Faun

Most of my academic investigations involve an attempt to sublimate a desire. The desire involves the desire to become a different person, through an idea of another person; I seek ownership of a new character-embodiment, which I craft through the imago of that Other. It’s not that I want to be that person, but I want to be the kind of person who bears traces of the Other, whatever that means. In any case, I am aware of how much my existence appears to revolve around certain men. I am never sure if I should be ashamed or cautious about revealing this, either as an awareness of mine, or as a real occurrence. I don’t know if it makes me seem weak, like slack dough that’s been left out to proof for too long, or like something that simply needs a few more folds and turns; is this weakness part of a process of strengthening, or is it a weakness that’s incorrigible, which leads to bad results. But it all becomes safe when I begin to sublimate. I self-shape, I self-turn, I self-arouse, I make whatever I am less slack, more solid, so that it sticks less to the bench knife, so that it holds itself in with its own surface tension, as a clearly defined round. I have been making bread each week; I began the habit after I met a man who makes bread; I made one beautiful boule before and after we had sex. I shared images of the boule with the one I loved, a different man; I picked up someone else’s form of sublimation and shared it with another. I took the form of this website, which I made as a sublimate of desire for Z, and shared it with D, but it was no simple change of house. In fact, I still write to Z. I write about A for D, and then I write about A for Z. And I hestitate to write, I am embarrassed by the slackness of “Jolt,” I cut it into a slightly different shape, but I am too slack to uproot and revise. I need to allow the mental semen to incubate. And I am also simply not good at this.

These days I’m investigating George Meredith’s “Comic Spirit.” I read my first Meredith novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, last May, so his talent with comedy is not new to me, but this current fascination with Meredith and the Comic Spirit is of the moment, and inflected by new knowledge of what it’s like to experience a new sort of joy. This “Comic Spirit” is therefore a second-order representation of some specific pleasures I associate with D; it’s an ideal of the shadow he’s left on me. The shadow of happiness. The shadow itself is shaded, hard to maintain, difficult to remember, there are no fine details in it; the shadow hasn’t been recorded except in the fact that I can come with someone else I don’t like that much or know too well.

Is it sad, or is it comical, that I attach this shadow to my research? It’s as sad or as comical as it is to listen to me write about this desire of mine. I’ve cried a fair amount in the weeks since he left, but I’ve also laughed and smiled with some blissful happiness, all that plastered over the happiness of the recent month. I’ve cried because I missed my period, which means my body is probably suffused with high levels of progesterone and prolactin. A pair of pregnancy tests with negative readings sit on the table beside me. I realized with some amalgam of tears and grotesque laughter that if I had been pregnant, I could have bent over backwards to keep the child, and hence become something like a terrible mother at the callow age of twenty-five.

George Meredith draws up this Spirit of Comedy in his “Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit.” In a sense it’s an abstract and academic text, but I wonder what he was sublimating as he wrote it, what comedy and tragedy existed for him in his first marriage to Mary Ellen Peacock, who left him for the painter Henry Wallis, and then died. Meredith was twenty-one when me married her. He modeled in Wallis’s best-known painting, The Death of Chatterton, in which the Romantic poet lies dead after having downed some arsenic. The Comic Spirit itself seems like a “spirit” of sublimation, the distillate of whatever’s left behind when one is broken down and can no longer take the heaviness of some traumatic event. It’s this star-twirling motif that gets drawn around the heads of dazed characters it cartoons: traumatic discombobulation that coincides with the most sudden explosive laughter. That orbit of the comic stars makes me think of comedy’s tendency towards circular bands or flat twists, with the pun’s Möbius-like surface which appears double while it is one. Likewise it’s impossible to define the thing itself—the “comic”—without the degenerate pinch of inversion: The Spirit of Comedy is the Comic Spirit, the concept of comedy figured as spirit, spirit of a concept coming into comedic existence. Now, let’s welcome him on stage—

If you believe that our civilization is founded in common-sense (and it is the first condition of sanity to believe it), you will, when contemplating men, discern a Spirit overhead; not more heavenly than the light flashed upward from glassy surfaces, but luminous and watchful; never shooting beyond them, nor lagging in the rear; so closely attached to them that it may be taken for a slavish reflex, until its features are studied. It has the sage’s brows, and the sunny malice of a faun lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle wariness of half tension. That slim feasting smile, shaped like the long-bow, was once a big round satyr’s laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress lifted by gunpowder. The laugh will come again, but it will be of the order of the smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental richness rather than noisy enormity. Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a full field and having leisure to dart on its chosen morsels, without any fluttering eagerness. Men’s future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning short-sightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit, individually, or in the bulk—the Spirit overhead will look humanely malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit.

