The “Nothing Girl”

Cute Trick 1945 - Art Frahm

No blog-writer has to apologise for liberal use of the words “I” and “me”. It’s expected. But when you read mine, one-off or regular, you’ll be implicitly aware that my “I” is a lens for looking at the big mysteries of life. It is through the personal that I reach out to the universal.

I’ve mentioned a few times my idea to write a sex therapy manual, for the inadequate reason that I got one as a gift from the friend of its author. The crassness of its style and content infected me with “book rage”. Like the proverbial man in the street with an abstract painting, I cried “I could do better than that!”

It made me think, but I didn't get far. Sex therapy’s based on the premise that someone has a problem with sex. Using the lens of “I” and its personal memories, I determined that the biggest sex problem is not getting enough, or not getting any. What kind of book could help with that? “How to make yourself more presentable”? Or perhaps a lengthy exposition of “Ebbry hoe ha dem tick a bush”. This is a Jamaican proverb meaning “For every hoe, there’s a stick somewhere in the bush which fits it”. There’s somebody for everybody.

Above: real female stickleback
Below: as imagined by the sex-starved male
Click illustration for source and more inf.

The third kind of book to help someone who is not getting enough would be the sort that you’d hide under the bedclothes if a family member (mother, sister, wife) enters unexpectedly. It’s part of human nature to imagine that which we haven’t got, and today there is no shortage of aids, both words and pictures, to get us started.

Fantasy, like animated cartoons, depends on images which distil a vision of reality, and press particular buttons in our psyches. Musing on whether pornography has a basis deep in our animal inheritance, I remembered the work of Konrad Lorenz, the celebrated Austrian ethologist who joined Niklaas Tinbergen in researching the love-life of the stickleback, a fish commonly found in ponds and streams. If you make a crude model of a male stickleback, emphasising its red belly, you will excite the female, when she is in the mood, and attract the wrath of rival males. Likewise the male will find a model with a grey belly swollen with eggs most interesting. They are more attracted to the pornographic image than the real thing.

To the boy growing up, the unassisted imagination yields erotic treasures long before he knows how to approach a real girl, or so it was in my case. Indeed I pity the others, who learned promiscuity at an early age. I’m suddenly reminded of John Cowper Powys’ novelistic creation of Larry Zed, a half-witted gypsy boy. Let me quote:

“She’s like me ‘Nothing Girl’,” he said to himself, “who do cuddle I to sleep! If only she’d let poor Larry do it, how he’d hold she close!”

Never had young Zed made love to anyone in his life; and only with that presence at night, when his limbs were relaxed and the labours of the day released him, had he ever really known, even in his imagination, what a girl’s body can do to drive away pain and suffering and anger and misery from the mind of mortal man.

The Deck of Cards

It was the glorious summer of 1960. I had just left school and the world was mine. I went to a seaside resort, Shanklin on the Isle of Wight. I knew nothing about women, girls I should say: I disregarded any over the age of 21.

I got a job washing dishes at a hotel, accommodation provided in a hut behind the kitchens. The first evening I went out and walked the streets. Girls galore. The scent of ice-cream and hot-dogs and cheap perfume. The chatter of sparrows and girls. A radio blared “Weep no more my baby” by Brenda Lee, a singing star not yet turned 16. I’d never yet met any girls for I’d been at boarding-school; my appearance was strange and I was gauche socially.

My room-mate was a gnarled vagrant labourer, fond of the simple pleasures like betting and drink. He put a deck of cards my way. Each had the photo of a woman in provocative pose. I’d heard of these cards, but now I had the opportunity to lounge on my bunk in the hot evenings, studying each carefully and deciding which I liked best. The innocent-looking ones or the other kind? I imagined that photographer and model would succumb to mutual lust as soon as the photo-shoots were over. The cards were mild by today’s standards but put me in a fever of excitement.

Till those cards, the girls of my imagination were noble and virtuous, goddesses who bestowed their favours only on young knights bound by the rules of chivalry. What precise rules I didn’t know, but feelings within me held sway, beyond the mere physical.

