I salute them. We need unfamiliar heroics at any time, but after a year of worshipping at the shrine of speed and muscle, of bodies strung like instruments, it is salutary to be reminded that people have other ambitions, inhabit different shapes, and need not be young and beautiful, or want to dance, to be engrossing.
Seriousness is all. And the size of an ambition is no more a criterion of seriousness than is usefulness. A man might train fleas to jump over matchsticks and be serious. So once the fanfares are concluded and the promo girls have limped off, blowing final kisses at the cameras – in all kindness someone should have told them it was a darts championships they’d been hired to appear on and not The Only Way Is Essex – the darts reassert themselves, narrowing ambition to those small bands of cork enclosed by wire.
I have marvelled in the past at the touching contrast between the overflowing bulk of the man throwing and the dainty precision with which he throws. But darts players have shrunk considerably since then – I hope for reasons of health, not vanity – so the contrast is no longer as touching as it was. But the precision itself is still remarkable – such fine judgement, such subtle readjustment. See an arrow fly in slow motion, see how much it arches and how far it deviates, and it is a miracle it ever finds its target. A cheetah can sprint, an antelope can hurdle, an otter can swim. But show me the animal that can hit a treble 20 three times running with three darts.
Yes, the cheetah on the veldt is more beautiful than Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor at the oche. But beauty, like celebrity, is a fatal distraction. As our powers of concentration wane, we more and more prefer what’s ambient to what is. Not so with darts, where neither youthful beauty nor garrulous personality can seduce us from the thing itself – a last refuge of the serious.
The erotic gravitas of George Galloway
Nietzsche wasn’t right about everything. ‘Gott ist tot,’ he told us. Wrong. God is still very much with us. He lives on as a derangement in the minds of people who kill to express their love for Him, or kill to assert His non-existence. If Gott were really tot we’d hear His name invoked less often. But modern man has to be convinced he’s put something behind him – some system of belief, some style in art, some way of looking at the world. So if God isn’t dead, who or what is? My candidate is sex. Reader, you read it here first. Sex Is Dead.
We could start in Soho, where chocolate and cupcake shops have replaced the heartbreak peepshows and masochistic parlours in which, for the brief illusion of rapture, young men once threw away their inheritances and their health. But let’s start instead with George Galloway and Cristina Odone – the Tristan and Iseult of current affairs broadcasting. Last seen burning up our screens on Question Time.
Galloway has since referred to Odone as ‘the saintly figure with wandering hands’, thereby attesting to the sexual friction between them. That they don’t like each other goes without saying, but sex isn’t always an expression of liking. The possibility of attraction where there is hostility is a troubling discovery that all men and women who are honest about their emotions make early, what they go on to do with that discovery often determining the sexual course their lives will take.
I know nothing of the sexual course of Cristina’s or George’s life, though I do recall seeing the latter on his hands and knees lapping milk from a saucer like a cat – unless I dreamed it after eating too much cheese. Maybe I also dreamed his elegant meditation on sexual misunderstanding: ‘Not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion.’
As for the gestes de tendresse exchanged with Odone on Question Time, it is worth noting that Galloway had already been softened up by the calm severity exercised by the journalist Jonathan Freedland. Softened up in the sense of being made to look intellectually clumsy and politically foolish, but the encounter could also have acted as a sort of foreplay, rendering him the more susceptible to Odone’s ‘wandering hands’. She appeared to touch his arm anyway, in the crazed hope of persuading him to a point of view that wasn’t his own, whereupon those juices that make men say and do impetuous things flooded Galloway’s being. ‘Take your hands off me!’ he cried. Not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion, but no means no.
How salutary, in these morally slack times, to be reminded of the importance of a touch. It was as though we’d been returned to the world of the Victorian novel, only this time it wasn’t an outraged maiden saying, ‘Unhand me, you bounder!’ It was George Galloway.
For returning me to such a world, if for nothing else, I feel indebted to the Respect Member for Bradford West. He is right: a touch can be momentous. It’s because a touch matters that readers of Jane Austen all but faint when there is the subtlest intimation of one. I have previously, in this column, confessed to perturbations of the heart when Captain Wentworth, assisting Anne Elliot into her carriage, lays his hand upon her. I don’t read Jane Austen to be aroused, but if arousal is what you’re after, then Anne Elliot confounded by the abrupt intimacy of Wentworth’s intervention offers a thousand times more of it than you will find in any of E. L. James’s heroine’s lucubrations on the size of her lover’s erection. To wit: ‘It springs free.’ He slips a condom ‘onto his considerable length’. (Oh, Sir Jasper, what considerable length you have.) ‘Holy cow!’ exclaims she, in erotic wonderment.
It isn’t only that the author of Fifty Shades of Grey lacks the ear, the passion, the wit, the adroitness, the seriousness and the sense of the ridiculous of a Jane Austen – or a Danielle Steel, come to that – it is that she lacks the gravitas of a George Galloway for whom, at least in the instance detailed above, even the smallest physical advance is fraught with significance.
