‘But, Foruwa, Foruwa,’ argued the Queen Mother although in her heart she understood her daughter, ‘five years ago your rites were fulfilled. Where is the child of your womb? Your friend Maanan married. Your friend Esi married. Both had their rites with you.’
‘Yes, Mother, they married and see how their steps once lively now drag in the dust. The sparkle has died out of their eyes. Their husbands drink palm wine all day long under the mango trees, drink palm wine and push counters across the draughtboards all the day, and are they not already looking for other wives? Mother, the man, I say, is not here.’
This conversation has been overheard by one of the men and soon others heard what Foruwa had said. That evening there was heard a new song in the village.
‘There was a woman long ago
Tell that maid, tell that maid,
There was a woman long ago,
She would no marry Kwesi,
She would not marry Kwaw,
She would not, would not, would not.
One day she came home with hurrying feet,
I’ve found the man, the man, the man,
Tell that maid, tell that maid,
Her man looked like a chief,
Tell that maid, tell that maid,
Her man looked like a chief,
Most splendid to see,
But he turned into a python
He turned into a python
And swallowed her up.’
From that time onward there were some in the village who turned their backs on Foruwa when she passed.
Shall we say
Shall we put it this way
Shall we say that a day came when Foruwa with hurrying feet came running to her mother? She burst through the courtyard gate; and there she stood in the courtyard, joy all over. And a stranger walked in after her and stood in the courtyard beside her, stood tall and strong as a pillar. Foruwa said to the astonished Queen Mother:
“Here he is, Mother, here is the man.”
The Queen Mother took a slow look at the stranger standing there strong as a forest tree, and she said:
“You carry the light of wisdom on your face, my son. Greetings, you are welcome. But who are you, my son?
“Greetings, Mother,” replied the stranger quietly, “I am a worker. My hands are all I have to offer your daughter for they are all my riches. I have travelled to see how men work in other lands. I have that knowledge and my strength. That is all my story.”
Shall we say
Shall we put it this way,
Strange as the story is, that Foruwa was given in marriage to the stranger.
There was a rage in the village and many openly- mocked saying, ‘Now the proud one eat the dust.’
Yet shall we say
Shall we put this way,
that soon, quite soon the people of Kyerefaso began to take notice of the stranger in quite a different way.
‘Who,’ some said, ‘is this who has come among us? He who mongles sweat and song, he for whom toil is joy and life is full of abundant?’
‘See,’ said others, ‘what a harvest the land yields under his ceaseless care.’
He has taken the earth and moulded it into bricks. See what a home he has built, how it graces the village where it stands.’
‘Look at the craft of his fingers, baskets or kente, stool or mat, the man makes them all.’
‘and our children swarm about him, gazing at him with wonder and delight.’
Then it did not satisfy them anymore to sit all day at their draughtboards under the mango trees.
‘See what Foruwa’s husband has done,’ they declared;
‘shall the sons of the land not do the same.
And soon they began to seek out the stranger to talk with him. Soon they too were toiling, their fields began to yield as never before, and the women laboured joyfully to bring in the harvest. A new spirit stirred the village. As the carelessly built houses disappeared one by one, and new homes built after the fashion of the stranger’s grew up, it seemed as if the village of Kyerefaso had been born afresh.
The people themselves became more alive and a new pride possessed them. They were no longer just grabbing from the land what they desired for their stomach’s present hunger and for their present comfort. They were looking at the land with new eyes, feeling it in their blood, and thoughtfully building a permanent and beautiful place for themselves and their children.
‘Osee!’ It was festival – time again. ‘Osee! Blood no more. Our fathers found for us the paths. We are the roadmakers. They bought for us the land with their blood. We shall build it with our strength. We shall create it with our minds.’
Following the men were the women and children. On their heads they carried every kind of produce that the land yielded and crafts that their fingers had created. Green plantains and yellow bananas were carried by the bunch in large white wooden trays. Garden eggs, tomatoes, red – oil palm nuts warmed by the sun were piled high in the black earthen vessels. Oranges, yams, maize filled with shining brass trays and golden calabashes. Here and there were children proudly carrying colourful mats, baskets and toys, which they themselves had made.
The Queen Mother watched the procession gathering on the village playground now richly green from recent rains. She watched the people palpitating in a massive dance towards her where she stood with her fan – bearer outside the royal house. She caught sight of Foruwa. Her load of charcoal in a large red hibiscus danced with her body. Happiness filled the Queen Mother when she saw her daughter thus.
Then she caught sight of Foruwa’s husband. He was carrying a white lamb in his arms, and he was singing happily with the men. She looked on him with pride. The procession had approached the royal house.
‘See!’ rang the cry of the Asafo leader, ‘See how the best in all the land stands. See how she stands waiting our Queen Mother. Waiting to wash the dust from our brows in the coolness of her peaceful stream. Spread skin of the gentle sheep in her way, gently, gently. Spread the yield of the land before her. Spread the craft of your hands before her, gently, gently.
‘Lightly, lightly walks our Queen Mother, for she is peace.
Salman Rushdie
The bidders who have assembled for the auction of the magic slippers bear little resemblance to your usual salesroom crowd. The Auctioneers have publicized the event widely and are prepared for all comers. People venture out but rarely nowadays; nevertheless, and rightly, the Auctioneers believed this prize would tempt us from our bunkers. High feelings are anticipated. Accordingly, in addition to the standard facilities provided for the comfort and security of the more notable personages, extra-large bronze cuspidors have been placed in the vestibules and toilets, for the use of the physically sick; teams of psychiatrists of varying disciplines have been installed in strategically located neo-Gothic confessional booths, to counsel the sick heart.
