Plato or some of his followers might posit the prior or prenatal collocation of souls.
— Does he not also tell some legend of a unity capriciously split by the gods, so that half goes wandering in search of half? But that is a pretty doctrine of male soul and female soul conjoined if they are lucky, which is rare, after an eternity of seeking.
— Male and female are grossly conjoined following nature’s wish that they breed. There is an airier or more spiritual mode of conjunction.
They drank and drinking looked each other in the eye or eyes. Thomas Walsingham said:
— More spiritual? Angels holding hands?
— Holding hands, yes. Effecting more intimate joining. We have bodies, we are not all soul. There is a higher order than what crass nature dictates. Nature does not want poetry, nor music, nor the eyes of the seeker looking upward from the dungy earth. Nature does not want the love that she would call sterility but we could designate otherwise.
— Well, we have known each other some ten minutes and you are already anatomising unnatural love.
Kit blushed. He said hurriedly:
— Unnatural love is a bad phrase. What is against nature is sin, so the religions say. But what makes man what he is is unnatural if we raise him as we must above eating, dunging, begetting, dying.
— Well, these be high or deep matters for a morning cup and a first meeting. In youth is pleasure. (Kit started: someone, perhaps he himself, had said that that previous day or night that seemed now much in the past.) I mean that thought is the enemy of doing. My grave cousin is always saying that thought both makes and undoes life’s fabric. If, he says, he thinks too much on racks and thumbscrews and what he calls the apparatus of the finding of truth then he grows sick. And yet, he says, what is the big conflict but a grinding of thought against thought. Some think that bread can be God and some that bread is bread and God but a hovering thought over it. And some that the Pope is the devil. It was different a hundreg years back. Thoughts change and become perilous. Whar, then, are the things that do not change? In youth is pleasure.
&
So to it again — femures, recta, ventra, ala. Cows ambled up munching roundly to watch, and one left an ample pat in tribute near to their thrown clothes. It steamed to the sun and its wholesome odour was borne in to them on the veering wind. There were enough birds above and about them, flying low since they had received messages of weather change, to make it seem that whirring wings of Adam’s paradise and a jangle of song withal were there to bless them. The scriptures had a lone Adam before that unhandy work with his nb, but what man could doubt that there had been a nameless companion for him expunged by God’s hunger for multiplicitous children to be tormented or saved according to his caprice, hence the machine Or miraculous contrivance of procreation, which pretended love, love being there but a trick? And so as the wind freshened they colled in the finality of their naked coupling among the insects, then dressed, then hand in hand walked to the town, though, reaching it, not hand in hand.
&
And Raleigh opened up a cabinet under his window. It held rows of long tubes, as he showed, curved gracefully and ending in a shallow bowl. Clay, he said, as in Virginia, but here I have one especially fashioned in silver. It glinted tn the firelight. And here is the nymph. From a drawer of the cabinet he took a fair pinch of a herb, strands of yellow, brown, black, and stuffed this in the silver bowl. Smell, he said, proffering. Kit sniffed. Heady, outlandish, altogether new. And now, Raleigh said, hef enlivening and curative spirit riseth in smoke. He took from a pot a spill and enflamed it at his fire. Then he inflamed the herb, the herb smouldered, he drew in smoke and, in a blue jet, emitted it. The aroma sidled towards Kit; Kit coughed gently. Aye, you will cough more when you kiss her. But the cough will be in the manner of a cleansing, a disgorgement of the grosser humours, you may even vomit them up. There is a bowl beneath that table. And then no more coughing, only the bliss of inhalation. Curse it, my talking has doused her. And he refired his spill and relighted. The blue jet bore his words: Will you try?
Kit tried. He held the warming clay bowl in his fist; the fumes crept up the narrow tube. He drank to his lungs. And then his whole body burst in the manic fit. Aye aye, Raleigh said, kicking the spew-bowl] from under. Be not shamed by it. I too when I began. Cough cough, my boy, cough out the rottenness of the age. And then gently draw. Gently but gently.
The one draw was for the moment enough. His stomach settled, his lungs shrugged an acquiescence, but his head danced. His eyes took in a reeling room then bade a stiller image ensue. There sat Sir Walter, calm, drinking in his smoke, saying:
— There is a philosophy in this. As some say the love of boys is the higher refinement of coupling — I cannot agree, being by temperament given only to the enjoyment of women, nevertheless — they say this, I say, meaning that appetite is no longer chained to what nature wills, as with animals, so with tobacco eating and drinking are refined to an essence beyond the reach of gross nutriment. You follow me? I think you do. Hariot will give you a lecture on this at our next meeting.
