Trauma / Rochester

The Imperfect Enjoyment

Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,
I filled with love, and she all over charms;
Both equally inspired with eager fire,
Melting through kindness, flaming in desire.
With arms,legs,lips close clinging to embrace,
She clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her face.
Her nimble tongue, Love's lesser lightening, played
Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed
Swift orders that I should prepare to throw
The all-dissolving thunderbolt below.
My fluttering soul, sprung with the painted kiss,
Hangs hovering o'er her balmy brinks of bliss.
But whilst her busy hand would guide that part
Which should convey my soul up to her heart,
In liquid raptures I dissolve all o'er,
Melt into sperm and, and spend at every pore.
A touch from any part of her had done't:
Her hand, her foot, her very look's a cunt.

Smiling, she chides in a kind murmuring noise,
And from her body wipes the clammy joys,
When, with a thousand kisses wandering o'er
My panting bosom, "Is there then no more?"
She cries. "All this to love and rapture's due;
Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?"

But I, the most forlorn, lost man alive,
To show my wished obedience vainly strive:
I sigh, alas! and kiss, but cannot swive.
Eager desires confound my first intent,
Succeeding shame does more success prevent,
And rage at last confirms me impotent.
Ev'n her fair hand, which might bid heat return
To frozen age, and make cold hermits burn,
Applied to my dead cinder, warms no more
Than fire to ashes could past flames restore.
Trembling, confused, despairing, limber, dry,
A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I lie.
This dart of love, whose piercing point, oft tried,
With virgin blood ten thousand maids have dyed;
Which nature still directed with such art
That it through every cunt reached every heart -
Stiffly resolved, 'twould carelessly invade
Woman or man, nor aught its fury stayed:
Where'er it pierced, a cunt it found or made -
Now languid lies in this unhappy hour,
Shrunk up and sapless like a withered flower.

Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame,
False to my passion, fatal to my fame,
Through what mistaken magic dost thou prove
So true to lewdness, so untrue to love?
What oyster-cinder-beggar-common whore
Didst thou e'er fail in all thy life before?
When vice, disease, and scandal lead the way,
With what officious haste dost thou obey!
Like a rude, roaring hector in the streets
Who scuffles, cuffs, and justles all he meets,
But if his king or country claim his aid,
The rakehell villain shrinks and hides his head;
Ev'n so thy brutal valour is displayed,
Breaks every stew, does each small whore invade,
But when great Love the onset does command,
Base recreant to thy prince, thou dar'st not stand.
Worst part of me, and henceforth hated most,
Through all the town a common fucking-post,
On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt
As hogs do rub themselves on gates and grunt,
May'st thou to ravenous chancres be a prey,
Or in consuming weepings waste away;
May strangury and stone thy days attend;
May'st thou ne'er piss, who did refuse to spend
When all my joys did on false thee depend.
And may ten thousand abler pricks agree
To do the wronged Corinna right for thee.

*

I think some of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester's bawdy verses are packed full of trauma, anxiety and tragedy. A lot of the time, sure, he is the epitome of hideous misogynist privation, ploughing through whores with a zeal that borders on the psychotic, almost as if he was suffused to bursting point with all the phallic, rakish, libertine spirit of the Court and of the age, the cool satiric voice somehow not prepared to contain all the disgust and hatred without the side-effects of reflection, whimsy and sadness rearing their ugly heads. This poem I think is really fascinating, and tragic - a feisty rake prematurely ejaculates and is furious at his bastard cock for failing him at the very moment "great Love" (not just regular whoring) demands it performs its task - and it is very much a performance within a performance, the theatre of ruptured desire in a satirical verse on contemporary base lustiness. I'm reminded of the section in Brecht's Mann = Mann where Bloody Five shoots his own cock off. Anybody dig?

x

Never remember / Anything longer than its own duration

I could not, without instant death
Gaze into a crate at a drained face
Of some person once familiar to me from the water's surface
Into which a man looked who, so I realise, died.
Therefore I am unable to open this crate
Because this fear is in the both of me, for perhaps
I am the Both which has just come about
On our earth's transformable top surface:
A chopped-off batlike thing hanging
Betwixt rubber trees and hut, a night bird
A thing that would gladly be cheerful.
One man equals no man. Some one has to call him.
Therefore
I would gladly have looked into this chest
As the heart clings to its parents.

Given a forest, which would still be there
If no one walked through it, and the very man
Who walked through where a forest once was:
How do they recognise one another?
When he sees his own footprints among the reeds
With water spurting into them, does that puddle mean anything to him?
What is your opinion?

By what sign does Galy Gay know himself
To be Galy Gay?
Suppose his arm was cut off
And he found it in the chink of a wall
Would Galy Gay's eye know Galy Gay's arm
And Galy Gay's foot cry out: This is the one!?
Therefore I am not looking into this chest.
Moreover in my opinion the difference
Between yes and no is not all that great.
And if Galy Gay were not Galy Gay
Then he would be the drinking son of some mother who
Would be some other man's mother if she
Were not his, and thus would anyway drink.
And would have been produced in March, not in September
Unless instead of March he had
Been produced only in September of this year, or already
In September the year before
Which represents that one small year's difference
That turns one man into another man.
And I, the one I and the other I
Are used and accordingly usable.
And since I never gazed at that elephant
I shall close an eye to what concerns myself
And shed what is not likeable about me and thereby
Be pleasant.

Noise of moving trains

...

from Brecht's Mann = Mann, after the newly "reassembled" Galy Gay performs the mock burial of an empty coffin supposedly bearing his own remains after he is (mock) executed by his fellow soldiers.

San Bartolomeo

LEAR

Er steigt herab vom Thron. Er dünkt sich groß.
Sein eigenes Denkmal, so hat er sich aufgestellt
Steht auf der Erde, die sich nackt und bodenlos
Dreht unter dem fleischernen Denkmal, das fällt.

Regen wäscht ihn. Da merkt er: das ist kein Spaß.
Er brüllt, gestreckt auf Leichen. Kein Sarg bleibt leer.
Überm Gewäsch des Narren (Fleisch wird Aas)
Gelächter der Lokomotiven. Er hört es nicht mehr.

(Heiner Müller, LEAR)