Most of us nowadays are sick.
There are no priests. The Auctioneers have drawn a line. The priests remain in other, nearby buildings, buildings with which they are familiar, hoping to deal with any physically fall-out, any insanity overspill.
Units of obstetricians and helmeted police SWAT teams wait out of sight in side alleys in case the excitement leads to unexpected births or deaths. Lists of next of kin have been drawn up and their contact numbers recorded. A supply of strait-jackets has been laid in.
See: behind bullet-proof glass, the ruby slippers sparkle. We do not know the limits of their powers. We suspect that these limits may not exist.
Movie stars are here, among the bidders, bringing their glossy, spangled auras to the saleroom. Movie-star auras, developed in collaboration with masters of Applied Physics, are platinum, golden, silver, bronze. Certain genre actors specializing in villainous roles are surrounded by auras of evil – livid green, mustard yellow, inky red. Then one of us collides with a star’s priceless (and fragile) aura, he or she is instantly knocked to the floor by a security team and hustled out to the waiting paddy-wagons. Such incidents slightly reduce the crush in the Grand Saleroom.
The memorabilia junkies are out in predictable force, and now with a ducking movement of head one of them applies her desperate lips to the slippers’ transparent cage, setting off the state-of-the-art defense system whose programmers have neglected to teach it about the relative harmlessness of such a gesture of adoration. The system pumps a hundred thousand volts of electricity into the collagen-implanted lips of the glass-kisser, terminating her interests in the proceedings.
It is an unpleasantly whiffy moment, but it fails to deter a second aficionado from the same suicidal act of devotion. When we learn that this moron was the lover of the first fatality, we rather wonder at the mysteries of love, whilst reaching once again for our perfumed handkerchiefs.
The cult of the ruby slippers is at its height. A fancy dress party is in full swing. Wizards, Lions, Scarecrows are plentiful supply. The jostle crossly for position, stamping on ones another’s feet. There is a scarcity of Tin Men on account of the particular discomfort of the costume. Witches bide their time on the balcony and galleries of the Grand Saleroom, living gargoyles with, I many cases, high credit ratings. One corner is occupied entirely by Totos, several of whom are copulating enthusiastically, obliging rubber-gloved janitor to separate them so much so as to avoid giving public offence. He does this with great delicacy and Taste.
We, the public, are easily, lethally offended. We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From this high ground we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities. We take pride in our short fuses. Our anger elevates, transcends.
Around the – let us say – shrine of the ruby-sequined slippers, pools of saliva have been forming. There are those of us who lack restraint, who drool. The jump-suited Latino janitor moves amongst us, a pail in one hand and a squeegee mop in the other. We admire and are grateful for his talent for self-effacement. He removes our mouth waters from the floor without causing any loss of face on our part.
Opportunities for encountering the truly miraculous are limited in our Nietzschean, relativistic universe. Behaviourist philosophers and quantum scientists crowd around the magic shoes. They make indecipherable notes.
Exiles, displaced persons of all sorts, even homeless tramps have turned up for a glimpse of the impossible. They have emerged from their subterranean hollows and braved the bazookas, the Uzi-armed gangs high on crack or smack or ice, the smugglers, the emptiers of houses. The tramps wear strenchy jute ponchos and hawk noisily into the giant potted yuccas. They grab fistful of canapés from trays borne upon the superb palms of A-list caterers. Sushi is eaten by them with impressive quantities of wasabe sauce, to whose inflammatory powers the hoboes’ innards seem impervious. SWAT teams are summoned and after a brief battle involving the use of rubber bullets and sedative darts the tramps are removed, clubbed into unconsciousness and driven away. They will be deposited some distance beyond the city limits, out there in that smoking no-man’s-land surrounded by giant advertising hoardings into which we venture no more. Wild dogs will gather around them, eager for luncheon. These are uncompromising times.
Political refugees are at the auction: conspirators deposed monarchs, defeated factions, poets, bandit chieftains. Such figures no longer wear the black berets, the pebble-lensed spectacles and enveloping greatcoats of yesteryear, but strike resplendent attitudes in boxy silken jackets and high-waisted Japanese couture pantaloons. The women sport toreador jackets bearing sequined representations of great works of art. One beauty parades Guernica on her back, while several others wear glittering scenes from the Disasters of War sequence by Francisco Goya.
Incandescent as they are in their suits of lights, the female political refugees fail to eclipse the ruby slippers, and huddle with their male comrades in small hissing bunches, periodically hurling imprecations, ink-pellets, spitballs and paper darts across the salon at rival clusters of émigrés. The guards at the exits crack their bullwhips idly and the politicians control themselves.
We reverse the ruby slippers because we believe they can make us invulnerable to witches (and there are so many sorcerers pursuing us nowadays); because of their powers of reverse metamorphosis, their affirmation of a lost state of normalcy in which we have almost ceased to believe and to which the slippers promise us we can return; and because they shine like the footwear of the gods.
