Peeping Tom to Lady Godiva. Poems I have written #7

Peeping Tom to Lady G. 

Why should I not desire to hold you in the dark? 

To trace, moon lit, the line from shoulder down to hip,

to leave my lonely fears behind, 

a winter coat now summer’s here.

 

Why should I not desire to make you smile

for me, and me alone; to see you naked,

taste the salt truth of your beauty, 

share your body’s unembarrassed joy.

 

Why should I not desire to know your secret heart:

the self you run from in the name of duty? 

Oh lady, with all reverence,

why should I not desire to hold you in the dark? 

----

From Lady Godiva and Me. Copies of the second edition are available from Lulu.com https://www.lulu.com/shop/liam-guilar/lady-godiva-and-me/paperback/product-14qg5qqv.html?q=lady+godiva+and+me&page=1&pageSize=4

signed copies from www.liamguilar.com

Lady Godiva and Me was originally published by five arches press in England. The second edition was published in Australia. 

The Poetry Voice Podcast is 100!

Who would have thought we'd get this far?

And so to celebrate, two readings, both from Lady Godiva and Me as shameless self-promotion.
In the first voices from the modern city. Clicking on the link will take you to the reading

www.liamguilar.com/the-poetry-voice/2019/12/19/from-lady-godiva-and-me-the-modern-city



In the second Peeping Tom speaks.

www.liamguilar.com/the-poetry-voice/2019/12/19/peeping-tom-speaks-from-lady-godiva-and-me

A second edition of Lady Godiva and Me is available from Amazon, the Book Depository, and from the shop at www.liamguilar.com 

Lady Godiva and Me is back in print

The naked lady rides again, with an accompanying cast of earls, churls, ranting preachers, shop girls migrants, factory workers skinheads and schoolboys.

A lightly revised second edition, available from Lulu, and from the shop at www.liamguilar.com

"For the ones like us/ who are oppressed by the figures of beauty"

Reading about 18th century attitudes to the sublime (as you do) I came across this quote:
“The need to destroy the power of the beautiful other is an outcome of her very purity, her separateness from the perceiver’s interest. Thus as Mary Shelley presents it, the purity of Kantian beauty is a deprivation that inevitability evokes the enmity of the perceiver, who wants to punish it for its inaccessibility and distance. When woman is the embodiment of that beauty, she is at risk. (Wendy Steiner. The Trouble With Beauty. P17)

The header quote is from a Cohen song. It could just as easily be
"Beauty is the first touch of terror/and it awes us so much/because it so coolly disdains to destroy us” which thanks to google I’ve just learned, after twenty years, is a misquotation from Rilke.

Leofric and Tom can be read as representing two responses to The Other. In this case the Other is a beautiful woman. (Lady G doesn't have to be beautiful for my purposes, but it works just as well if we play along with that idea).

Leofric, in my version, loves his wife. She is God's gift to him. She makes him want to be better, to honour her or words to some such thought. It's like the two players in a duet where one is perceived as being so much better than the other. The positive and healthy response is to rise to the challenge, to want to play better, and in fact to play better. Leofric loves her because she takes his performance as a human being to somewhere he can't get on his own and because he has the self-confirming sense that the feeling is mutual, that he does the same thing for his wife. You could say he's the ideal adult male in an ideal relationship. A bit radical really, a happily married man who loves his wife and is loved by her. Not many of them in fiction.

Tom on the other hand (who seems to me to be very adolescent) experiences nothing but a revelation of beauty. He doesn't see a flesh and blood woman. He sees beauty with a capital B riding past and when he turns back to his little room that is both literal and symbol of his life, he realises he cannot imagine her there, cannot believe she would even give him the time of day if they passed in the street.

Instead of feeling enriched by his encounter with this Other he feels inadequate. He can imagine that body in his bed, but not at his table, or by his fire...and because of that he feels small and ugly and diminished...so he will quickly start to hate her even though she doesn't know that he exists...and his sexual fantasies about her will sour and become an act of psychic revenge. He is blinded to his own true nature. (Trapped in his little room, he doesn't see that he could just as easily step out of it) and to hers because he doesn't see her clearly enough.. Godgifu, for him, becomes Godiva. Like everyone else, he invents versions of other people, only in his case his version is an impossible ideal that diminishes him.
His ability to see clearly is destroyed.

Cliches, voices, Uncle Charles

Writing a series of first person pieces, trying to covey a swirl of voices, creates problems I hadn’t faced simply writing individual poems. The first piece at the start of the second section, #5 is spoken by a Roman soldier at the Lunt. I knew he had to be there. I could see him, courtesy of those Ladybird illustrated history books, but for eighteen months all he’d say was, ”I’m cold”. In a silly Italian accent.

Sometimes characters simply wouldn’t work. There are a couple of stories I discovered which I wanted to use but they never felt right.

As I listened to my characters, trying to tune them on the page, I realized that some of them spoke in Clichés. The natural reaction is to recoil in horror, imagining the scathing career ending comments some critic (who will probably never read the thing) would make. But if you’re going to create a character, then you have to create his or her mental landscape, and it’s not just the syntax or the dialect that matters. Having them speak or think in way that’s forced and artistic for the sake of being “artistic” or “poetic” is false. Peeping Tom cannot sound like Geoffrey Hill.

