Eros under review

photo by Irfan Demirel on Unsplash

Londoners I’m close to were involved in preparing  hefty volumes of something called the Erotic Review for publication. Their task was simply concerned with  preparing the volumes—just under 200 pages each— for publication, design and other graphic matters.

I was gifted with 400 pages of their efforts that I proceeded to wade through from my prone position at the time like an unfunny clown without  stilts in an unappetising flood of unspiced stew. At the same time I strove to hide the nature of my reading matter from the white coated staff of the pious establishment that buzzed over  me, introducing in my weary mind the insect theme. For these purveyors of care were as attentive as mosquitoes in moonlight and despite my shooing away. Reflected on my state of health and spelling it out on their own  boards, they were the writers here. I guessed at the entry: beware, he’s still ambitious. That wasn’t the bible he was reading.

Onward to a subsequent Sunday I found a couple of these London friends at my bedside. They had taken time from their holiday, an escape from Brexit, to pay me a consoling visit. They were anxious to know what I thought of issue 9 of the erotic review now hidden beneath my pillow. I could hide my usual nastiness that was untouched by illness and said that I got very tired of hearing individuals confessing how eroticism set them on new paths in life.

These confessions were like hearing evangelicos tell how they got Jesus like a very bad cold or like hearing foodies go on about discovering a new diet that defeated obesity and led to eternal life.

The woman of the couple a former actress piped up loudly that I was ignoring the poems of Mutsuo Takahashi that she had set up in the translation of Jeffrey Angles. The other patients in the room  and their visitors were now taking what interest their linguistic skills permitted in our talk. The former actress now issued a challenge. If I was so sure of what should have been written, why don’t I write it. Was I guilty of one of the third millennium crimes, ageism, I hadn’t caught up with? She took the issue from me attracting many stares and turned to page 109 where  she had  reproduced a verse of Takahashi:

beyond the crossroads of eighty

beyond the crossroads of ninety 

should I go mad standing

on the  mountain pass of one hundred

what will become of me then?

Congratulated my friend on the mise-on-page and turned to page 112-113 where the  poet said:

after lust is gone

lust’s memory

still send up its smoke

there  is where 

the pain of old age resides

even after skin grows cold

flesh freezes

and bones crack

love’s grassfire

still smoulders

About your challenge, look at page 110:

old and half dead

perhaps!

but while still alive

one keeps wishing

to play with the young

with life yet to live

I did accept her challenge and wrote the following: always in the feminine—as an old acquaintance. Yet few have ever been at close quarters with.

Two at Prayer

The praying mantis often appears in metaphors. Encyclopaedias sometimes offer a line drawing and books of curiosities might show a photograph. This can lead us to think of her—always in the feminine—as an old acquaintance. Yet few have ever come within touching distance of a praying mantis live and twitching. I have been at closest quarters with an exemplar and presume to take up your time to tell you about it. Allow me to ignore your exclamation of distaste and to get on with an account of the event.

I lay in bed musing, weighing the pros and cons of being alone, when she appeared. At first I puzzled over what seemed an ill-drawn bottle stuck with straws. A drawing came to mind because this first glimpse of her, my praying mantis, was a shadow softly outlined on the wall. I don’t know where the light behind her came from, perhaps from the window whose warped shutter I never managed to close tightly or from the lamp on my table, small as a toadstool and giving no more than a glimmer.

When I turned my head, she was there, straight and, of course, more solid than a shadow. She was praying, upright on the edge of my eiderdown. The moment to say no, get out, not here, had been when I first saw her shadow. Now there was nothing for it but to go on like a good sport with what I had let happen.

Put from your mind that her touch was like the brush of a spider.  There were none of those  stray hairs you see on a arachnid’s leg. If your acquaintance comes only from line drawings, you might expect an untidy fringe of sorts to be an invariable feature of a mantis. In real life, there is no hair at all, but several spurs, rigid and foot-like, toward the ends of her lowest pair of legs. They can best be understood as feet, several toeless feet projecting like brackets at an uncomfortable appearing though in action quite functional angle. Her middle limbs are simpler, their last segment of three both strong and serviceable, a forearm of rough bark, you might say, at what can be thought of as an elbow but one that ends at the wrist.

