Applesauce

I'm still savoring Jane Lockwood's food post from last month. Sadly, the Tom Jones video seems to have been nabbed by the YouTube police and labeled "no longer available." But the memory lingers on my retina, on my tongue and other fun nerve endings.

So when I bought some gorgeous purple-black figs yesterday, I paid them proper attention, perhaps for the first time. I ate one really slowly, really looking at the inside of it, the seeds, the fibrousness, the subtle fleshy pink color of the insides.

It made me think of the word "incarnadine," which I always think of in its blood-stained Lady Macbeth associations, but which, it turns out, according to the OED, has the more primary meaning of the pinkish color of flesh under the skin. The OED gives a wonderful snippet of a Lovelace poem:

Whose white satin upper coat of skin,
Cut upon velvet rich incarnadin,
Has yet a body (and of flesh) within

I've got to find the whole poem.

And for the first time, as well, I really thought about D. H. Lawrence's poem, called "Figs," that Jane Lockwood has wisely been trying to call our attention to in various blog-comments over the last year or so. I've always thought of figs as little sacs of seeds -- in Almost a Gentleman, I have Phoebe rolling her tongue around David's balls "as though they were a ripe double fig." But I never really thought about that subtly-colored fibrous inside, what Lawrence writes about as "the flowering all inward and womb-fibrilled."

Lawrence keeps going with the inwardness thing -- getting a little strange, perhaps, about the hiddenness of female sexuality. Still, read the poem. As Shellie once said about Holling on the late lamented TV show, Northern Exposure, it's "got a motor on it."

I guess figs are up there with mussels and oysters, aren't they, as classic erotic food. And pomegranates -- there were pomegranate seeds at the center of the first sexy story I ever read, the myth of Persephone. I couldn't have been more than eight.

Of course at the time, I didn't understand why I kept reading it over and over. Little girl goes out picking flowers, big hot brooding dark guy appears in his big black chariot drawn by four big black steaming frothing horses and steals her away to his gloomy underground hideaway. I guess the message was don't take pomegranate seeds from strangers, little girl -- or you'll go straight to hell, with your big hot brooding dark guy (at eight, I was innocent enough to think that I was the only person in the world who would have wanted to stay with him in Hades).

What makes a food seem sexy? I've been supposing that it's its resemblance to flesh, or to genitalia. But if so, what to we make of the sexiest food of all?

Which is of course the humble, everyday apple. Neither soft nor saclike nor seeded, it's your generic fruit, your basic keep-the-doctor-away nostrum. Perhaps it's the irrevocability of that first crunchy bite that gets everybody's attention. Once you've pierced the bright red or green skin with your teeth, there's no hiding what you've done, no going back.

I like remembering that in The Slightest Provocation, the first food my youthful hero and heroine share is an apple. I wasn't thinking deeply or symbollically about it. One doesn't have to. The cultural resonance has been so obvious, so everpresent, since...

...well, I was going to say "since Eve," but that would've been awfully, parochially, Judeo-Christian of me, wouldn't it? How about since Sappho, of archaic Greece, in the seventh century BC?

And what of this fragment (only fragments Sappho's work survive) translated by the poet and classical scholar Anne Carson, in her book Eros: The Bittersweet:

As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot--well, no they didn't forget--were not able to reach...

The syntax is desire itself -- the apple more unreachable as it becomes more precisely articulated. Eros is in the reach, the distance. As Carson says, "The poem is incomplete, perfectly.."

Incomplete, perfectly. I may have repeated that phrase to myself as many times in the last few weeks as I reread the story of Persephone, a whole lot of years ago. I haven't finished reading Eros: The Bittersweet yet. I'm savoring it, like I did that ripe black fig. I'm finding it the most exhilerating and reassuring book about sex and writing that I've read in a really long time -- reassuring for its telling me that I'm not crazy to think that desire can inhere not only in the meanings but the syntax, that eroticism isn't only a matter of ends but of means.

I really don't know what question I should be asking you here -- but it's my birthday today, so I'm not going to knock myself out for one. Maybe something like does any of this stuff mean anything to you or am I really weird and crazy?

But isn't that the question every erotic writer asks all the time?

One-and-a-half-handed reading

For me the writing process started a long, long time ago, even if I didn't actually begin writing until fairly recently--rather like Flora Poste in Cold Comfort Farm (one of my favorite books) who claims that she's going to gather material and then, when she's fifty, write a book as good as Mansfield Park. I believe voice is something you accumulate from your experiences, culture, and above all, your reading. And since we've been talking quite a bit here about what books we read in our formative years that have stayed with us and made us into the filthmongers we are, I thought I'd share mine.

The dirty book of my generation was Lady Chatterley's Lover. Copies of it, pawed over so much they fell open at the "good bits," were passed around surreptitiously at my all-girls high school (a very old-fashioned place with uniforms, lesbian gym teachers, the lot). All those rude words! All that running around in the rain with flowers in places flowers don't usually go! Pics here are from the BBC's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1992) starring the lovely and talented Sean Bean and directed by Ken Russell, who also directed one of my favorite movies of all time, Women in Love. And here's a very Ken-Russell-like shot from the production. But seriously, who doesn't fantasize about naked men crucified with flowers while out on a quiet afternoon hack?

Trouble is, D. H. Lawrence got women's sexuality all wrong, in my opinion--poor old Connie doesn't have a "proper" orgasm until she allows the virile working-class gamekeeper into her mantrap. No kidding, he and Freud were responsible for a generation (at least) of Englishmen's incompetent fumbling. (Well, you didn't come because you're not a real woman. Of course they wouldn't admit to wanting to sleep with their mum...) On the other hand, you have to (almost) forgive someone who could write this (quoted by Alan Bates in Women in Love--you must see that movie):

The proper way to eat a fig, in society
Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled, four-petalled flower.

Oh, wow. Read the whole poem, Figs, here. There's some wonderful stuff before he goes into a DHL-like rant, as he tends to, and apologies to those who've heard all this before from me.

As for other early influences, Jane Eyre, of course. All that...discipline. I do hope we'll talk about Jane Eyre later--it's worth at least one post and lots of discussion, but I'll share this with you. Last year, some letters came to light that suggested Charlotte Bronte barely escaped court action over her portrayal of Lowood School and Mr. Brocklehurst. You can read the whole story here.


And another book I've always loved, The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, is absolutely fascinating and I'll talk about that next time.

Thoughts, anyone?

And you do know the difference between erotica and pornography, don't you? If you need two hands to hold the book, it's erotica ...