So I took the risk with Tom, especially, in his modern versions, and allowed him to speak how I heard him speaking. Some of his images make my teeth hurt. He sounds to me like a lonely seventeen year old. But once I gave myself that freedom, Tom speaks some simple lyrics and he uses images, neither of which I would have allowed myself outside a sequence. But I think it works. He is a cliché, and so is some of his language. But I don’t think you can separate the two. Having said this, I did leave out about half a dozen pieces which just took the idea too far. They might make lyrics for a band, but as poems they sucked.

And then I read Hugh Kenner and discovered the Uncle Charles Principle.

And it all made sense.

Whether anyone reading it will see this remains to be seen.

Curiosity

If you label Tom “a Voyeur”, you label him as perverse and criminal. But I think curiosity is a valuable human characteristic. And the V word blurs the distinction between extremes of behaviors.

The people lining the banks in the picture above have dropped what they were doing to come and watch the funny looking foreigners in their weird clothes. The FLF are about to begin Kayaking the Tripa river in Northern Sumatra. There is nothing perverse or criminal about their enthusiastic curiosity.

Traveling in Indonesia and Central Asia, you quickly learn that terms like private and personal are defined culturally and socially. It’s easy to forget that except for the very rich, it’s only in the past two hundred years in Britain that people have been able to afford the kind of buildings where different rooms are built for different purposes and you could expect to get through your day without someone seeing you doing something that today would be described as intimate or personal.

In some cultures curiosity is still seen as natural. In others, only certain types of curiosity are acceptable. And yet the English speaking world revels in a form of institutionalized voyeurism. Photographers with cameras stuck on a lens longer than my arm sit waiting for THE picture of the highly over paid human coat hanger. Look at the magazines on the rack. You pays your money and you get the juicy personal details and the "raunchy", "revealing".

But I suspect the act of writing presupposes certain types of curiosity too. Writers watch people. Over hear them. It’s about noticing little things and storing them away for future reference.
My version of Peeping Tom is that he’s curious. Not sick. Not criminal.

I’m no expert so I'm not sure where curiosity slips into Voyeurism, which is both a paraphilia and a crime. If you’re walking home at night and pass a naked figure in an open window, I suspect not taking a second look is an act of courtesy or repression. If you stop and watch, in the English speaking world, then you’ve consciously trespassed on a line we draw between public and private. Coming back the next day at the same time hoping to see the same thing is probably a sign of sickness, and having binoculars or your camera in your pocket would be inexcusable.

The issue of writing Tom was therefore complicated. It’s one thing to walk around in someone else’s head, and try to see his or her point of view. It’s harder to do it when the border lines between understandable and repulsive are so vague.

Watching I understand. Curiosity I understand. But voyeurism? Especailly the high tech, premeditated kind? When the landlord is accused of having drilled holes into the bedroom he’s just rented out to a couple so he can install cameras, or when a man is arrested and found guilty of having pin hole cameras in the toes of his shoes, so he can take pictures up women’s skirts and then publish them on the web, we’ve come a long way from curiosity, and something sinister and intrusive is happening.

So far in fact that “up skirting” and “down blousing” are not only ugly new words but ugly new crimes, and moves have recently been made in Australia to acknowledge them as such and make sure there are punishments in place.

Tom watches Godiva riding past. In my version, he’s not a voyeur. But I'm not sure the distinction works.

Peeping Tom

One of the attractions of writing poetry about a historical subject is that you’re writing poetry not history. You can wander through areas where a lack of qualifications is no problem, and make links which no rational historian might accept. I extended that privilege into the world of the paraphilias: Voyeurism and exhibitionism.

Peeping Tom is a later addition to the story. He first appears in the 16th century, although the voyeuristic element has been introduced in earlier versions where it was Leofric who was perversely enjoying the sight of his wife.

The savagery of Tom's punishment feels as though we have slipped sideways into Grimm’s grimmest. Several commentators have pointed out at that he acts as a scapegoat to displace the charge of voyeurism. The man looking at the painting, the reader imagining the story, is not Peeping Tom, is not guilty. The picture is of a nude, not a naked woman, the viewer looks with the educated gaze of the connoisseur. The story of the ride is a tale of courage and compassion, not a work of pornography.

What the commentaries don’t do is reflect on how the arrival of Tom changes the story and shapes the image of Godiva.

The most powerful woman in your world is going to ride past. Naked. Do you look, or turn away.

1980s, Mrs. Thatcher? Wouldn’t look. No way, no how.
2008, Anna Bligh, Qld Premier is about to ride down the road. Nope.

Tom’s act shifts the story so that Godiva is suddenly worth looking at. So much so that he jeopardizes the deal. Godgifu, was short or tall, thin or fat. For all we know she had a face like the back of a shield wall. Enter Tom, and suddenly Godgifu becomes Godiva, becomes an object of desire. Just as people create ideal versions of people they don't know well. No longer an individual; an inhuman ideal.