The activity of drawing out the Comic Spirit is “no more heavenly than the light flashed upward from glassy surfaces, but luminous and watchful; never shooting beyond them, nor lagging in the rear; so closely attached to them that it may be taken for a slavish reflex, until its features are studied.”

I can’t seem to describe what is happening here: it’s not that Meredith is “inventing” or “drawing” or “sketching” or “crafting” his “notion” of the Comic Spirit. It’s more like the figure has come on down to him, that he’s received a glimpse of the Pan-like deity that embodies the unembodied.

Isobel Armstrong notes that this description of the Comic Spirit resembles Walter Pater’s description of La Gioconda, or at least corresponds to it. Meredith’s figure is a “rational, masculinised counterpart to Pater’s descriptions of the feminine face.” And there is, for both, the “same concentration on the eyes and lips, the same hint of transgressive mystery”.

The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea. (Walter Pater, "Leonardo da Vinci," in The Renaissance)

I think Pater’s correct. She does seem like a scuba diver and a trafficker. She’s a sluttish one for sure, like Shakespeare’s “sluttish time.” She sweeps together ten thousand experiences with that promiscuous watchfulness of hers, and with the unmoved enjoyment in her smile. As for the fact that she’s been dead many times… there’s little that’s melancholic in being an immortal revenant.

Sometimes Meredith refers not to the Comic Spirit, but to the Comic Muse. She occupies an important place in the essay, and in his most famous novel, The Egoist, but he doesn’t describe her, not in physiognomic detail. Perhaps it is through her muteness that she speaks. Only once does she truly “appear”:

So, and much so universally, the world of his dread and his unconscious worship wagged over Sir Willoughby Patterne and his change of brides, until the preparations for the festivities of the marriage flushed him in his county’s eyes to something of the splendid glow he had worn on the great day of his majority. That was upon the season when two lovers met between the Swiss and Tyrol Alps over the Lake of Constance. Sitting beside them the Comic Muse is grave and sisterly. But taking a glance at the others of her late company of actors, she compresses her lips.

One of the funniest parts of The Egoist is the bit on the leg.

Of the young Sir Willoughby, her word was brief; and there was the merit of it on a day when he was hearing from sunrise to the setting of the moon salutes in his honour, songs of praise and Ciceronian eulogy. Rich, handsome, courteous, generous, lord of the Hall, the feast and the dance, he excited his guests of both sexes to a holiday of flattery. And, says Mrs. Mountstuart, while grand phrases were mouthing round about him, "You see he has a leg."

That you saw, of course. But after she had spoken you saw much more. Mrs. Mountstuart said it just as others utter empty nothings, with never a hint of a stress. Her word was taken up, and very soon, from the extreme end of the long drawing-room, the circulation of something of Mrs. Mountstuart’s was distinctly perceptible. Lady Patterne sent a little Hebe down, skirting the dancers, for an accurate report of it; and even the inappreciative lips of a very young lady transmitting the word could not damp the impression of its weighty truthfulness. It was perfect! Adulation of the young Sir Willoughby’s beauty and wit, and aristocratic bearing and mien, and of his moral virtues, was common; welcome if you like, as a form of homage; but common, almost vulgar, beside Mrs. Mountstuart’s quiet little touch of nature. In seeming to say infinitely less than others, as Miss Isabel Patterne pointed out to Lady Busshe, Mrs. Mountstuart comprised all that the others had said, by showing the needlessness of allusions to the saliently evident. She was the aristocrat reproving the provincial. “He is everything you have had the goodness to remark, ladies and dear sirs, he talks charmingly, dances divinely, rides with the air of a commander-in-chief, has the most natural grand pose possible without ceasing for a moment to be the young English gentleman he is. Alcibiades, fresh from a Louis IV perruquier, could not surpass him: whatever you please; I could outdo you in sublime comparisons, were I minded to pelt him. Have you noticed that he has a leg?”