Disapproving critiques of the fetishising of the slippers are offered by religious fundamentalists, who have been allowed to gain entry by virtue of the extreme liberalism of some of the Auctioneers, who argue that a civilized saleroom must be a broad church, open, tolerant. The fundamentalists have openly stated that they are interested in buying the magic footwear only in order to burn it, and this is not, in view of the liberal Auctioneers, a reprehensible programme. What price tolerance if the intolerant are not tolerated also? ‘Money insists on democracy,’ the liberal Auctioneers insist. ‘Anyone’s cash is as good as anyone else’s.’ The fundamentalists fulminate from soap-boxes constructed of special, sanctified wood. They are ignored, but some senior figures present speak ominously of the thin end of the wedge.
Orphans arrive, hoping that the ruby slippers might transport them back through time as well as space (for, as our equations prove, all space machines are time machines as well): they hope to be reunited with their deceased parents by the famous shoes.
Men and Women of dubious character are present – untouchables, outcasts. The security forces deal brusquely with many of these.
‘Home’ has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows anymore. How hard can we expect even a pair of magic shoes to work? They promised to take us home, but are metaphors of homeliness comprehensible to them, are abstractions permissible? Are they literalists, or will they permit us to redefine the blessed word?
Are we asking, hoping for, too much?
As our numberless needs emerge from their redoubts and press in upon the electrified glass, will the shoes, like the Grimms’ ancient flatfish, lose patience with our ever-growing demands and return us to the hovels of our discontents?
The presence of imagery beings in the Saleroom may be the last straw. Children from nineteenth-century Australian paintings are here, whining from their ornate, gilded frames about being lost in the immensity of the Outback. In blue smocks and ankle socks the gaze into rain forests and red deserts, and tremble.
A literary character, condemned to an eternity of reading the works of Dickens to an armed madman in a jungle, has sent in a written bid.
On a television monitor, I noticed the frail figure of an alien creature with an illuminated fingertip.
This permeation of the real world by the fictional is a symptom of the moral decay of our post-millennial culture. Heroes step down off cinema screens and marry members of he audience. Will there be no end to it? Should there be more rigorous controls? Is the State employing insufficient violence? We debate such questions often. There can be little doubt that a large majority of us opposes the free, unrestricted migration of imaginary beings into an already damaged reality, whose resources diminish by the day. After all, few of us would choose to travel in the opposite direction (through there are persuasive reports of an increase in such migrations latterly).
I shelve such disputes for the moment. The Auction is about to begin.
It is necessary that I speak about my cousin Gale, and her habit of moaning loudly while making love. Let me be frank: my cousin Gale was and is the love of my life, and even now that we have parted I am easily aroused by the mere memory of her erotic noisiness. I hasten to add that except for this volubility there was nothing abnormal about our love-making, nothing, if I may put it thus, fictional. Yet it satisfied me deeply, deeply, especially when she chose to cry out at the moment of penetration: ‘Home, boy! Home, baby, yes – you’ve come home!’
One day, sad to relate, I came home to find her in the arms of a hairy escapee from a caveman movie. I moved out the same day, weeping my way down the street with my portrait of Gale in the guise of a tornado cradled in my arms and my collection of old Pat Boone 78 r.p.m. records in a rucksack on my back.
This happened years ago.
For a time after Gale dumped me I was bitter and would reveal to our social circle that she had lost her virginity at the age of fourteen in an accident involving a defective shooting-stick; but vindictiveness did not satisfy me for long.
Since those days I have dedicated myself to her memory. I have made of myself a candle at her temple.
I am aware that, after all these years of separation and non-communication, the Gale I adore is ot entirely a real person. The real Gale has become confused with my re-imagining of her, with my private elaboration of our continuing life together in an alternative universe devoid of ape-men. The real Gale may now be beyond our grasp, ineffable.
I caught a glimpse of her recently. She was at the far end of a long, dark, subterranean bar-room guarded by freelance commandos bearing battlefield nuclear weapons. There were Polynesian snacks on the counter and been from the Pacific rim on tap: Kirin, Tsingtao, Swan.
At that time many television channels were devoted to the sad case of the astronaut stranded on mars without hope of rescue, and with diminishing supplies of food and breathable air. Official spokesmen told us of the persuasive arguments for the abrupt cancellation of the space exploration budget. We found these arguments powerful; influential voices complained of the sentimentality of the images of the dying spaceman. Nevertheless, the cameras inside his marooned craft continued to send us poignant pictures of his slow descent into despair, his low-gravity, weight reduced death.
I watched my cousin Gale as she watched the bar’s TV. She did not see me watching her, did not know that she had become my chosen programme.
The condemned man on another planet – the condemned man on TV – began to sing a squawky medley of half-remembered songs. I was reminded of the dying computer, Hal, in the old film 2001: Space Odyssey. Hal sang ‘Daisy, Daisy’ as it was being unplugged.
The Martian – for he was now a permanent resident of that planet – offered us his spaced-out renditions of ‘Swanee’, ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’ and several numbers from The Wizard of Oz; and Gale’s shoulders began to shake. She was crying.
I did not go across to comfort her.
I first heard about the upcoming auction of the ruby slippers the very next morning, and resolved at once to buy them, whatsoever the cost. My plan was simple; I would offer the miracle-shoes to Gale in all humility. If she wished, I would say, she could use them to travel to Mars and bring the spaceman back to Earth.
Perhaps I might even click the heels together three times, and win back her heart by murmuring, in soft reminder of our wasted love, There’s no place like home.
You laugh at my desperation. Ha! Go tell a drowning man not to clutch at straws. Go ask a dying astronaut not to sing. Come here and stand in my shoes. What was it the Cowardly Lion said? Put ‘em up. Put ‘em uuuuup. I’ll fight you with one hand tied behind my back. I’ll fight you with my eyes closed.