One of my colleagues at the hotel became my role-model: Lionel, student at a college of technology. He wore a bow tie and slicked-back hair. He played classical clarinet in the Portsmouth Symphony Orchestra. He used to charm hotel guests of both sexes and all ages in his role as evening barman. Each day he’d recount how his charm had scored with a lady after the bar closed at midnight. One week it was 3 girls: each from Leicester, each aged 25, looking as if “left on the shelf”; and each named Shirley. Their parents had been caught up in Shirley Temple mania, when the child-star was 6 years old.

As Miranda, one of my favourite heroines, exclaimed in The Tempest:

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beautious mankind is!
O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!

Then I went to university. There were plenty of girls but the ones I met soon became like sisters. At a lecture on Shakespeare in a hall with tiered seats, I could see through the white blouses of girls in front to the bra-straps which bit repulsively into their plump shoulders. Real women were a let-down compared to my fantasies of Goddess and Tart. Sometimes I would rendezvous with a girl for a date, and then fail to turn up. Three times actually. Not the same girl, needless to say.

Real girls were fascinating to behold and I felt safer just looking. The ones who interested me were not the ordinary, not the obviously pretty ones; they might be flat-chested or prominent-buttocked, or as Alexander McCall Smith describes in his Ladies Detective stories from Botswana, “traditionally built”. However it was girls whose faces set them apart from the crowd who fascinated me most. Sometimes my sense of pity added to the erotic mix, when a girl had for example an aquiline nose or a hare-lip. I thought women who looked as extraordinary as I felt would be more approachable. It was disappointing to discover how ordinary they were to speak to, after I had shyly stalked them for days.

But then, as Philip Larkin says in his poem Annus Mirabilis:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

There must have been something in the air. Girls wanted to lose their virginity, not for pleasure, not for romance, not to have babies, but as a rite of passage. I was a man, and willing. But it wasn’t what I wanted. I’ll confess to you, only you, that it took forty more years, four children and three grandchildren before I found that.

The complaints department responds . . .

A reader of this blog and heaven-sent friend, whose anonymity I shall defend to my last breath, unless he declares himself of his own accord, complains to me thus:

I have decided to stop reading your blog. It has such a profane influence on me that I have stopped thinking in the way I used to do.

I am more introvert now and trying to link up with the nature and the influence of surrounding environment in me is too much. I blame you.

I tried writing in my blog, but everything is coming out deep from the heart. And is very personal, all because of you.

I want to think and write about women, sex and all kinds of licentiousness. So, I think, I should not read your angelic blog anymore.

Bad influence.

It is to dear X that I dedicate a new post, which I am in the process of writing, which shall be all about sex.

A couple of times in this blog I have referred to my desire to write a sex therapy manual: not with the intention of helping anyone, I hasten to add, but in order to deride and mock existing manuals on this topic.

No one in my experience has enough experience to help others, unless inspired by the Holy Ghost. Not sure if the Holy Ghost exists, and if he does, not sure if he is up to dictating anything worthwhile about sex.

It is in the nature of erotic writing to be a stimulant to lasciviousness and licentiousness. Long may they live together and be fruitful, say I.

Accordingly, I publish this post with a promise to deliver the next, which shall be tantalizingly called "The Deck of Cards". It shall treat of pornography; showing that it is not just a perversion of the human species but one which can infect the rest of the animal kingdom too. Together with some intimate confessions.

Instinctive response

Territorial markers
Pic credit: flickr/underground_sbd

Jim wrote a comment on my last piece, Human Animal. My response grew into this post. Thanks, Jim, for spotting what was missing!

My piece for what it’s worth was partly a spontaneous outpouring though I admit a temptation to think of it as philosophy.

I am glad you mention good and bad, Jim. These are part of the baggage that I don’t believe in. Judaism, Christianity and Islam see good and bad as absolutes and objective realities, but I see them as effects of perspective, which depend on where you are standing. Good is what smiles on me, bad is what threatens.

In your third paragraph you envisage the deadly war between intellect and instinct. Who will enslave whom if they are left to fight it out? How can the outcomes of this war be mitigated and regulated by laws which will ensure that each keeps to its own territory?

In this you are not at all missing the point, but dealing with an issue which I did not even cover in my brief piece.

