Erotic iambi of Archilochus (fragments) & Encounter in a meadow (extract)

Erotic fragments

I replied:
"Madam, you mustn't be at all afraid
of ill repute. As for...
I'll deal with it. Don't you be angry with me.
You really think I'm such a wretch as that?
You must have seen me as a low-class churl,
not what I am and what my forebears were.
I know the art of loving him that loves me,
hating my hater and foulmouthing him
with an ant's venom. So I'm quite sincere.
This citadel that you are walking in
was never sacked by any man, but now
your spear has conquered it, yours in the glory:
so be its queen, enjoy dominion.
I daresay quite a few will envy you"

Their nurse brought them along, with scented hair
and bosoms, such that even an old man
would have desired them. Oh Glaucus...

She had a myrtle-sprig and a beautiful rose
that she was playing with; her hair hung down
shading her shoulders and her upper back.

...right through the myrtle-spray.

They lay down in the shadow of the wall.

There is this wall that runs all round the yard.

Every man rolled back his skin...

...his tender horn...

...wet mound of Venus...

Up and down she bounced
like a kingfisher flapping on a jutting rock.

Like a Thracian or Phrygian drinking beer through
a tube
she sucked, stooped down, engaged too from
behind.

And his dong
...flooded over like a Prienian
stall-fed donkey's...

...foam all round her mouth...

They stooped and spurted off
all their accumulated wantonness.

...through the tube into the vessel.

The virgin priestesses
with cudgels drove you away from the door.

Oh fortunate man, to have
such daughters to his name!

...a growth between the thighs...

I won't use surgery,
I know another sovereign remedy
for a growth of this description.

...and severed the tendons of his middle parts.

But the sinews of his wick are ruptured...

I wish I had as sure a chance of fingering
Neoboule -
the workman falling to his flask - and pressing
tum to tummy
and thighs to thighs...
as sure as I know how to start the lovely round
of singing
lord Dionysus' dithyramb when the wine has
blitzed my brains in.

Encounter in a Meadow (extract)

But please, my dear, don't grudge it if I go
under the arch, though the gates;
I'll dock at the grass borders,

be sure of that. Now as for Neoboule,
someone else have her. Dear me,
she's past ripe, twice your age;

her girlhood's flower has shed its petals, lost
all the enchantment it had.
She never got enough;

she's proved her [...]'s measure, crazy woman.
Keep her away - for the crows!
I pray no friend of mine

would have me marry somebody like her
and give all the neighbours a laugh.
No, you're the one I want.

You're not untrustworthy, you're not two-faced,
but she's so precipitate, she
makes friends with crowds of men.

I don't want babies blind and premature,
like the proverbial bitch,
from showing too much haste".

Trans. M.L. West. Archilochus, one of the first lyric poets and ranked in antiquity alongside Homer and Hesiod, wrote such scandalous and scatological verses concerning one Lycambes and his daughter Neoboule it's believed they both committed suicide.

"Photographs of torture victims are often so brutal and blatant that the viewer looks away. It's a reflex. Anonymous x-ray images can be viewed more objectively. The images make the viewer think about the issue of torture, but in a bearable way. That is my aim."

Professor Hermann Vogel has been collecting x-rays of torture injuries for almost 30 years. The project started organically; Vogel had just qualified as a professor of clinical radiology in Germany, and was travelling to developing countries to study the physiological effects of tropical diseases. "I was going through x-rays, and I began to notice that you have to pay special attention to Friday night. In the developing world, that is pay day and if you are paid, you drink, and then violence occurs."

Vogel realised the potential x-rays had for charting patterns of violence and uses of force worldwide. "At first I thought I should create an atlas about the radiography of war. I started to visit regions which had been or were at war, but as the project went on I knew it would be incomplete if I didn't deal with torture, too."

Obtaining x-rays proved tricky. "Victims of torture don't normally get treatment, or are kept in custody until the injuries are not apparent any more. The military regime in Chile dealt with evidence of torture by tying their dead victims to pieces of railway track and throwing them into the sea.

"I had to find other sources. I went to the rehabilitation centres of torture victims in Europe and Turkey, studied international x-ray archives and was sent material by colleagues who knew of my work. I was actually invited to Chad by a new regime which had just staged a coup. We were allowed to use two local hospitals to x-ray and find evidence of torture that had occurred under the previous regime."