Reader, we are grown too light in the consideration we show our bodies and in the messages we exchange through them. And where there’s no weight in the contact, and no seriousness in our interpretation of it, there is no sex worth the discussing. I don’t say you have to be desperate to be inflamed by Fifty Shades of Grey – though you most certainly have to be sheltered – I say you have to be cowardly. You have to want sex without the sex.
So, to be clear, while I do think explicitness is usually the end of the erotic, which is why Henry James wrote hotter novels than Jackie Collins, it is not in the name of prudishness that I say so. I can take as much filth as the next man or woman. It’s possible I can take more. But filth, too, exacts obligations. We talk about pornography as though we know its precise delineations and limits, where it fails as art, at what point it degrades love. But pornography is not a discrete entity. In sex, and so in art, we move in and out of it.
Degradation and even violence visit us in sex, often when we don’t expect or welcome them. It can seem sometimes that sex is a little death flirting with the idea of a big one, and who’s to say where that flirtation will stop? Writers of true pornography such as de Sade, Bataille or Pauline Réage recognise that their subject lies on the far side of that line, where to deal with sex means to deal with life in extremis. They are nothing if not in earnest. Sex dies when it’s reduced to lightly perfumed tales of couples locking one another into panda-skin handcuffs bought from Ann Summers. Lovers who take greater risks call this vanilla sex. I wish readers a happy Valentine’s Day. But not a vanilla one.
Toast
Men! I ask you! Be patient: this is neither an attack nor a defence. Of Twitter and Toasters I sing – the baffling nature of man (Wayne and Kevin, not Homo sapiens) as evidenced by the latest revelations of their habits, customs, weaknesses and barbarities. Accusations of ‘sexism’ have been bandied about with such flagrancy this week it has felt like the sixties all over again.
But the word ‘sexist’ is no longer what it was; it had magical properties then, making every man take a second look at himself, even those who protested their innocence the loudest.
‘Sexist? Me! I’ll show you bloody sexist!’ Now, sexism feels too small a concept for the errands it is sent on. What does it mean to call that man a ‘sexist’ who tweets threats of rape because his victim made
the case for putting Jane Austen on a £10 note?
Sexist! You might as well accuse Fred West of unneighbourliness. When violence of this order has so apparently inoffensive a cause – would he have felt the same had it been Charlotte Brontë on the tenner, or Jane Austen on a fiver? – it’s not a catch-all word like ‘sexist’ we need; it’s a whole new science of literary, monetary and social-media psychopathology.
Then, just as we felt we were staring down a pit too deep ever to fathom, came reports of a man calling the fire brigade to free his penis from a pop-up toaster. We are, of course, in the territory of urban legend here. My school friend Malcolm specialised in stories of men trapping their penises – in the neck of a Coke bottle, in a vacuum-cleaner nozzle, an ice bucket, a kitchen tap, a car exhaust, the viewing end of a telescope, the spout of a teapot, an egg slice, a spectacle case, a trombone, raw liver (Malcolm’s creativity anticipated Portnoy’s by years), a key ring, the strings of a tennis racket, a hole in the road.
Perhaps because he gave us so many ideas, aged eleven, we weren’t sure whether to believe him or not. But it was the ferret that finally broke, as it were, the camel’s back of our credulity. Why would a man keep a ferret in his trousers? Why would the ferret suddenly decide to lock its jaws, and when the police shot the ferret how could they be sure they hadn’t shot the man’s penis? Before this barrage of questions Malcolm’s inventiveness at last gave way, though he still insists that while the hole in the road was embroidery, the ferret wasn’t. And the fire brigade insists the same about the pop-up toaster.
So you tell me, reader, how to begin to understand the appeal of a toaster. Yes, loneliness and desperation will drive a man to try most things, and yes, not all of them will resemble a woman’s parts, supposing it is a woman he is missing. But a toaster fails on almost every count. Shape, texture, aperture, accessibility, metaphor – all wrong. Only when it comes to danger – the toaster as femme fatale – can it be said to fit the bill. You turn it on, you make your advances, you wait for it to get hot, and then you are ejected – or, as in the case the firemen attended, you are not – whereupon, burnt, hurt and vowing never to risk such a relationship again, unless of course there’s something wrong with you, you beat an ignominious retreat.
That, anyway – and I hope I won’t be branded a ‘sexist’ for it – is the best in the way of empathy for l’amoureux grillé I can manage.
As I said, ‘Men!’
But the toaster has at least made me think again about Twitter and its misuse. I had thought to argue, when the week began, that if you don’t like what pops into your Twitter box – my ignorance of the terminology is both deliberate and defiant – you should close it. You don’t leave your front door open, you don’t tell everyone where you live, you don’t publicise your email address unless you’re looking for trouble, and if you have reason to suppose you might be threatened, badgered or abused by phone, you ensure your number is ex-directory.
This isn’t cowardice. It’s sensible precaution. Before email replaced paper mail I regularly received abusive letters, some brief explosions of apparently motiveless hate, others angry I had found something funny that their senders hadn’t, most taking issue with my politics, though I have no politics. One, a card written in spirals of faeces, sperm and blood, promised biblical retribution. So when email became the medium of choice for nutters, I chose not to append my email address to this column. Why invite hate into your life?