Scared, huh? Scared?
The Grand Saleroom of the Auctioneers is the beating heart of the earth. If you stand here for a long enough all the wonders of the world will pass by. In the Grand Saleroom, in recent years, we have witnessed the auction of the Taj Mahal, the Statue of Liberty, the Alps, the Sphinx. We have assisted at the sale of wives and the purchase of husbands. State secrets have been sold here, openly, to the highest bidder. On one very special occasion, the Auctioneers presided over the sale, to an overheated and inter-denominational bunch of smouldering red demons, of a wide selection of human souls of all classes, qualities, ages, races and creeds.
Everything is for sale, and under the firm yet essentially benevolent supervision of the Auctioneers, their security dogs and SWAT teams, we engage in a battle of wits and wallets, a war of nerves.
There is a purity about our actions here, and also an aesthetically pleasing tension between the vast complexity of life that turns up, packaged into lots, to go under the hammer, and the equally immense simplicity of our manner of dealing with this life.
We bid, the Auctioneers knock a lot down, we pass on.
All are equal before the justice of the gavels: the pavement artist and Michelangelo, the slave girl and the Queen.
This is the courtroom of demand.
They are bidding for the slippers now. As the price rises, so does my gorge. Panic clutches at me, pulling me down, drowning me. I think of Gale – sweet coz! – and fight back fear, and bid.
Once I was asked by the widower of a world-famous and much-loved pop singer to attend to an auction of rock memorabilia on his behalf. He was the sole trustee of her estate, which was worth tens of millions. O treated him with respect.
‘There’s only one lot I want,’ he said. ‘Spend what-ever you have to spend.’
It was an article of clothing, a pair of edible rice paper panties in peppermint flavor, purchased long ago in a store on (I think this was the name) Rodeo Drive. My employer’s late wife stage act had included the public removal and consumption of several such pairs. More panties, in a variety of flavors – chocolate chip, knickerbockers glory, cassata – were hurled into the crowd. These, too, were gobbled up in the general excitement of the concert, the lucky recipients being too carried away to consider the future value of what they caught. Undergarments that had actually been worn by the lady were therefore in short supply, and presently in great demand.
During that auction, bids came in across the video links with Tokyo, Los Angeles, Paris and Mila, bids so rapid and of such size that I lost my nerve. However, when I telephoned my employer to confess my failure he was quite unperturbed, interested only in the final price. I mentioned a five-figure sum, and he laughed. It was the first genuinely joyful laugh I had heard from him since the day his wife died.
‘That’s all right then,’ he said. ‘I’ve got three hundred of those.’
It is to the Auctioneers we go to establish the value of our pasts, of our futures, of our lives.
The price for the ruby slippers is rising ever higher. Many of the bidders would appear to be proxies, as I was on the day of the underpants; as I am so often, in so many ways.
Today, however, I am bidding – perhaps literally – for myself.
There’s an explosion in the street outside. We hear running feet, sirens, screams. Such things have become commonplace. We stay where we are, absorbed by higher drama.
The cuspidors are in full employment. Witches keen movie stars flounce off with tarnished auras. Queues of disconsolate form at the psychiatrists’ booths. There is work for the club-wielding guards, though not, as yet, for the obstetricians. Order is maintained. I am the only person in the Saleroom still in the bidding. My rivals are disembodied heads on video screens, and unheard voices on telephone links. I am doing battle with an invisible world of demons and ghosts, and the prize is my lady’s hand.
At the height of an auction, when the money has become no more than a way of keeping score, a thing happens which I am reluctant to admit: one becomes detached from the earth.
There is a loss of gravity, a reduction in weight, a floating in the capsule of the struggle. The ultimate goal crosses a delirious frontier. Its achievement and our own survival become – yes! – fictions.
And fiction’s grip, we may mortgage our homes, sell our children, to have whatever it is we crave. Alternatively, in that miasmal ocean, we may simply float a distance, so that they seem weightless, trivial. We let them go. Like men dying in a blizzard, we lie down in the snow to rest.
So it is that my cousin Gale loses her told over me in the crucible of the auction. So it is that I drop out of the bidding, go home, and fall asleep.
When I awake I feel refreshed, and free.
Next week there is another auction. Family trees, coats of arms, royal lineages will be up for sale, and into any of these one may insert any name one chooses, one’s own, or one’s beloved’s. Canine and feline pedigrees will be on offer, too: Alsatian, Burmese, saluki, Siamese, cairn terrier. Thanks to the infinite bounty of the Auctioneers, any of us, cat, dog, man, woman, child, can be a blue blood; can be – as we long to be; and as, covering in our shelters, we fear we are not – somebody.
Louis “Studs” Terkel
I wince when I’m called a former beauty queen or Miss U.S.A. I keep thinking they’re talking about someone else. There are certain images that come to mind when people talk about beauty queens. It’s mostly what’s known as t and a, tits and ass. No talent. For many girls who enter the contest, its part of the American Dream. It was never mine.You used to sit around the TV and watch Miss America and it was exciting, we thought, glamorous. Fun, we thought. But by the time I was eight or nine, I didn’t feel comfortable. Soon I’m hitting my adolescence, like fourteen, but I’m not doing any dating and I’m feeling awkward and ugly. I’m much taller than most of the people in my class. I don’t feel I can compete the way I see girls competing for guys. I was very much of a loner. I felt intimidated by the amount of competition females were supposed to go through with each other. I didn’t like being told by Seventeen magazine: Subvert your interest if you have a crush on a guy, get interested in what he’s interested in. If you play cards, be sure not to beat him. I was very bad at these social games.