For Vogel, the x-rays have a unique power. "X-rays reveal what the naked eye cannot see. A forensic investigation will reveal fractures, foreign objects and needles, but x-rays provide plausibility. Does the story match the pattern of injury? Does the age of the injury correlate with the time-span of when the torture occurred? Does the torture method correspond with the region, organisation, military or militia responsible?"

They also have a practical purpose, and Vogel is campaigning for the EU to accept the use of x-ray for non-medical reasons. "In some countries, x-rays can be used as evidence in court and a few of my x-rays have helped prove that torture has occurred. They are also increasingly being considered as part of the asylum process."

From the Guardian website, accessible here http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/31/x-rays-of-torture-victims. The image shown is of a knee-capping from Northern Ireland - the black dots are pellets.

King Pelican (Extract)

-the character of Edward Lear addressing the character of Johnny

Only recently have I come to understand something that Lord 

Westbury said to me. We were talking on one occasion, I made a 

foolish little joke about ducks, a silly pun — this is it, you see, exactly, 

a pun is no more or less than an irreconcilable tension and really we 

were talking at some metaphorical remove about the American Civil 

War. 

 

 He said to me: “Lear, I abominate the forcible introduction of 

ridiculous images, calculated to distract the mind from what it is 

contemplating.” 

 

 

LEAR laughs, though his distress is evident. 

 

 

 At the time I thought he was being an old stuffed buzzard, but now, 

God damn it to hell, you come around here and ask if I want your 

company and what am I to say? 

Everything I can possibly ever say to you, including this, and this, and 

this, and this, I write it all on your mind. Do you see? I speak, or I 

gesture, or I whistle a tune or blow my nose, and whatever it is, if 

you’re here to see it, it’s something I’m doing to you, that gets inside 

you. I get inside you and scribble on the inside of your brain. My silly 

little cartoon men with broken arms and jutting beards. I forcibly 

introduce images into your contemplation. I have only to lift a finger 

and my finger’s inside you. Yes?

It used to be my heart’s delight to see you in the afternoons, and talk 

about my travels, and sound off about painting, and blow words at 

you and enjoy your pleasure. But ever since I killed those innocent 

animals — those sixty-three creatures that need never have existed, 

and I brought them into the world simply for the pleasure of 

destroying them... Like some blind stumbling God. You see? I killed 

them for my sport... 

 

 And now I’m all but paralysed by my capacity for violence, which 

exceeds all else. I may love you, Johnny. But what a thing to say to 

someone! Surely I haven’t the right to commit such a horribly 

disruptive act? It’s like shouting ‘fire!’ in a theatre! It’s too 

irresponsible.

-Chris Goode

Eroticism (extract)

The flesh in sacrifice and in love

The external violence of the sacrifice reveals the internal violence of the creature, seen as a loss of blood and ejaculations. The blood and the organs brimful of life were not what modern anatomy would see; the feeling of the men of old can only be recaptured by an inner experience, not by science. We may presume that they saw the fullness of the blood-swollen organs, the impersonal fullness of life itself. The individual discontinuous existence of the animal was succeeded in its death by the organic continuity of life drawn into the common life of the beholders by the sacrificial feast. There remains something slightly bestial about consuming this meat in an atmosphere of surging carnal life and the silence of death. Now the only meat we eat is prepared for the purpose, inanimate, removed from the organic seething of life where it made its first appearance. The sacrifice links the act of eating with the truth of life revealed in death.

It is the common business of sacrifice to bring life and death into harmony, to give death the upsurge of life, life the momentousness and the vertigo of death opening on to the unknown. Here life is mingled with death, but simultaneously death is a sign of life, a way into the infinite. Nowadays sacrifice is outside the field of our experience and imagination must do duty for the real thing. But even if sacrifice and its religious meaning escape us we cannot fail to know the reactions concerned with certain elements in the spectacle, namely nausea. We have to imagine a sacrifice as something beyond nausea. But if the divine transfiguration does not take place, taken separately the different aspects may finally induce a feeling of nausea. Cattle being slaughtered or cut up often makes people sick today, but there is nothing in the dishes served at tables to remind them of this. So one might say of contemporary experience that it inverts pious conduct and sacrifice.