I’m not suggesting we play the ostrich. The violence in the human heart doesn’t vanish because we look away, but some of it thrives on the knowledge it is being communicated. Social media doesn’t create it; it does, though, add to its savour.
Make no mistake: turning the tables might look like striking back, but in the end the public shaming of the troll on Twitter itself is just another way of playing along. So why keep the portals to our privacy wide open? For what? Reader, what is lost if you never tweet again?
And then I remember the toaster. If we are to blame the medium for what’s done on it, must we charge the toaster with inciting lust? And are we therefore to forswear toast?
After much consideration, this is my answer: if toasters were suddenly to turn vengeful, showing up in our bedrooms in an elemental rage and issuing threats and curses, then yes, we might indeed decide that toast is bought at too high a price. There’s always something else to eat. And some other means of wittering on about it to people we don’t know and who want us dead.
In God’s name, why?
It was a night made for eating out. The sun still hot but the glare from the Mediterranean no longer angry, the Promenade des Anglais given over to people perambulating rather than exercising, remembering that their bodies are primarily sites of pleasure, not denial. No more early-morning joggers ruining the golden hour before breakfast with their strenuous example. Now, all was well with the world again, and my only thought a bottle of Bandol. Then I saw her.
I didn’t have to stare. I could have looked away. I had a companion to converse fondly with, a menu to study, and a bread roll of the sort that only the French can bake to pull apart, a bread roll that creaks and whimpers the way mandrakes are said to do when you rip them from the ground. But there was something so magnificently heroic about the insouciant carefulness with which she negotiated the steps into the garden, on heels that would have doubled my height had I been wearing them; something so alarming about the upward curl of her lips, as though she’d ordered the surgeon to give her a mouth with which she could blow kisses at her own eyeballs – eyeballs too far apart for her to see in any direction but sideways, like an alligator; something so heartbreaking about the way she tossed her hair, a girl again, prior to sitting herself down on buttocks from which the flesh had been so sedulously suctioned, sliced or dieted away that even over the creaking of the bread you could hear her little bones crunch, that I had no option but to lean over and say something to her.
‘Excusez-moi, madame, but in the name of God, why?’
Naturally, I didn’t say anything of the sort. She was none of my business and a woman has a right to look the way she wants to look. But was it really she who wanted to look like that, or was it the man she’d joined, the man I took to be her husband? It’s hard to believe that so many years after The Female Eunuch there remain women willing to mutilate themselves to stay in favour with their men. And in truth there was no knowing, on this occasion, for whose behoof this valiant woman had subjected herself to such a drastic assault. But if it was to interest the man, then it had failed. He had been sitting in a sort of rich man’s slouch, his feet outstretched in pale pink loafers – no socks – a lazily replete expression on his face, as though he knew life had no new thing to offer him, only more dying sun and flat champagne and, I am afraid to say – all that remodelling notwithstanding – her. He didn’t raise his eyes to her when she arrived. Perhaps he knew she wouldn’t be able to see him with her repositioned vision anyway. Or perhaps he knew an embrace was out of the question for fear her face would deliquesce in the heat of the propinquity.
She didn’t please him, anyway. Reader, she couldn’t have pleased him less. If it had been her intention to fool him into thinking she was twenty-one instead of – and I’m guessing conservatively – seventy-one, she had wasted her money and her time. Not impossibly she had wasted her natural beauty too. For if there’s madness in a young woman’s paying to be disfigured, there is tragedy in an older woman’s doing it. We all age differently, I grant you. But it is a cruel fallacy to suppose that the beauty of a girl must surpass the beauty of a woman, that the blankness of expectancy is to be preferred to the marks of knowledge.
This, too, I wanted to lean across and tell my neighbour: a face that bears the history of affection can be a lovely thing; the lines of mirth and sorrow that experience etches are more engrossing – and that can mean more sensually as well as intellectually and spiritually engrossing – than no lines at all; extravagant beauty is not the lot of everyone, at any age
, but there is an exquisiteness that even the plainest face can possess by virtue of kindness given and received, by virtue of what the eyes – if you would only leave them alone – have registered, and by virtue of what the lips – if you would let them be themselves – have uttered.
And yet this you have chosen to sacrifice to an illusion of youthful naturalness which resembles youth in not a single aspect and is to nature what Disney’s Dumbo is to a living elephant.
Would you not have thought, reader, that sufficient women have traded their dignity and grace for this furious flower of plastic evil that surgeons call a mouth for others to know now what to expect? And don’t tell me that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that where I see a woman deformed the woman herself sees confidence and allure, for you have only to watch her sit entrapped in her friable cosmetic cage to see that she is mortally unhappy – unable to know how to behave, for she is not a child, whatever her desperation to look like one, and never again to know whether she will be loved for herself or for what’s been practised on her. As for him – the man for whom, perhaps, she’s done it – then let him show how well he thinks it works by having his paunch and double chin removed to suggest vigour, and his dead unillusioned eyes widened to suggest the sweet ingenuousness of a shepherd boy, ideal companion to his new young Sylvan wife.
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