After I went to the University of Colorado for three and a half years, I had it. This was 1968 through ’71. I came home for the summer. An agent met me and wanted me to audition for commercials, modeling, acting jobs. Okay, I started auditioning and winning some.
I did things actors do when they’re starting out. You pass out literature at conventions, you do print ads, you pound the pavements, you send out your résumés. I had come to a model agency one cold day, and an agent came out and said, “I want you to enter a beauty contest.” I said, “No, uh-uh, never, never, never. I’ll lose, how humiliating.” She said: “I want some girls to represent the agency, might do you good.” So I filled out the application blank: Hobbies, measurements, blah, blah, blah. I got a letter: “Congratulations. You have been accepted as an entrant into the Miss Illinois Universe contest.” Now what do I do? I’m stuck.
You have to have a sponsor. Or you’re gonna have to pay several hundred dollars. So I called up the lady who was running it. Terribly sorry, I can’t do this. I don’t have the money. She calls back a couple of days later: “We found you a sponsor, it’s a lumber company.”
It was in Decatur. There were sixty-some contestants from all over the place. I went as a lumberjack: blue jeans, hiking boots, a flannel shirt, a pair of suspenders, and carrying an axe. You come out first in your costume and you introduce yourself and say your astrological sign or whatever it is they want you to say. You’re wearing a banner that has the sponsor’s name on it. Then you come out and do your pirouettes in your one-piece bathing suit, and the judges look at you a lot. Then you come out in your evening gown and pirouette around for a while. That’s the first night.
The second night, they’re gonna pick fifteen people. In between, you had judges’ interviews. For three minutes, they ask you anything they want. Can you answer questions? How do you handle yourself? Your poise, personality, blah, blah, blah. They’re called personality judges.
I thought. This will soon be over, get on a plane tomorrow, and no one will be wiser. Except that my name got called as one of the fifteen. You have to go through the whole thing all over again.
I’m thinking. I don’t have a prayer. I’d come to feel a certain kind of distance, except that they called my name. I was the winner, Miss Illinois. All I could do was laugh. I’m twenty-two, standing up there in a borrowed evening gown, thinking: “What am I doing here? This is like Tom Sawyer becomes an altar boy.”
I was considered old for a beauty queen, which is a little horrifying when you’re twenty-two. That’s much part of the beauty queen syndrome: the young, untouched, unthinking human being.
I had to go to this room and sign the Miss Illinois-Universe contract right away. Miss Universe, Incorporated, is the full name of the company. It’s owned by Kaiser-Roth Incorporated, which was bought out by Gulf & Western. Big business.
I’m sitting there with my glass of champagne and I’m reading over this contract. They said: “Oh, you don’t have to read it.” And I said: “I never sign anything that I don’t read.” They’re all waiting to take pictures, and I’m sitting there reading this long document. So I signed it and the phone rang and the guy was from a Chicago paper and said: “Tell me, is it Miss or Ms.?” I said: “It’s Ms.” He said, “You’re kidding?” I said, “No, I’m not.” He wrote an article the next day saying something like it finally happened: a beauty queen, a feminist. I thought I was a feminist before I was a beauty queen, why should I stop now?
Then I got into the publicity and training and interviews. It was a throwback to another time where crossed ankles and white gloves and teacups were present. I was taught how to walk around with a book on my head, how to sit daintily; how to pose in a bathing suit, and how to frizz my hair. They wanted curly hair, which I hate.
One day the trainer asked me to shake hands. I shook hands. She said: “That’s wrong. When you shake hands with a man, you always shake hands ring up.” I said: “Like the pope? Where my hand is up, like he’s gonna kiss it?” Right. I thought: Holy mackerel! It was a very long February and March and April and May.
I won the Miss U.S.A. pageant. I started to laugh. They tell me I’m the only beauty queen in history that didn’t cry when she won. It was on network television. I said: “No, I’m not kidding.” I didn’t know what else to say at that moment. In the press releases; they call it the great American Dream. There she is, Miss America, your ideal. Well, not my ideal, kid.
The minute you’re crowned, you become their property and subject to whatever they tell you. They wake you up at seven o’clock next morning and make you put on a negligee and serve you breakfast in bed, so that all the New York papers can come in and take your picture sitting in bed, while you’re absolutely bleary-eyed from the night before. They put on the Kayser-Roth negligee, hand you the tray, you take three bites. The photographer leave, you whip off the negligee, they take the breakfast away, and that’s it. I never did get any breakfast that day. (Laughs.)
You immediately start making personal appearances. The Jaycees or the chamber of commerce says: “I want to book Miss U.S.A. for Christmas Day parade.” They pay, whatever it is, seven hundred fifty dollars a day, first-class air fare, round trip, expenses, so forth. If the United Fund calls and wants me to give a five-minute pitch on queens at a luncheon, they still have to pay a fee. Doesn’t matter that it’s a charity. It’s one hundred percent to Miss Universe, Incorporated. You get your salary. That’s your prize money for the year. I got fifteen thousand dollars, which is all taxed in New York. Maybe out of a check of three thousand dollars. I’d get fifteen hundred dollars.