So might it be amplified. A simple-seeming word of this import is the triumph of the spiritual, and where it passes for coin of value, the society has reached a high refinement: Arcadian by the aesthetic route. Observation of Willoughby was not, as Miss Eleanor Patterne pointed out to Lady Culmer, drawn down to the leg, but directed to estimate him from the leg upward. That, however, is prosaic. Dwell a short space on Mrs. Mountstuart’s word; and whither, into what fair region, and with how decorously voluptuous a sensation, do not we fly, who have, through mournful veneration of the Martyr Charles, a coy attachment to the Court of his Merrie Son, where the leg was ribanded with love-knots and reigned. Oh! it was a naughty Court. Yet have we dreamed of it as the period when an English cavalier was grace incarnate; far from the boor now hustling us in another sphere; beautifully mannered, every gesture dulcet. And if the ladies were . . . we will hope they have been traduced. But if they were, if they were too tender, ah! gentlemen were gentlemen then—worth perishing for! There is this dream in the English country; and it must be an aspiration after some form of melodious gentlemanliness which is imagined to have inhabited the island at one time; as among our poets the dream of the period of a circle of chivalry here is encouraged for the pleasure of the imagination. Mrs. Mountstuart touched a thrilling chord. “In spite of men’s hateful modern costume, you see he has a leg.”

That is, the leg of the born cavalier is before you: and obscure it as you will, dress degenerately, there it is for ladies who have eyes. You see it: or, you see he has it. Miss Isabel and Miss Eleanor disputed the incidence of the emphasis, but surely, though a slight difference of meaning may be heard, either will do: many, with a good show of reason, throw the accent upon leg. And the ladies knew for a fact that Willoughby’s leg was exquisite; he had a cavalier court-suit in his wardrobe. Mrs. Mountstuart signified that the leg was to be seen because it was a burning leg. There it is, and it will shine through! He has the leg of Rochester, Buckingham, Dorset, Suckling; the leg that smiles, that winks, is obsequious to you, yet perforce of beauty self-satisfied; that twinkles to a tender midway between imperiousness and seductiveness, audacity and discretion; between “You shall worship me”, and “I am devoted to you;” is your lord, your slave, alternately and in one. It is a leg of ebb and flow and high-tide ripples. Such a leg, when it has done with pretending to retire, will walk straight into the hearts of women. Nothing so fatal to them.

Self-satisfied it must be. Humbleness does not win multitudes or the sex. It must be vain to have a sheen. Captivating melodies (to prove to you the unavoidableness of self-satisfaction when you know that you have hit perfection), listen to them closely, have an inner pipe of that conceit almost ludicrous when you detect the chirp.

And you need not be reminded that he has the leg without the naughtiness. You see eminent in him what we would fain have brought about in a nation that has lost its leg in gaining a possibly cleaner morality. And that is often contested; but there is no doubt of the loss of the leg.

Well, footmen and courtiers and Scottish Highlanders, and the corps de ballet, draymen too, have legs, and staring legs, shapely enough. But what are they? not the modulated instrument we mean—simply legs for leg-work, dumb as the brutes. Our cavalier’s is the poetic leg, a portent, a valiance. He has it as Cicero had a tongue. It is a lute to scatter songs to his mistress; a rapier, is she obdurate. In sooth a leg with brains in it, soul.

“You see he has a leg”..!

There are seven paragraphs on the leg!

“Have you noticed that he has a leg?” So it might be amplified.

