It is tempting to link the same fertility rites or, more precisely, the Phrygian rite of the death of Atys, with another beautiful song that begins: «I went down to the St. James Infirmary, to see my baby there, laid out on a cold white table . . . » The reference to Saint James suggests the Spanish Santiago, and a happy intuition led us to recognize this also as the name of a celebrated pilgrimage city. We then realized that we had come upon an uncompleted translation of an Iberian poem. As we all are sadly aware, no Spanish text has ever been recovered, since, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica informs us, about twenty years before the Explosion the religious authorities of that nation ordered the burning of all books that did not have a particular nihil obstat.
But for some time now, thanks to brief quotations found in foreign volumes, we have formed a fairly clear idea of the figure of the mythic Catalan bard of the nineteenth or twentieth century, Federico Garcia, also identified as Federico Lorca, barbarously murdered, the legend goes, by twenty-five women whom he had coldly seduced. A German writer of 1966
(C. K. Dyroff, Lorca: Ein Beitrag zum· Duendegeschichte als flamencowissenschaft) speaks of Lorca’s poetry as of a «being-in-death-rooed-like-love, wherein the spirit of the time is named revealing itself to itself through funereal danced cadences under an Andalusian sky.» These words, unusually suited to the abovementioned text, allow us also to attribute to the same author other magnificent verses, of hot Iberian violence, printed in the Quaternulus: «Cuando caliente el sol su esta playa . . . «
If I may take the liberty, dear friends, today, when spatiovision sets are bombarding us constantly with an avalanche of murky and dreadfully imitative music, today, when the irresponsible bawlers of drivel teach their children songs with absurd words, of recalling the crucial essay «The Decline of Arctic Man,» which describes how an unknown bandleader actually set to music an obscene verse typical of drunken sailors («No, I will not see it, Ignacio’s blood on the sand»), the latest product of industrial nonsense. Let me now say that those immortal lines of Lorca, which reach us from the dark night of time, testify to the moral and intellectual stature of an earthling of two thousand years ago.
We have before us a poem that is not based on the tortuous, labyrinthine research of an intellect bloated with culture but employs rhythms that are spontaneous and elementary, pure in their youthful grace; a poem that leads us to think that a God, not creative travail, is responsible for such a miracle. Great poetry, ladies and gentlemen, is universally recognizable; its stylemes cannot be mistaken; there are cadences that reveal their kinship even if they resound from opposite ends of the cosmos.
So it is with joy and profound emotion, distinguished colleagues, that I have finally succeeded in making a scholarly collation, by placing an isolated verse found on a scrap of paper two years ago among the ruins of a Northern Italian city into the context of a more extensive song whose complete text I believe I have now assembled on the basis of two pages in the Quaternulus. An exquisite composition, rich in learned references, a jewel in its Alexandrine aura, perfect in its every turn of phrase:
Ciao ciao bambina Get
thee to a nunnery
Nunnery, hey nonny!
Come back to Sorrento
As dreams are made on…
I’m afraid the time allowed me for this paper is up. I would like to discuss the material further, but I am confident that I will be able to translate and publish, once I have solved a few delicate philological problems, the fruits of my invaluable discovery. In conclusion, I leave you with the image of this lost civilization that, dry-eyed, sang its own destruction of values, and with lighthearted elegance uttered diamond words that depicted for all time a world of grace and beauty. But with a presentiment of the end there was also a prophetic sensitivity. From the bottomless, mysterious depths of the past, from the worn and defaced pages of the Quarternulus Pompeianus, in one verse isolated on a page darkened by radiation we find perhaps a presage of what was to happen.
On the very eve of the Explosion, the poet saw the destiny of the earth’s population, which would build a new and more mature civilization on the icecap of the pole and find in Inuit stock the. superior race of a renewed and happy planet. The poet saw that the way of the future would lead from the horrors of the Explosion to virtue and progress. Seeing this, he no longer felt fear or remorse; and so into his song poured out this verse, direct as a psalm: «Button up your overcoat if you’re on a spree. Take good care of yourself.»
Just one verse; but to us, children of the prosperous and progressive Arctic, it comes as a message of faith and solidarity from the chasm of pain, beauty, death, and rebirth, in which we glimpse the beautiful and beloved countenance of our fathers.
1959
The Socratic Strip
When she appears on the little stage of the Crazy Horse, shielded by a black mesh curtain, Lilly Niagara is already naked. Something more than naked: she is wearing an undone black bra and a garter belt. During the first part of her number she dresses in-, dolently, or rather, she slips on stockings, and fastens them to the casual harness that dangles over her limbs. She devotes the second part of her act to returning to the initial situation. Thus the audience, uncertain whether this woman has dressed or undressed, does not realize that practically speaking she has done nothing, because the slow, pained movements, delicately underlined by the anguish of her facial expression, simply declare her determined professionalism and faithfully follow a grand tradition now codified even in instruction manuals; and thus nothing is unexpected, nothing is seductive.
Compared to the techniques of other grand mistresses of striptease, who know how to gauge accurately their offer of an introductory innocence, which they conelude with abundant, unpredictable slyness, lasciviousness kept in reserve, with savage twists for the final outrage (mistresses, in sum, of a dialectic, Occidental strip), the technique of Lilly Niagara is already beat and hard. It recalls, on sober consideration, the Cecilia of Moravia’s La noia, a bored sexuality composed of indifference, here spiced by an expertise borne like a penance.
Lilly Niagara, then, wishes to achieve the ultimate level of striptease. She does not present the spectacle of a seduction directed at no one, that makes promises to the crowd but withdraws the offer at the last moment; rather, she crosses the final threshold and denies even the promise of seduction. So if the traditional striptease is the suggestion of a coitus that suddenly proves to be interruptus, provoking in devotees a mystique of privation, the strip of Lilly Niagara chastises the presumption of her new disciples, revealing to them that the promised reality is only to be contemplated, and that even the complete enjoyment of that contemplation is denied, for it must take place in silent immobility. Lilly Niagara’s Byzantine art preserves, however, the habitual structure of conventional striptease and its symbolic nature.
It is only in some boites of the most total ill fame that at the end of the performance you can induce the performer to sell herself. At the Crazy Horse you are instructed, with the greatest urbanity, that it is not considered proper to ask to purchase photographs. What can be seen appears only for a few minutes within the magic area of the stage. And if you read the articles on stripping that enrich some of the publications on sale in the leading theaters, you realize that the nude dancer typically exercises her profession with strict diligence, dedicating herself in her private life to domestic affections, to the young fiance who accompanies her to her job, or, totally submissive, to a jealous husband within impervious walls. Nor should this be thought merely a cheap device. In the bold and more innocent Belle Epoque, however, managers went to great lengths to convince the customers that their divas were insatiable monsters in private as in public, devourers of men and wealth, priestesses of the most unspeakable refinements in the boudoir.
But the Belle Epoque staged its sumptuous sinfulness for a well-to-do ruling class, to whm the theater and the after-theater had to bow, a class who enjoyed the total possession of objects, the inalienable privilege of money.
The striptease you