From the day I won Miss U.S.A. to the day I left for Universe, almost two months later, I got a day and a half off. I made about two hundred fifty appearances that year. Maybe three hundred. Parades, shopping centers, and things. Snip ribbons. What else do you do at a shopping center? Model clothes. The nice thing I got to was public speaking. They said: “You want a ghost writer?” I said: “Hell no, I know how to talk.” I wrote my own speeches. They don’t trust girls to go out and talk because most of them can’t.
One of the big execs from General Motors asked me to do a speech in Washington, D.C., on the consumer and energy crisis. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the National Management Association. The White House, for some reason, sent me some stuff on it. I read it over, it was nonsense. So I stood up and said, “The reason we have an energy crisis is because we are, industrially and personally, pigs. We have a short-term view of the resources available to us; and unless we wake up to what we’re doing to our air and our water, we’ll have a dearth, not just a crisis.” They weren’t real pleased. (Laughs.)
What I resent most is that a lot of people didn’t expect me to live this version of the American Dream for myself. I was supposed to live it their way.
When it came out in a newspaper interview that I said Nixon should resign, that he was a crook, oh dear, the fur flew. They got very upset. I got an invitation to the White House. They wanted to shut me up. The Miss Universe Corporation had been trying to establish some sort of liaison with the White House for several years. I make anti-Nixon speeches and this invitation.
I figured they’re either gonna take me down to the basement and beat me up with a rubber hose or they’re gonna offer me a cabinet post. They had a list of fifteen or so people I was supposed to meet. I’ve never seen such a bunch of people with raw nerve endings. I was dying to bring a tape recorder but thought if you mention the word “Sony” in the Nixon White House, you’re in trouble. They’d have cardiac arrest. But I’m gonna bring along a pad and paper. They were patronizing. And when one of ‘em got me in his office and talked about all the journalists on television people being liberals, I brought up blacklisting, Red Channels, and the TV industry. He changed the subject.
Miss Universe took place in Athens, Greece. The junta was still in power. I saw a heck of a lot of jeeps and troops and machine guns. The Americans were supposed to keep a low profile. I have never been a great fan of the Greek junta, but I knew darn well I was gonna have to keep my mouth shut. I was still representing the United States, for better or for worse. Miss Philippines won. I ran second.
At the end of the year, you’re run absolutely ragged. That final evening, they usually have several queens from past years come back. Before they crown the new Miss U.S.A., the current one is supposed to take what they call the farewell walk. They call over the PA. Time for the old queen’s walk. I’m now twenty-three and I’m an old queen. And they have this idiot farewell speech playing over the airwaves as the old queen takes the walk. And you’re sitting in the throne for about thirty seconds, then you come down and they announce the name of the new one and you put the crown on her head. And then you’re out.
As the new one is crowned, the reporters and photographers rush on the stage. I’ve seen photographer shove the girl who has just given her reign up to thirty seconds before, shove her physically. I was gone by that time. I had jumped off the stage in my evening gown. It is very difficult for girls who are terrified of this ending. All of a sudden (snaps fingers), you’re out. Nobody gives a damn about the old one.
Miss U.S.A. and remnants thereof is the crown stored in the attic in my parent’s home. I don’t even know where the banners are. It wasn’t me the fans of Miss U.S.A. thought was pretty. What they think is pretty is the banner and crown on that lamp, I swear to God ten men would come in and ask it for a date. I’ll think about committing an axe murder if I’m not called anything but a former beauty queen. I can’t stand it anymore.
Several times during my year as what’s-her-face I had seen in the movie The Sting. There’s a gesture the characters use which means the con is on: they rub their nose. In my last fleeting moments as Miss U.S.A., as they were playing that silly farewell speech and I walked down the aisle and stood by the throne, I looked right into the camera and rubbed my finger across my nose. The next day, the pageant spent all their time telling people that I hadn’t done it. I spent the time telling them that, of course, I had. I simply meant: the con is on. (Laughs.)
Miss U.S.A. is in the same graveyard that Emma Knight the twelve-year-old is. Where the sixteen-year-old is. All the past selves. There comes a time when you have to bury those selves because you’ve grown into another one. You don’t keep exhuming the corpses.
If I could with every young girl in America for the next fifty years, I could tell them what I liked about the pageant. I could tell them what I hated. It wouldn’t make any difference. There’re always gonna be girls who want to enter the beauty pageant. That’s the fantasy: the American Dream.
Junichiro Tanizaki
It was an age when men honored the noble virtue of frivolity, when life was not such a hard struggle as it is today. It was a leisurely age, an age when professional wits could make an excellent livelihood by keeping rich or wellborn young gentlemen in a cloudless humor and seeing to it that the laughter of the Court ladies and geisha was never stilled. In the illustrated romantic novels of the day, in the Kabuki theater, where rough masculine heroes like Sadakuro and Jiraiya, were transformed into women - everywhere beauty and strength were one. People did all they could to beautify themselves, some even having pigments injected into their precious skins. Gaudy patterns of line and color danced over men’s bodies.
Visitors to the pleasure quarters of Edo preferred to hire palanquin bearers who were splendidly tattooed; courtesans of the Yoshiwara and Tatsumi quarter fell in lo9ve with tattooed men. Among those adorned were not only gamblers, firemen, and the like, but members of the merchant class and samurai. Exhibitions were held time to time; and the participants, stripped to show their filigreed bodies, would pat themselves proudly, boast of their own novel designs, and criticize each other’s merits.