And the leg has the qualities of that Spirit—with the flashing of light upward from glassy surfaces, the sage’s brows, “the sunny malice of a faun [which] lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle wariness of half tension.” And that slim feasting smile, shaped like the long-bow…the laugh that is finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind… Compare this with the leg that smiles, that winks, that is obsequious to you, yet perforce of beauty self-satisfied; that twinkles to a tender midway between imperiousness and seductiveness, audacity and discretion, between “You shall worship me,” and “I am devoted to you”…

It is a leg of ebb and flow and high-tide ripples.

A leg which will walk straight into the hearts of women.

At some point in the middle of reading and writing about this I started to lubricate. My involvement with the comic spirit was lubricious and oriented towards this cock of a man: I wanted to flick or pelt him with complimentary comparisons, somewhere high off in that low-minded spirit of mine.

Beyond Meredith’s half-smiling faun there’s the whole tradition of Dionysian figures: who is Pan, what is a Faun, what is a Satyr? What can we glean from looking at all the classical represenations of these gods and half-human beings, known mostly for their constant erections? Armstrong calls Pan the “disruptive god of panic,” and the satyr “a double creature of libidinal energy and dissidence compounded with the sage.” I particularly like what Meredith writes about the “sunny malice of a faun [that] lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle wariness of half tension.” And then “that slim feasting smile, shaped like the long-bow, was once a big round satyr’s laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress lifted by gunpowder.”

It’s an incredible, cartoonish, comic simile: the laugh that flings the brows up like a fortress lifted by gunpowder. It’s quite possible not to laugh at first because of how much time it takes to reconcile the image of the fortress and the image of the brows. The conceit is almost too sudden and thick. So instead of bursting out in spontaneous laughter we keep on reading and begin to smile, just as the text predicts: The laugh will come again, but it will be of the order of the smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental richness rather than noisy enormity. Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a full field and having leisure to dart on its chosen morsels, without any fluttering eagerness. Golden richness, mental richness.

My investigations of sculptures haven’t gotten me anywhere, though it is notable that the penises of most relevant sculptures have broken off. Praxiteles: Resting Satyr. I like this sculpture, but it doesn’t tell me much about comedy, and it doesn’t tell me much about my notion of the beloved.

But I want to know more about the relation between the priapism of the Satyr, of the faun, of Dionysus, and other male comic spirits, and the “compressed lips” of the Mona Lisa. And I want to know something about the figure of Flora in Botticelli’s Primavera, the woman I see as “sluttish” because of her grin, because of her dress, because of her scaly lamia-arms. She emblazoned the “March” post I made last year, when I met many new men.

Why is it comical when a man has a constant erection?

Why is it comical when a woman fakes an orgasm, or comes without a sign?

Why do I find it comical and often hilarious when women are represented in Victorian fiction as not knowing what they want, as being overdetermined by their sex, as being fickle, irrational, confused? Why do I find sluttishness so hilarious? “You elf!” I can’t marry you because I get tired o’ my lovers as soon as I get to know them well. What I see in one young man for a while soon leaves him and goes into another yonder, and I follow, and then what I admire fades out of him and springs up somewhere else; and so I follow on, and never fix to one. I have loved FIFTEEN a’ready! Yes, fifteen, I am almost ashamed to say,’ she repeated, laughing. ‘I can’t help it, sir, I assure you. Of course it is really, to ME, the same one all through, on’y I can’t catch him!’ She added anxiously, ‘You won’t tell anybody o’ this in me, will you, sir? Because if it were known I am afraid no man would like me.’

I like feminine unknowns, the shine of feminine ignorance.

From Far From the Madding Crowd:

“Oh!” she cried out in affright, pressing her hand to her side.

“Have you run me through?—no, you have not! Whatever have you done!”

“I have not touched you,” said Troy, quietly. “It was mere sleight of hand. The sword passed behind you. Now you are not afraid, are you? Because if you are I can’t perform. I give my word that I will not only not hurt you, but not once touch you.”

“I don’t think I am afraid. You are quite sure you will not hurt me?”

“Quite sure.”

“Is the sword very sharp?”

“O no—only stand as still as a statue. Now!”

