Darling (21 page)

There are substances that throw down roots in the human organism, roots that coil themselves around the little bones and dip their sharp nibs into the chemicals of the brain to draw up treaties, dependencies, visionary loans. Most of these substances are brown—brandies, whiskies, the sedimentary wines, opium, marijuana, coffee, tea. Among them the most delightful is tobacco.

Ass-eared leaves are harvested in sultry climes, cured to a golden brown, graded, then cut to various uses—pipe, cigar, cigarette, snuff. To ingest a lungful of tobacco smoke is to open an artificial bay, a small space of time, a monastery of privacy between one moment and the next, between one marriage and the next, between one sentence or one task and the next. It is unfortunate
that tobacco is ultimately destructive of the organism it so befriends. One's lungs become a shambles.

“You don't mind the smell of strong tobacco, I hope?” asks Holmes.

•   •   •

“Take the invalid to the sun,” the gray doctor in nineteenth-century novels urges. The tubercular poet, against his better judgment, goes to Rome.

In the twentieth century, among light-skinned populations, a vogue for tanning began with the dawning age of tourism. The novelist goes to Mexico. Applying brown to oneself is different in its implication from painting health on one's cheek because it risks a confusion of racial and class identity. For the tourist, tan may be a mark of leisure. But tan is also the laborer's mark. In Cairo as in Quito, brown cloaks the distinction between the white-suited visitor and the company of criers and beggars in the bazaar.

In D. H. Lawrence's short story “Sun,” a New Yorker named Juliet travels to Greece for a sun cure. Juliet takes the sun for a lover: “Sometimes he came ruddy, like a big, shy creature. And sometimes slow and crimson red, with a look of anger.” Juliet's cure extends to a gardener she sees. She describes the gardener's attraction as “his vitality, the peculiar quick energy which gave a charm to his movements, stout and broad as he was.” The reader is led to recognize the gardener as an amorous surrogate of the sun.

•   •   •

When the gods of Olympus sport with mortals, they take on the disguise of flesh:

Venus:
You see that girl?

Cupid:
(A vacant stare.)

Venus:
I overheard someone on the colonnade remark she has beauty to rival Venus.

Cupid:
Surely not, Radiant Mother.

Venus:
Oh, Radiant Mother! You know as well as I do the degenerates prefer that greasy sort of ripeness. Look how she goes. Inside, you know, they are nothing but filth. I want you to shoot her.

Cupid:
She looks harmless.

Venus:
She paints up, too. I've seen her at it with a turd of beetroot. They eat filth, they think filth, they make filth. They die in filth. Have you ever smelled one?

Cupid:
Of course I have.

Venus:
Do you like the smell of them?

Cupid:
Not particularly. Apollo says you get used to it.

Venus:
Apollo should keep his nose in the clouds where it belongs. I'll bet you've never smelled them when they cut their hair.

Cupid:
Do they cut their hair?

Venus:
Otherwise they look like complete monkeys. They have hair in the most comical places.

Cupid:
Apollo says it tickles.
If they are so beastly why do we wear their parts?

Venus:
For sport. For butter. For fun. Form is nothing to us. Clouds. Trees. Thin air if we feel like it.

Cupid:
Thin air is boring.

Venus:
I want you to shoot an arrow through her big fat tit. The little idiot will fall head over heels for the first hairy back that flutters by.

•   •   •

“Lend me thy cloak, Sir Thomas.” The brown cape conceals the beggar-king, the sacred heart, the anointed head. Shakespeare's King Henry wraps himself in Thomas's plain cloak on the eve of
the Battle of Agincourt in order that he might move unrecognized among his men. The twin device of disguise and epiphany is as old as the hills. Biblical Joseph is reunited with his jealous brothers. Richard the Lionheart reveals himself to Robin Hood. Caesar to Cleopatra. Arthur to Guinevere. Beast to Beauty. Cyrano to Roxanne. “It is I. All along, it was I.”