There was an exceptionally skillful young tattooer named Seikichi. He was praised on all sides as a master the equal of Charibun and Yatsuhei, and the skins of dozens of men have been offered as the silk to his brush. Much of the works admired at tattoo exhibitions were his. Others might be more noted for their shading, or their use of cinnabar, but Seikichi was famous for the unrivaled boldness and sensual charm of his art.
Seikichi had formerly earned a living as an ukiyoke painter of the school of
Toyokuni and Kunisada, a background that, in spite to his decline to the status of a tattooer, was evident from his artistic conscience and sensitivity. No one whose skin and physique failed to interest him could buy his services. The clients he did accept had to leave the design and cost entirely to his discretion-and to endure for one to eleven months the excruciating pain of his needles.
Deep in his heart the young tattooer concealed a secret pleasure, and a secret desire. His pleasure lay in the agony of men felt as he drove his needles into them, torturing their swollen, blood-red flesh; and the louder they groaned, the keener was Seikichi’s strange delight. Shading and vermillioning - these are said to be especially painful - were the techniques he most enjoyed.
When a man had been pricked five or six hundred times in the course of an average day’s treatment and then has soaked himself in a hot bath to bring out the colors, he would collapse at Seikichi’s feet half dead. But Seikichi would look down at him coolly. “I dare say it hurts”, he would remark with an air of satisfaction.
Whenever as spineless man howled in torment or clenched his teeth and twisted his mouth as if he were dying, Seikichi told him: “Don’t act like a child, pull yourself together – you have hardly began to feel my needles!” And he would go on tattooing, as unperturbed as ever, with an occasional glance at the man’s tearful face.
But sometimes a man of immense fortitude set his jaw and bore up stoically, not even allowing himself to frown. The Sikichi would smile and say: “Ah, you are a stubborn one! But wait. Soon your body will begin to throb with pain. I doubt if you will be able to stand it….”
For a long time Seikichi had cherished the desire to create a masterpiece on the skin of a beautiful woman. Such a woman had to meet various qualifications of character as well as appearance. A lovely face and a beautiful body were not enough to satisfy him. Though he inspected all the reigning beauties of the Edo gay quarters he found none who met his exacting demands. Several years had passed without success, and yet the face and figure of the perfect woman continued to obsess his thoughts. He refused to abandon hope.
One summer evening in the fourth year of his search Seikichi happened to be passing the Hirasei Restaurant in the Fukagawa district of Edo, not far from his house, when he noticed a woman’s bare milk white-foot peeping out of the curtains of a departing palanquin. To his sharp eye, a human foot was as expressive as a face. This one was sheer perfection. Exquisitely chiseled toes, nails like the iridescent shells along the shore at Enoshima, a pearl-like rounded heel, skin so lustrous that it seemed bathed in the limpid waters of a mountain spring – this, indeed, was a foot nourished by men’s blood a foot to trample on their bodies. Surely this was the foot of a unique woman who had so long eluded him. Eager to catch a glimpse of her face, Seikichi began to follow the palanquin. But after pursuing it, several lanes and alleys he lost sight of it altogether.
Seikichi’s long-held desire turned into passionate love. One morning late the next spring he was standing on the bamboo-floored veranda of his home in Fukagawa, gazing at the spot of omoto lilies, when he heard someone at the garden gate. Around the corner of the inner fence appeared a young girl. She had come on errand for a friend of his, a geisha of the nearby Tatsui quarter.
“My mistress asked me to deliver this cloak, and she wondered if she would be so good as to decorate its lining,” the girl said. She untied a saffron-colored cloth parcel and took out a woman’s silk cloak (wrapped in a sheet of thick paper bearing a portrait of the actor Tojaku and a letter.
The letter repeated his friend’s request and went on to begin that its bearer would soon begin a career as a geisha under her protection. She hoped that, while not forgetting old ties, he would also extend his patronage to this girl.
“I thought I had never seen you before,” said Seikichi, scrutinizing her intently. She seemed only fifteen or sixteen, but her face had a strangely ripe beauty, a look of experience, as if she had already spent years in the gay quarter and had fascinated innumerable men. Her beauty mirrored the dreams of the generations of glamorous men and women who have lived and died in this vast capital, where the nation’s sins and wealth were concentrated.
Seikichi had her sit on the veranda, and he studies her delicate feet, which were bare except for elegant straw sandals. “You left the Hirasei by palanquin one night last July, did you not?” he inquired.
“I suppose so,” she replied, smiling at the odd question. “My father was still alive then, and he often took me there.”
“I have waited five years for you. This is the first time I have seen your face, but I remember your foot… Come in for a moment, I have something to show you.”
She had risen to leave, but he took her by the hand and led her upstairs to his studio overlooking the broad river. Then he brought out two picture scrolls and unrolled one of them before her.
It was a painting of a Chinese princess, the favorite of the cruel emperor Chou of the Shang dynasty. She was leaning on a balustrade in a languorous pose, the long skirt of the her figured brocade robe trailing halfway down a flight of stairs, her slender body barely able to support the weight of her gold crown studded with coral and lapis lazuli. In her right hand she held a large wine cup, tilting it to her lips as she gazed down at a man who was about to be tortured in the garden below. He was chained hand and foot at a hollow copper pillar in which a fir would be lighted. Both the princess and her victim – his head bowed before her, his eyes closed, ready to meet his fate – were portrayed with terrifying vividness.
As the girl stared at his bizarre picture her lips trembled and her eyes began to sparkle. Gradually her face took on a curious resemblance of that of the princess. In the picture she discovered her secret self.