This inversion is meaningful if we now consider the similarity between the act of love and the sacrifice. Both reveal the flesh. Sacrifice replaces the ordered life of the animal with a blind convulsion of its organs. So also with the erotic convulsion; it gives free rein to extravagant organs whose blind activity goes on beyond the considered will of the lovers. Their considered will is followed by the animal activity of these swollen organs. They are animated by a violence outside the control of reason, swollen to bursting point and suddenly the heart rejoices to yield to the breaking of the storm. The urges of the flesh pass all bounds in the absence of controlling will. Flesh is the extravagance within us set up against the law of decency. Flesh is the born enemy of people haunted by Christian taboos, bus if as I believe an indefinite and general taboo does exist, opposed to sexual liberty in ways depending on the time and the place, the flesh signifies a return to this threatening freedom.

- Georges Bataille, Eroticism [Marion Boyars, 2006, trans. Mary Dalwood], pp. 91-92.

JUSTINE: Who’s this then? 

 

 Give you a clue. We’ve seen him before. Last 

week. 

 

 She mimes Jesus on the cross with his tongue 

sticking out. 

 

 Actually he’s not normally portrayed with his 

tongue sticking out. 

 

 All right, well, it’s Christ, and... St 

Thomas, and... 

 

 This picture is just over four hundred years 

old, it’s Caravaggio, ‘The Incredulity of St 

Thomas’. 

 

 Can I assume you know the story? Doubting 

Thomas? Who didn’t believe that Jesus had 

actually risen from the dead, right, and then 

Jesus turns up and invites Thomas to, like, 

check out the wounds, guy. And Thomas... 

 

 You see I think this is a painter looking into 

an abyss. Two abysses, in fact. I don’t know 

what the plural is of abyss. I think it’s just 

a bigger abyss, isn’t it? 

 

 I mean there’s an abyss of sexuality here, of 

Caravaggio completely lost in this homoerotic 

moment, the finger disappearing into the 

wound, look, look at the face, look at Jesus’s 

face. He’s totally getting off on this. Isn’t 

he? Look at that voluptuous flap of skin. Look 

how he’s holding Thomas’s wrist. He needs this 

just as much as Thomas does. He has to hold 

Thomas steady because how would it feel to 

feel somebody flinch inside you? 

 

 So there’s this vertigo of blasphemy and 

homosexual desire and Caravaggio is utterly in 

thrall to both these forces and yet at the 

same time the real horror in this picture is 

what it tells us about painting. 

 

 Not just for Thomas but for Jesus as well, the 

proof of his resurrection is not in his 

appearance, it’s not in his image beaming down 

in front of people. There has to be this 

encounter with the body and that means getting

inside the body. You don’t trust the image. 

 

 The wound is a little local glimpse of the 

interior of the body. Its carnality, its 

complexity. It says this is not an apparition. 

This is not a rumour. This is blood and warmth 

and the erotic collapse of the distance 

between us. Only the body can do this. The 

image of the body cannot. The mere painted 

image of the body is, abysmally for 

Caravaggio, not sufficient to dispel doubt. 

 

 More than that. Only the wounded body can do 

this. Or the sexual body. As the wound heals 

the body becomes more like its image again, 

more superficial. The wound has to be open for 

the doubt of the body, the incredulity, to be 

alleviated. So healing becomes a kind of 

forgetfulness. A kind of amnesia. The only 

ways to confront the body faithfully are to 

fuck it, or to fuck it up. 

 

 How can you not respond to that? 

 

-From Speed Death of the Radiant Child 

                                      by Chris Goode

Proud Flesh (extract)

Proud Flesh: "Overgrown flesh arising from excessive granulation upon, or around the edges of, a healing wound." (SOED)


She assimilates all comparison into her like
no-one can seize for a limb; & the milky
way of the colonies has to turn far short

& seep in the nimbus of blue & deteriorating
photo-cells, that starve for the limited
blush of time a comparison would carry

What choice remains for us then but amputate
the nimbus, the diseased limb, how else
our sugars were to imagine or to repine

after the battered torso we'd long conceived
recombinant; pig-ignorant we fly to work
to fail before her, fleet & sound of limb

incorporating music while her ears are waxed
against a suitor's leaning rock we cleave
from clouds of so like her, the fontanel

we could neither hear nor watch nor mutilate
Fatigued by this we dabble in chance
over the foil, scraping free the pounce

disguising ranks of symbols of such aridness
they seem lush, choking earth with eager
compacts for renewal, grist for gangrene:

the readier we are the more we seek the same
atonement, suitable when the shorthand
of the admonished things, these our pranks

frequent her like witnesses, o intense inane
they jostle, even the stars are like stops
that shearing a torso out of fierce love

colonize its phantom limbs to prove her body


- John Wilkinson, Proud Flesh [Salt, 2005] pp. 76-77