Disguise is an attribute of the gods; modesty is not. The God of the Desert is an exception. The God of the Desert instructs that Aaron and his sons, and all priests following from their seed—“a law for the ages”—are to wear breeches of linen during sacred rites “to cover the flesh of nakedness; from the hips to the thighs they are to extend” in order that priests not flash their humanity during the gruesome work of the slaughter of beasts.

God's prescription seems only to confirm something that we already feel about ourselves, about our human nature, as represented by the flesh of nakedness from our hips to our thighs: that our private parts, as we call them, though definitively generic, are made of special stuff; are neither purely reflexive nor completely governable. We are confused. We are profoundly crafted.

The revelation of our nakedness to strangers, to lovers, has the potency of sacred awe, much like the prelude to a sacrifice. A hush falls upon the audience of a movie or a play when an actor disrobes. But when an actor appears suddenly naked, as if in the midst of life, the audience will laugh at its own embarrassment.

Even in a doctor's office, the moment of physical epiphany may be accompanied by a sense of awe. Young doctors of the twenty-first century resort to an Edwardian deportment at such times that one might call priestly. The patient feels herself a sacrifice.

In 1925, at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, American
dancer Josephine Baker appeared nude in a series of good-natured anthropological parodies. I quote Janet Flanner, the Paris correspondent for the
New Yorker,
who was there:

[Baker] made her entry entirely nude except for a pink flamingo feather between her limbs; she was carried upside down and doing the split on the shoulder of a black giant. Mid-stage he paused . . . swung her in a slow cartwheel to the stage floor, where she stood . . . an unforgettable female ebony statue. A scream of salutation spread through the theater. Whatever happened next was unimportant.

Calvin Klein's notoriety came with his advertisements for male underwear in the 1980s. Klein employed the waxed, darkly tanned nude as both mannequin and garment. Underpants were a way of affixing a label to a body. Put on the garment and you put on nakedness. The notion that one's body could be worn (and not only one's body but one's tan, and not only one's tan but one's vacancy) became a conceit for a number of other designers, notably Gianni Versace. After Versace was murdered in Miami, frequent patrons of his Greco-carny boutiques received a memento mori in the mail—an album of flamboyant Versace designs interspersed with photographs of models wearing nothing at all.

Preindustrial populations wore furs and skins from practical necessity. Pelt was collateral to meat. We no longer need animal skins for warmth. In the city, therefore, a fur coat becomes a complicated conceit. Luxury merges with transgression. The socialite inhabiting the skin of a wild animal is enacting Beauty and Beast at once. If one were to play the conceit to the end, as Princess Diana famously did, one might visit one's reluctant paramour late at night wearing a fur coat, a diamond necklace, and nothing more. Queen and Huntress.

Long after Adam and Eve imagined they could hide from God, long before Princess Diana masqueraded as a predator, Queen Marie Antoinette dressed as an opéra comique shepherdess. The French speak of
nostalgie de la boue,
not with specific reference to
La Petite Ferme,
but applicable. Literally,
boue
is muck. What a splendid paradox, that a high civilization should cultivate nostalgia for a time opposite or before or below—a descent into uncivilization. Marie Antoinette as
boue
-peep, tripping through her Meissen barnyard, a little poetic fantasy within a political fantasy, within a world of filth.

•   •   •

We associate death with blackness because, I suppose, when we close our eyes we can't see. As to actual death, the death of a point of view—who can say? Death might well be as blue as a robin's egg. In the light of day the process of aging—and death itself—is brown. To the observer, death is brown. Time is bacterial progress.

In the cleaned, “original” version of the Sistine ceiling, Adam appears pale, beautiful, dead—his eyes do not yet see. The weather is fine. The void is a pale spring afternoon. Earth is green. The divine hubbub looks like the interior of a luxury sedan. God is massively potent and in love. Unborn Eve is tucked under God's arm, obviously a gift for the darling boy; she could be a nymphet on the cover of a Murdoch tabloid.