Are intellect and instincts at war with one another? No, but you’d think otherwise from the media and personal conversations. People want to buy things they cannot afford; have a love affair with someone who will not be good for their life; eat things which will make them fat or damage their health. Their lives are battlegrounds of “instincts” versus “good intentions”.

But these wars are effects of perspective, not absolutes. The human animal is stuck in a cage. Pacing back and forth in this reduced space, he cannot exercise his instincts though he vaguely remembers them and tries to find substitutes within the cage. This is what domesticates him. He remembers the joy of finding wild honey deep in the forest; so he drinks Coca Cola.

Instincts are built in to procure what every animal needs. The bird builds its nest and the bee gathers nectar. Instinct is design. It makes the tree grow tall and the sunflower turn its face to the sun.

Seeing graffiti on a wall, I rejoice in evidence of instinct. Planners and real-estate moguls have seized the right to create an urban environment in their image; the alienated youth, excluded from these activities, defy one-sided laws to make their mark in the only ways they can.

From birth the human animal is placed in civilization’s cage and taught to overcome instinct. But Nature fights back and it’s funny as well as sad that “feral children” are reported as terrorizing parts of our cities.

We can trust our instincts. They are not broken, merely buried in accretions of civilization, that messed-up city that has sprawled over the face of the earth. We can recover them intact, and discover that they have all we need including conscience and a sense of oneness.

I would not be surprised if what we call the spiritual is part of our bodily instinct.

Human animal

Yves/flickr

It’s less than a week since I posted last but seems longer; and then it gets harder to try and distil the impressions and thoughts of several days into a short space. One thing: I wanted to lead you by the hand and show you “my” waterfall (100 yards from my door) but a photo must take the place of that childish gesture. I have no garden, just a rented flat but like Diogenes, the less I have the more I can claim as my own. He was the originator of the Cynic philosophy, not cynical in the modern sense of denying the goodness of human nature; but cynic as in κύων, cyon, dog. He and I have in common that we rejoice in man as animal, though I don’t live in a barrel and perform acts of grossness in public. My writings unlike his are preserved so you can know me directly, whereas we only have salty anecdotes about him.

Another philosopher was on my mind today, René Descartes. If I recall correctly---anyone can check the Net but I prefer the distortions of memory---Descartes was holed up in Holland far from home one cold winter, huddling up to a stove behind which could be heard the sound of crickets wintering in crevices. He eschewed the baggage of traditional concepts and tried to reason everything from first principles, famously proving his own existence through the observable fact of his “cogito”. I’m less impressed by reason and try not to rely on it. What interests me is instincts and feelings, particularly those which show that the “spiritual” is an outgrowth of all life’s full-time preoccupation: how to get by.

It seems to me that civilisation has tried to take us away from “brute” existence; tried to show that we are above the beasts. It’s part of my method on the other hand to reject all culture in order to rediscover how we become what we are, whether above, below or equal to the beasts.

What is it to be human? That is my quest. If I have to behave eccentrically to get there, so be it. I consider my own lifelong tendency to rebellion and solitude, a perennial sulky teenager outcast in a wilderness of his own creation. Has it been a self-imposed penance or was it simply the best I could do at the time? Everyone’s behaviour is adaptive, a way of trying to get by. The philosopher is no exception when he thinks and publishes. What we all do from birth onwards is carve ourselves a space in this world enough to sustain life. Hunters did this in forest and plain. Peasants succeeded them, holding land for pastoral and arable farming. Nowadays this has become “virtual”, a handy word: we have learned to deal with tokens, not real things.

Pic credit: Everything Exmoor

The core of my philosophy is to convey that intellect is not the organ for discovery of truth, but a useful weapon as well as an overdeveloped excrescence for display purposes. The human cerebral cortex has got so sophisticated that we can't cope with it. To understand overdevelopment, consider the antlers of the red deer stag.

If you have reached this far, I am sorry to burden you with such a heavyweight thing as a philosophy: yes, heavy like antlers! We know that thinking hurts but we have to go to school anyhow and learn it, because life in this world is a permanent rutting season, and male or female, we are forced to grow unwieldy antlers to compete and display. What else, dear friends, is blogging?