“Your own feelings are resembled here,” Seikichi told her with pleasure as he watched her face.
“Why are you showing me this horrible thing?” the girl asked, looking up at him. She had turned pale.
“The woman is yourself. Her blood flows in your veins.” Then he spread out the other scroll.
This was a painting called “The Victims.” In the middle of it a young woman stood leaning against the trunk of a cherry tree: she was gloating over a heap of men’ corpses lying at her feet. Little birds fluttered about her, singing in triumph; her eyes radiated pride and joy. Was it a battlefield or a garden in spring? In this picture the girl found something long hidden in the darkness of her own heart.
“This painting shows your future,” Seikichi said, pointing to the woman under the cherry tree – the very image of the young girl. “All these men ruin their lives for you.”
“Please, I beg of you to put it away!” She turned her back as if to escape its tantalizing lure and prostrated herself before him, trembling. At last she spoke again. “Yes I admit that you are right about me – I am like that woman…so please, please take it away.”
“Don’t talk like a coward,” Seikichi told her, with his malicious smile. “Look at it more closely. You won’t be squeamish long.”
But the girl refused to lift her head. Still prostrate, her face buried in her sleeves, she repeated over and over that she was afraid and wanted to leave.
“No, you must stay – I will make you a real beauty,” he said moving closely to her. Under his kimono was a vial of anesthetic, which he has obtained a year ago from a Dutch physician.
The morning sun glittered on the river, setting the eight-mat studio ablaze with light. Rays reflected from the water sketched ripping golden waves on the paper sliding screens and on the face of the girl, who was fast asleep, Seikichi had closed the doors and taken up his tattooing instruments, but for a while he only sat there entranced, savoring to the full her uncanny beauty. He thought that he would never tire of contemplating her serene mask like face. Just as the ancient Egyptians had embellished their land with pyramids and sphinxes, he was about to embellish the pure skin of this girl
Presently he raised the brush, which was gripped between the thumb, and the last two fingers of his left hand, applied its tip to the girl’s back, and, with the needle, which he held in his right hand, began pricking out a design. He felt his spirit dissolve into the charcoal-black ink that stained her skin. Each drop of the Ryuku cinnabar that he mixed with alcohol and thrust in was a drop of his lifeblood. He saw in his pigments the hues of his own passions.
Soon it was afternoon, and there the tranquil spring day drew toward its close. But Seikichi never paused in his work, nor was the girl’s sleep broken. When a servant came from the geisha house to inquire about her, Seikichi turned him away, saying that she had left long ago. And hours later, when the moon hung over the mansion across the river, bathing the houses along the bank in a dreamlike radiance, the tattoo was not yet half done. Seikichi worked on by candlelight.
Even to insert small drop of ink was no easy task. At every thrust of his needle Seikichi gave a great sigh and felt as if he has stabbed his own heart. Little by little the tattoo marks began to take on the form of a huge black-widow spider; and by the time the night sky was paling into dawn this weird, malevolent creature had stretch its eight legs to embrace the whole of the girl’s back.
In the full light of the spring dawn boats were being rowed up and down the river, their oars creaking in the morning quiet; roof tile glistened in the sun, and haze began to thin over white sails sailing in the early breeze. Finally Seikichi put down his brush and looked at the tattooed spider. This work of art had been the supreme effort of his life. Now that he had finished it his heart was drained of emotion.
The two figures remained still for some time. Then Seikichi’s low, hoarse voice echoed quavering from the wall of the room:
“To make you truly beautiful I have poured my soul into this tattoo. Today there is no woman in Japan to compare with you. Your old fears are gone. All men will be your victims.”
As if in response to these words a faint moan came from the girl’s lips. Slowly she began to recover her senses. With each shuddering breath, the spider’s legs stirred as if they were alive.
“You must be suffering. The spider has you in its clutches.”
At this she opened her eyes slightly, in a dull stare. Her gaze steadily brightened, as the moon brightens in the evening, until it shone dazzlingly into his face.
“Let me see the tattoo,” she said, speaking as if in a dream but with an edge of authority in her voice. “Giving me your soul must have made me very beautiful.”
“First you must bathe to bring out the colors,” whispered Seikichi compassionately. “I am afraid it will hurt, but be brave a little longer.”
“I can bear anything for the sake of beauty.” Despite the pain tat was coursing through her body, she smiled.
“How the water stings! Leave me alone – wait in the other room! I hate to have a man see me suffer like this!”
As she left the tub, too weak to dry herself, the girl pushed aside the sympathetic hand Seikichi offered her, and sank to the floor in agony, moaning as if in a nightmare. Her disheveled hair hung over her face in a wild tangle. The white soles of her feet were reflected in the mirror behind her.
Seikichi was amazed at the change that had come over the timid, yielding girl of yesterday, but he did as he was told and waited in his studio. About an hour later she came back, carefully dressed, her damp, sleekly combed hair hanging down over her shoulders. Leaning over the veranda rail, she looked up in the faintly hazy sky. Her eyes were brilliant; there was not a trace of pain in them.
“I wish to give these pictures too,” said Seikichi, placing the scrolls before her. “Take them and go.”
“All my old fears have been swept away – and you are my first victim!” She darted a glance at him as bright as a sword. A song of triumph was ringing in her ears.
“Let me see your tattoo once more,” Seikichi begged.
Silently the girl nodded and slipped the kimono off her shoulders. Just then her resplendently tattooed back caught a ray of sunlight and the spider was wreathed in flames.
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