Sometime late in the 1980s, Pope John Paul II was consulted by a Cardinal Prefect concerning a proposal to clean and restore the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. In the 1980s, John Paul was a vigorous, handsome man. In the 1980s, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel had been left to darken for four hundred Roman summers. Michelangelo's Creation and Judgment wore the shadows of so many years.

At the apex of Michelangelo's grand design, God reaches toward
Adam to enliven him. In the damaged version, the four-centuries-old sinful version, Adam is brown, a figure of exhaustion; Adam seems to sink back into the earth upon which he reclines. God is prognostic, and his half shell of celestial hubbub shudders in turbulence. There are cracks in the void.

The Nippon Television Network of Tokyo proposed to pay for the restoration of the Sistine frescoes in exchange for exclusive rights to photograph the restored ceiling and walls. It took Michelangelo four years to paint the Judeo-Christian epic. It required more than double that time for the frescoes to be cleaned. Conservators used cotton swabs to apply distilled water to an acre of shale-like cloud. The Vatican installed an air-filtering system to circumvent any future deterioration of heaven.

In February of 1820, John Keats, aged twenty-five, suffered the first hemorrhage of his lung, losing eight ounces of blood. He left damp England on the urgent advice of his physician. By November he was living in Rome with Joseph Severn, a young painter who had accompanied him on his journey and who stayed on to care for him. Keats had a relapse in December and fell gravely ill. Keats forbade Severn to wish for a return of spring. Keats prayed each evening would be his last on earth and wept with each rising sun.

As a young man, Karol Wojtyła had been a playwright and actor of parochial repute. When Wojtyła became John Paul II, he became one of the great theatricals of his century. He played the Pope for the age of television. By the time he died in 2005, half the people alive on earth had known no other in the role. The planet his audience, the Pope seemed never without an intuition of the camera. Kissing the tarmacs of airports!

Those for whom decorum is a religion scorned the theatrical vulgarity of some of the trappings of John Paul II's papacy—the
Pope-mobile, for example. But the planet loved it. The Pope-mobile served John Paul, as did the pop music, the lights, the windjammer chasubles, the stadium masses modeled after rock concerts.

During the final years of his papacy, John Paul II lost control of his person to Parkinson's disease; his speech, his movements, slurred.

Young Mr. Severn drew Keats in his bed—
28 January, 3 o'clock, morning: drawn to keep me awake; a deadly sweat was upon him all this night
. The sketch conveys the very smell of the night's ordeal. Keats's hair is damp on his forehead and cheek; his face is sunken; closed lashes darken the hollows beneath his eyes. The brown penumbra that circles John Keats's prone head seems to draw ink from his drowning breath. After the poet's death, Severn corrected his sketch to publish it as the formal pieta:
Keats on his deathbed, February 23, 1821
.

In her last decade, when the famous legs came unstrung, when the famous face could no longer be repaired, Marlene Dietrich hid herself from the eyes of the world. She became a prisoner of our memory of her face on the screen. She closed the drapes of her apartment on the Avenue Montaigne. John Paul II was the cannier theatrical. He was willing to portray suffering—dragged as he was through St. Peter's on a wagon, in a pointed hat, drooling. He found the spotlight. Here was Lear, here was Olivier; here was Samuel Beckett.

The Pope's last stage was his bedroom window, a perfect proscenium: The curtain opened. The old man was wheeled into the light of the open window to utter a benediction—his arm flailing uncontrollably, clutching his forehead in a simian gesture, his mouth opening and closing in tortured silence. The microphone was quickly withdrawn. The curtain began to close as the figure receded.

At the end of his life, in great bodily pain, Saint Francis had an intimation that he dwelled, on earth, already in paradise. Francis composed a summation, a prayer he called the Canticle of Brother Sun, wherein he commended and blessed his familiars:
Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire, and Mother Earth who nourishes and rules us
. As he lay dying, Francis welcomed one final aspect of Nature to his Canticle:
Be praised, my Lord, for our Sister, Bodily Death, whom no living man can escape.

Toward the end of his short life, Hamlet, in a characteristically dark humor, traces for Horatio the ignoble decline of great Alexander. As thus:

Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer barrel?