But lest my philosophy sound top-heavy, a story of alpha-male dominance, I protest it’s the very opposite. I’m about to present its core secret. The drums roll, the fanfare sounds, and you would expect at this point a collection-plate to be passed around for contributions before the magician performs his most astounding trick. But no need for that: we’re family here, share and share alike in trust.

Everyone’s special, therefore everyone’s ordinary.

Not seeing the intrinsic glory of being human, we try to be special. We compete and get stressed and have beliefs, and before you know it we are hooked on elitism and prejudice without being aware of it. Don’t think that with these words I am promoting a political correctness agenda. No, no! The opposite.

What I celebrate is the ordinary: acceptance of the given. Not to change the world or escape from it, but to submit to its embrace. Like Diogenes, I want to point out that our needs are simple, even though we carry the burden of beliefs and culture on our heads and get entangled in thickets. Let us not get mired in scholarship either, saying, “Oh this sounds like the Tao te Ching!” or some other philosophy. We don’t need books. (It takes a bold writer to say that.)

We already have all the equipment we need to discover what it means to be human, and no one “out there” can tell us.

Reality cannot be imagined

Foto flickr/Vincent

For days the art of writing has evaded me. I had no subject-matter and no impetus. The other day a man asked me to write his biography, and I almost took it seriously, for I had nothing to write on my own account, just an imagined vocation. I’d reached the point where I didn’t want to step outdoors, for what was the point? I was lacking in motivation so why do something so motiveless?

Then this Sunday morning early I went out to post a letter and as soon as I got out the door, the open air enveloped me. Its reality was unimaginable from indoors: the unspoilt sharp air of dawn, never mind that it was sending down a steady fine drizzle from low cloud that painted the sky with a uniform pallor. As I type this I’m inches from the unimaginable, for my desk is close to the wall beyond which is the most ordinary and yet the most extraordinary: fresh air.

So this is what I mean by reality: something which impacts on our senses. If it cannot be imagined, how come the memory of some long-ago reality can be evoked by a tiny thing which happens today? It’s a rhetorical question because I know the answer: we’ve evolved that way. The orang-utan catches a whiff of distant fruit (durian) on the breeze, which triggers the long-buried memory of eating its sweet flesh, which sends him swinging from branch to branch in that direction.

It’s not just the air, it’s the echo of birdsong across rooftops, the way the curtains hang in the windows of a dwelling where everyone is still asleep.

Everything I am inspired to write is in response to this unimaginable reality. I can respond to it but not describe it, just like the snails I saw this morning extending their eye-stalks and feelers in joy at the answering of their prayers for just such a drizzle as this. Can they describe? I don’t think so. They merely enjoy the beauty of their own being.

It was only out in the rain that I remembered that the essence of my wayfaring is to go aimlessly, in pursuit of nothing but reality, a substance so plentiful that it matters not which way I go.

One could sit indoors and say “This is not a day to go out. It’s raining.” That’s what imagining does for us; no, what it does to us, for it does us no favours.

Reality dies every moment, replaced by new reality. The pattering of rain on the leaves is an age-old music, but the erratic clanking when it drips from a roof on an iron fire-escape is modern. I hear the hushed roar of airliners above these clouds: travellers waiting to land at Heathrow Airport, twenty miles away.

“Eternity is in love with the productions of time,” says William Blake. Unlike him, I don’t feel able to speak for eternity.

Death before dishonour

beret+baguette+bicycle=chic
Thanks flickr/emilyjhryder

I set out on my errands, hardly reached the street before ideas started to flow: something to ponder, something to write. I swiftly reviewed the range of human belief systems: from burnt offerings on rugged mountain-tops to mass church attendance (booking a place in Heaven) to New Age superstitions (“we create our own reality”). It all came in a flash, between two lamp-posts, as the familiar street swivelled before my unregistering eyes and the world went about its business, weaving back and forth, wheeled transport being more popular than the primal method that I, along with a select band of the dispossessed, had chosen: walking.