In an instant the atmosphere was transformed to Bathsheba’s eyes. Beams of light caught from the low sun’s rays, above, around, in front of her, well-nigh shut out earth and heaven—all emitted in the marvellous evolutions of Troy’s reflecting blade, which seemed everywhere at once, and yet nowhere specially. These circling gleams were accompanied by a keen rush that was almost a whistling—also springing from all sides of her at once. In short, she was enclosed in a firmament of light, and of sharp hisses, resembling a sky-full of meteors close at hand.

Never since the broadsword became the national weapon had there been more dexterity shown in its management than by the hands of Sergeant Troy, and never had he been in such splendid temper for the performance as now in the evening sunshine among the ferns with Bathsheba. It may safely be asserted with respect to the closeness of his cuts, that had it been possible for the edge of the sword to leave in the air a permanent substance wherever it flew past, the space left untouched would have been almost a mould of Bathsheba’s figure.

I want to be Bathsheba because I want to be charmed.

These circling gleams were accompanied by a keen rush that was almost a whistling—also springing from all sides of her at once. In short, she was enclosed in a firmament of light, and of sharp hisses, resembling a sky-full of meteors close at hand.

Is it side-splitting that I’m turned on when I read this sentence? That I identify with the utterly uncomical position of the seduced female in this scene? That I’m simple, that apt verbal descriptions of circling gleams are enough to make me wet? Just give me a good metaphor and I’m dead…

“the thin shaving of scarf-skin dangling from the blade”… that “the caterpillar was spitted”… the numerical precision of it all: he checks the sword’s “extension a thousandth of an inch short of [her] surface”; she has been “within half an inch of being pared alive two hundred and ninety-five times.”

“Only once more.”

“No—no! I am afraid of you—indeed I am!” she cried.

“I won’t touch you at all—not even your hair. I am only going to kill that caterpillar settling on you. Now: still!”

It appeared that a caterpillar had come from the fern and chosen the front of her bodice as his resting place. She saw the point glisten towards her bosom, and seemingly enter it. Bathsheba closed her eyes in the full persuasion that she was killed at last. However, feeling just as usual, she opened them again.

“There it is, look,” said the sergeant, holding his sword before her eyes.

The caterpillar was spitted upon its point.

“Why, it is magic!” said Bathsheba, amazed.

“Oh no—dexterity. I merely gave point to your bosom where the caterpillar was, and instead of running you through checked the extension a thousandth of an inch short of your surface.”

“But how could you chop off a curl of my hair with a sword that has no edge?”

“No edge! This sword will shave like a razor. Look here.”

He touched the palm of his hand with the blade, and then, lifting it, showed her a thin shaving of scarf-skin dangling therefrom.

“But you said before beginning that it was blunt and couldn’t cut me!”

“That was to get you to stand still, and so make sure of your safety. The risk of injuring you through your moving was too great not to force me to tell you a fib to escape it.”

She shuddered. “I have been within an inch of my life, and didn’t know it!”

“More precisely speaking, you have been within half an inch of being pared alive two hundred and ninety-five times.”

“Cruel, cruel, ’tis of you!”

“You have been perfectly safe, nevertheless. My sword never errs.” And Troy returned the weapon to the scabbard.

Bathsheba, overcome by a hundred tumultuous feelings resulting from the scene, abstractedly sat down on a tuft of heather.

“I must leave you now,” said Troy, softly. “And I’ll venture to take and keep this in remembrance of you.”

She saw him stoop to the grass, pick up the winding lock which he had severed from her manifold tresses, twist it round his fingers, unfasten a button in the breast of his coat, and carefully put it inside. She felt powerless to withstand or deny him. He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it blow so strongly that it stops the breath. He drew near and said, “I must be leaving you.”

He drew nearer still. A minute later and she saw his scarlet form disappear amid the ferny thicket, almost in a flash, like a brand swiftly waved.

That minute’s interval had brought the blood beating into her face, set her stinging as if aflame to the very hollows of her feet, and enlarged emotion to a compass which quite swamped thought. It had brought upon her a stroke resulting, as did that of Moses in Horeb, in a liquid stream—here a stream of tears. She felt like one who has sinned a great sin. The circumstance had been the gentle dip of Troy’s mouth downwards upon her own. He had kissed her.