&
If Christ had known it, would he have transmitted his substance in smoke? The eucharist in a pipe-bowl. He saw Christ an instant, smiling, bending no angry brows. Christ had been called on in that agony now past and not well remembered; the demons had not prevailed. The guilt lay in the pleasure that was not nature’s trap and it was analogous, Raleigh was right, to that other pleasure. To rise above the cry of the maw that bread be turned to blood and bone, of the importunate gentleman of the loins that brats be begotten — was not that in a manner of the conquest of nature, vinegary mother that would pull us down? And to overcome nature was to exalt the soul? No matter, the drawing in of this divine smoke was an ecstasy and men would in time perceive it as a great benison to the world. Why did ignorant painted savages already know it? He drank out his pipe and filled another. Ecstasy to be renewed daily, a pleasure as necessary as feeding, there was the problem, with daily ravishing of the nymph no easy entrance to a Henslowe trugging house. The problem of supply and, brutal irony, the body begetting a need no baker or vintner could satisfy. Raleigh was for now the keeper of many keys.
&
I was at that time lodged with Tom Kyd, a man lonely and timid with boy and woman alike, moaning that his new play did not go well and yet seeking to instruct me in the right fashioning of what he called a decasyllabon. I had left Ned Alleyn because he was to marry and also because he had puffed himself up with fame and gave too many orders. Kit would sometimes come when Kyd was out to woo me to undressing with I love thee I love thee, but I was older and shaving once a week and conning the parts of young men, though this would be a sharp declension from the glory of Bel-Imperia and Zenocrate. I had come to hate the prying paws of the small gallants who came to the tiring room, by wine emboldened, saying What hast under here? — fardingale or stuffed bodice — and a moment only sweetheart, it is my need. So in something like gentleness I would thrust Kit away, and he would shrug and droop but bear small malice. One day I put it to him:
— Why boys, why men, why never girls nor women?
— There is a divine command, Lucretius calls on Alma Venus, delight of gods and men, and it may not be questioned. She commands me the way I must go and ever has, and nothing may be done.
— And why does she, what is the reason in nature?
— It is not in nature, Alma Venus rides all above her, one may say it is a rebuke to nature, we will go our own way nor follow the bestial law of breeding. And thus too we may escape from our mothers. To bed a woman, which I have never done, has a strong stench of incest.
— You like not your mother?
— I love her as a son should, but best from afar.
— You may be what you wish, Nashe said, unnasally, since his handkerchief was at his hatchet nose. We are not here to exhort you to orthodoxy. We are merely at work on commissions. Your name would draw crowds and please their grades.
&
— Listen to me, Kit said, and he knew, saying it, that the me to which he referred was one of a parcel of many within, and he felt a manner of despair or at least desperateness in not knowing well which was to speak. It is easier to believe in this Church of King Henry’s founding than not to. I believe, I believe, your worships, and the question of what is belief never arises. So, with this thin surcoat of belief, we may do our work and drink our drink and never be molested. To question faith is a grave matter, and here you are bringing your clowns in. An atheist at least has set working the engines of thought, and it is no easy matter to throw God out of his heaven. The truth is that there are no atheists, since who would be so witless as to assert what he cannot prove? Simply and in all candour we must shrug and say we know nothing. God’s book is man’s book, since God handles no quill. These bishops with their termagant wives throw the book at us and say believe because I demand belief and by God I will burn or hang and quarter you if you do not. By what authority is it affirmed that Martin and his Calvinists are wrong? How has the Church that Peter founded in Rome become so suddenly the Scarlet Woman?
— As I said, Lyly nodded, your Faustus is a work of the old
faith. And by atheist we may mean you reject the Church of the Reform.
&
I was charmed. Laurigera stirpe prognata Delia, Sidnaei vatis Apollinet genuina soror I had written. This was the dedication to Tom Watson’s Amintae Gaudia, writ for her but yet to be printed, my Latin is better than Tom’s but not better than hers. She disliked my play for Pembroke’s Men. Too much sodomy, she said, and not enough history. I cut out the buggering of King Edward with a branding iron. Well, she shall have history without sodomy, if it can be found.
No comments:
Post a Comment