Yes, we inhabit the same basic reality, but on top of the basic components---this street, these Victorian houses, traffic lights, the sky---we construct an hallucinatory realm of compulsive ideas, and see everything through them.

But I saw---and all this took a few seconds, I hadn’t yet reached the second lamp-post---that our bubble of unreality is created for our protection. We have to cushion ourselves from death, and if that fails we have to affirm with conviction “Death is OK”. In general we are tolerant of one another’s beliefs, because we realise that others too are wrestling with the same imperative. Death: not just the real thing, but every loss, every shock that reminds our all-too-aware body of its imminent end.

I confess that in the last two paragraphs I have broken my own rule. I have repeatedly used the pronoun “we”. What right do I have to speak for everyone? I am not comfortable with it. So I’ll tell you about my errand: to the barber’s for a haircut. K had also asked me to bring back some bread.

I’m a natural worrier, as I realised by the time I reached the traffic lights, waiting for red so I could cross. Will the barbershop be busy? Who will cut my hair? Should I have waited another week? Is it already too long? Will I have to make conversation, or will there be an awkward silence? What if they cut my hair badly and overcharge me? Will they expect a tip? Will it be an old man or a young woman? You’d think it was my first time.

Then---I was 200 yards away now, I’d spent more time pondering the haircut than on death and religion---I suddenly recalled being five, running out of a barbershop screaming. It was in London and I did not trust Londoners. I had not lived through the War as they had. I’d been in easy-going Australia. Perhaps the barber said “Sit here, boy” forgetting that though small in size I was a human being with feelings. Perhaps I just saw the scissors and razor. Nothing my mother and her friend could say made any difference to my terror. Though I felt shame easily in front of others, my fright was so great that I cared not what anyone thought. I refused to go back in the shop and was prepared to ruin everyone’s day with my screams and tears.

Yesterday’s haircut wasn’t so bad, though the young woman was so quiet that I tried to start a conversation. She had difficulty hearing me so we subsided into silence. I’m guessing she was a recent immigrant, a Pole. She offered me discount as a pensioner, and I got out of there not feeling too damaged, just a little self-conscious, imagining my new short hair made me look a little pathetic, a little old.

I remembered to buy the bread. After further worrying I went to the small grocery called Costcutter, where everything costs more and there’s less choice. I nearly changed my mind when I got inside but felt sorry for the shop assistant, as I was the only customer. So I bought a sliced wholemeal loaf in its own garish plastic bag. For vague ecological reasons I refused the offer of a further bag to put it in, and walked out displaying my purchase for all to see.

I felt a little awkward and didn’t quite know why. Is there anything to be ashamed of in carrying home an undisguised loaf of bread swinging from your hand, when your head is newly shorn? I felt a little defensive. If a sword had been trailing at my side, I’d have grasped its hilt with my free hand, in case anyone gave me the wrong kind of look. In France it would have been different. To bicycle home beret-clad with a nude baguette would have been a gesture of national pride, like singing “Allons enfants de la patrie! Le jour de gloire est arrivé!”

Sometimes I think I’ve grown wisdom, but I’m not immune to that male pride epitomised in the mysterious phrase “Death before dishonour.”

Nostalgia

In the last year I have been reminded time and again, by smells and various other stimuli, of a period I spent in Holland when I was five. It was a young age for roaming alone in streets and woods, but that's what I did. I’d been dumped with an unwilling bogus “aunt” in a country trying to recover from the ravages of Nazi occupation. She chucked me out of the house at every opportunity and I wandered free. And when I started school I was taken the first day but after that, with my little tin of jam sandwiches for lunch, I went on my own.

Wandering alone in the last year has evoked moments in which the calendar has backtracked 60 years. I’ve recalled the remains of a chicken stolen by a fox; collecting pine cones and being instructed by some bogus cousin how to make the pine needles into little woven mats; a flat field full of fragments of mirror and perspex and strange little pieces of metal (it must have been where a fighter or bomber plane had been shot down); a wharf where sacks of chicken-feed were winched up off barges and into the upper storeys of tall warehouses; a forge where a blacksmith shaped horseshoes and nailed them to the hooves of a carthorse; finding bitumen which had been used to waterproof a drainpipe on the school wall and playing with it, to the fury of my “aunt” when she found the pocket of my shorts stuck tight with hardened pitch. And much more, with complete vividness as if it were yesterday.