Her third and topmost limbs resemble nothing so much as the jointed pincher arms of a crab, although more slender, graceful and, I’m pleased to assure you, free of any crustacean malice. They also recall a crab’s arm in being rounded, smooth, hard and as pleasant to finger as good quality plastic or old-fashioned Bakelite. Moreover—and this agreeable surprise redounds to her charm—instead of finishing in a threatening pinching mechanism, these top limbs each end in a kind of mitten whose saw-tooth edges only parody pain, like a playful slap that finishes in a smile.

Could any ensemble be less belligerent? It’s as if a pliers had only one jaw, or a scissors only one blade. The mitten with its several teeth might be seen as a hand if we are not too fussy about finger count. The meeting of one palm with the other in pursuit of the creature’s business has tagged her as  prayerful. But our encounter, I can report, proved thoroughly laic and secular.

By no means spiderish, then. Nor up against you does she feel like the twig arrangement of the line drawings. Both texture and scale seem different in what, of course, may be an illusion in the  half light. The inattentive might even make the drowsy assumption of being at grips with a human being. After all, there are people shaped like bottles. Close up, at any rate—you could hardly be closer—and especially from underneath when you can’t see but only feel her, the miscellaneous assemblage I’ve described becomes a presence with a marked personality. And for all my talk of bottles, her trunk is not cold or blank like glass.

To be truthful, with the light so poor and my mind roving, she doesn’t seem all that different from what  is usually thought of as a woman. In such moments, seen by the thoughtless as basic and unvaried, women do in fact differ from one another. My visitor could well have been an odd type, remote from the statistical mean. Certainly she was wide-awake and active. Passion is, I know, another matter and her busyness isn’t, I admit, the stuff of grand opera. However, to be busy, is a nice human touch.

I’d like to come to a conclusion for you about our time there on the bed, between the wall, the poorly shuttered window and my feeble lamp. Let me put it as a question. Why is this mantis always presented as lacking appeal? Some have gone so far in error as to call her idolomantis diabolica. My own experience left me with a overall favourable impression, and that isn’t something we can say often after the exit of a nocturnal visitor. I’m disappointed she has never come back. In her style, the way she settled down on me, there was something inimitable. But time to finish with words. Far be it for me to portray her as a lazy moth or anything that flutters, creeps or crawls.

Enough. You won’t learn anything more from me. I may be over delicate or puritanical, but I’m tight lipped about how partners perform in bed. Kiss and tell is not my way. I’m not afraid of being called a gentleman. I’ve been called worse. Some have even derided me as a daddy longlegs, just another spinner of webs. What I can assure you of is this. A praying mantis does not always devour her mate after their time together. For it’s obvious that I’m still here—am I not?—lying in the half-light watching  for shadows on the wall.

My friends did not think much of my work in the field as entomologist or as a bug scientist. I countered by insisting that hands-on experience was a pilar of science and that entomology wasn’t only about electronic fly swatters but the vast area of what humans and insects coming together got up to. But I’d had failed in their eyes to meet the challenge and was left in a sterile bright white environment to chew on that failure. In fact thinking on my entomological interlude I concluded that far from pornographic it had enlivened no end my bedridden days and nights. Like  dramatic changes in the weather  brought hope to umbrella pedlars. It also struck me that to issue a similar challenge to the Berkeley blog might  set the juices  of my colleagues there simmering  and stimulate the  productive juices. As it was we produced little commentary to postings and very few sudden free-wheeling contributions. So I resolved once I had advanced in the relearning to walk program to suggest what my friends insisted on, that the erotic belonged to all sorts of humans not only to the subscribers of an overpriced review to decorate coffee tables and serve as W.C reading review. For would not a Berkeley competition in erotic ideas inject new life into our doings. After all The Good Bishop himself was philoprogenitive. So feel challenged.