But this does not account for the special quality of those memories, something that we ourselves brought to the scene. It appears to me that the experiences which inspire nostalgia today are ones which were also especially luminous at the time: luminous, as if lit from within. And it occurs to me that they are remembered for that. And when they occurred the first time, aged five or whatever, it was as if that child remembered something from an even earlier existence: which logically speaking must therefore have been a previous life.

I know that to most people, previous life necessarily entails acceptance of the doctrine of reincarnation. Personally I have come to reject that notion, as it entails the doctrine of transmigration of souls.

It seems absurd and unlikely, now that we understand a little about evolution and the inheritance of DNA from our two parents, that we should also inherit from a soul which has just wafted into our body (at conception or first breath, who knows?) much as you would pour wine into a wineglass. Imagine the mix and match combinations! Not just the merging of two DNAs and chromosomes and all that, but a soul placed into the mix, not randomly but by some spiritual law.

I certainly believe in soul, but as a description of experience and not a theory. Even if my soul is a hand-me-down from some dead person or animal, I don’t believe that the soul’s memories have been handed down too, like a hard disk whose contents have not been completely wiped clean when it’s put into a new computer.

But what does make sense is that species-memories, or memories of my specific lineage, are passed to me in my genes. Chicks are born with a species-memory of snakes, so that they will be terrified of anything which looks like a snake; and of course every bird knows how to do its mating rituals and build its nest and find its food and migrate sometimes a thousand miles to a particular spot, there and back, without being taught or with only minimal tuition from its parents or peers.

Our brutal conditioning at home and school may have all but wiped these memories from us, I mean our human equivalents of the nest-building, food-finding and so on. The child brought up by wolves walks and eats like a wolf and may never learn to speak.

But I feel these days I am living proof (to myself at least) that the primitive survival-mechanisms so deeply imprinted in human cells over hundreds and thousands of years can still be felt.

Memory, nostalgia, intuition. I think these may be more reliable guides to fulfilling our yearnings for God, Divine Love and so forth than any doctrines we may learn from preachers and teachers and holy books.

When we delve deep, we find much. What do you think? What can you reach? What can you tell?

A world fit for ducks

I went to Mama Iris’ for a breadfruit and a pound of yam. I’d taken the camera to snap a vent on the roof of the Baptist Church, next to the Mosque. A man was standing in the crossroads, in the traffic’s way, so I went to see why. Ducks were taking to water and everyone made way for them. Mother was proud and brave, not frightened of humans or cars, choosing to travel in the gutter rather than on the safer pavement. She could smell distant water and followed the downward slope. It was on my way home so I kept an eye on her, a 21st-century Beatrix Potter to her Jemima Puddleduck.

All was fine as we crossed another road junction. Mother fanned out her tail into an air-raid shelter in case the worst happened. She feared only the red kites who soar overhead in these parts hoping to dine on chicks. She was worried that hers had travelled far already on their tiny legs with no rest or snacks.

The stream is not on the lowest ground because it was diverted in Victorian times and flows between old factories. I reported recently on the little waterfall where it rushes over a boulder through snagged twigs and plastic debris to rush down a culvert, which emerges on the other side of Oakridge Road, behind the White Horse Pub, as a quiet shady stretch fit for the raising of duck families.

I did not know how to convey this information to Mrs Duck.

A young woman stopped her car to suggest we call the RSPCA. She would probably have agreed with Prime Minister Blair that families need the support of institutional resources. I’m of a different political persuasion, and told her the river was close enough now.

Mother Duck turned off into a neglected factory car park and tried repeatedly to find a passage through a thicket of brambles and thorn bushes. Walking a mile or two in her webbed feet, I’d have done the same. The intrepid three were safe here from heavy wheels but off course for their destination. You can take a horse to water but not two ducklings and a guide who doesn’t know she is lost.

I’ve made my decision to trust Nature, its trial and error, its profusion, its risk. The other choice is a global zoo, managed for ever by a species that can’t even manage itself.