on romance, bipartites, and other saints
Plastic surgery, sapphic erotic verse, surrealism, tweed, a documentary by Marie Losier, and Rupert Thomson's Never Anyone But You.
11 Feb 23 | Vol 2 Issue 4
It seems I will never write the great post on the three ages of magic that lurks in the recesses of my mind. Perhaps dark forces are preventing me from completing it. This week sees it derailed by love. Oh, I see what you did there, you may think, it being Valentines and all this week. But love got there long before.
I propose a new patron saint of romance. Albeit one who probably doesn't immediately spring to mind. Not Harry Styles. No, not Barry White. Not even Lana Del Rey and her wounded heart. I'm nominating a purveyor of art terrorism, and, to make more sense of the opening paragraph, a leading practitioner of modern magick.
If love is what we speak of, let's start with a poem.
Ah me, if I grew sweet to man
It was but as a rose that can
No longer keep the breath that heaves
And swells among its folded leaves.The pressing fragrance would unclose
The flower, and I become a rose,
That unimpeachable and fair
Planted its sweetness in the air.No art I used men's love to draw;
I lived but by my being's law,
As roses are by heaven designed
To bring the honey to the wind.Ah Me, If I Grew Sweet To Man, 1893, Michael Field
I asked Anne if she knew of Michael Field. She hadn't. Anne likes poetry. I like pop lyrics.
I am surprised Michael Field isn't more widely known. Admittedly the poetry is rather schmaltzy in the Victorian style, but still, I'm surprised Michael Field aren't more widely known. Didn't you just say that? And you’ve got your tenses wrong, aren't is plural.
Yes. For Michael Field is a bipartite name for two lovers, Katherine Harris Bradley and her niece Edith Emma Cooper. Again, yes. You read that right — aunt and niece lesbian lovers. In Victorian times.
Note I'm deliberately avoiding the term pseudonym or nom-de-plume for Michael Field. No doubt while being useful for concealing their actual relationship, their use of a single name for them both went far beyond hiding from Victorian moral scorn.
Katharine the aunt, was known as Michael to her friends, Edith the niece as Henry or Field. Friends collectively referred to them as the Fields, the Michaels or the Michael Fields. Aside from the poetry they wrote 28 volumes of diaries together, as a single voice — that of Michael Field, and said they frequently couldn't tell who had written which sentence. They intended to live as a single co-joined identity. They were also pagans. They may have worshipped their dog. [1 ]
A good deal of their work is, for the time, sapphic erotica. Reread their poem above in light of discovering the authors’ identities. For the time, fairly steamy sappho stanzas. They wrote a volume of poetry subverting the male gaze of classical paintings. Transforming Correggio's Venus from the Goddess of love and desire to a mother figure. Although the site GradeSaver appears to still be amusingly unaware of the true nature of our authors' reality… "In his poetry, Field focuses largely upon romantic love. He pursues his lovers as if these women are something alien from himself. He sees them as desirable because they are different from him."
They were outed by Robert Browning, either as a curious but intrusive fan, or a lifelong friend, depending on which account you read. I've included some links in the footnotes. Theirs is a fascinating love story, they deserve greater fame. [2 ]
The campaign to have them honoured on a bank note starts here. Or a stamp at least. Two stamps. Or should that be one stamp. Or two half stamps.
Two honorary mentions. Or four. Since we're talking bipartites.
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. Honorary since they kept their separate names, but meriting inclusion for hardcore romance. Meeting at the ages of seventeen and fifteen, they worked together all their lives. Oh, Claude and Marcel were also both female. Born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob and Suzanne Alberte Malherb respectively. They moved in Parisian surrealist circles, so unlike Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper they had no need to hide behind a male persona to gain serious critical attention. Half fish, half burning giraffe being all the rage then. Their adoption of men’s names was a deliberate act expressing gender fluidity.
They weren’t aunt and niece, they were step-sisters. Sorry to disappoint, it’s not as salacious as that initially sounds. The reality being their respective parents married post the couple meeting. Reports though say they did revel in their status of being both lovers and related.
Definitely enough to warrant inclusion you probably think, but no! There’s more. They also fought the Nazis. As you do. Why the fuck did it take until 2018 to name a street after them one has to ask.
After flitting around avant garde Paris they moved to Jersey. Which was then promptly occupied by Nazis. In retaliation they started producing surrealist propaganda, distributing it secretly to the stationed troops. Eventually caught, they were sentenced to death. Had the island not been liberated in the nick of time they would have been executed. At her trial Claude requested she be shot twice, first as a resistor and again as a Jew. The resulting peel of laughter at this final act of defiance most likely saved her life, staving off the firing squad for another day. Sadly she died ten years later, brought on by health complications arising from her time in interment.
The pair are a real-life embodiment of that scene in Casablanca, which if you didn't know was sung by actual French refugees, given parts as extras, as WWII ravaged Europe. [3 ]
Gender bending Nazi fighting surrealists [4 ]. Tarantino really missed a beat there. The author Rupert Thompson however knows what's what, as did David Bowie, who said
You could call her transgressive or you could call her a cross-dressing Man Ray with surrealist tendencies. I find this work really quite mad, in the nicest way. Outside of France and now the UK she has not had the kind of recognition that, as a founding follower, friend and worker of the original Surrealist movement, she surely deserves.
A quick shout out to Gilbert and George. Another lifelong pair of lover artists. No merged identity, but never seen without each other. Also, no one, but no one wears tweed better than them.
Once we have the Michael Fields ensconced on a bank note, next we need to petition the Vatican to canonise Genesis P-Orridge as the Patron Saint of Romance.
Fans of difficult music, or those old enough to remember the 70s might say, there's another Genesis P-Orridge? You can't mean the "singer" of Throbbing Gristle, who went on to infamous obscurity post Psychic TV Godstar, battling for control of chaos magick. Which is where this post began and we came in.
It’s also where magick exits, leaving his occult dabblings for another solstice. Even my friends who are fans of his music have gradually stopped paying much attention to his output — which, being wildly prolific from the use of William Burroughs' The Do Easy method, is understandable [5 ]. Also he was hardly the most tuneful chap to begin with.
Meaning most of us have missed his swansong as the Saint of Romance. Or their swansong using the preferred pronoun s/he.
Their final work being The Pandrogeny Project, and I really do mean their. P-Orridge met one Jacqueline Breyer, by day a nurse caring for terminally ill children, by night a professional dominatrix. Love ensued. How could it not. Well Julian, the last couple fought Nazis, and while their credentials involve inventing industrial music, dying children, and kinky sex, we have aunt and niece single identity erotic Victorian poetry to contend against, why are they the headliners?
How about changing your (plural) name/s to Breyer P-Orridge and spending $200,000 — in 1990s money — on cosmetic surgery. Breast implants, cheek and chin implants, lip plumping, eye and nose jobs, tattooing, and hormone therapy in order to look like each other. To become one in two. To become a bipartite.
We started out, because we were so crazy in love, just wanting to eat each other up, to become each other and become one. And as we did that, we started to see that it was affecting us in ways that we didn't expect. Really, we were just two parts of one whole; the pandrogyne was the whole and we were each other's other half.
When (Lady Jaye) Breyer P-Orridge died in 2007, (Genesis) Breyer P-Orridge continued having further surgery to look like her, and started using the pronoun we to include her into his/her/their corporeal being.
Since that time Genesis continues to represent the amalgam Breyer P-Orridge in the material 'world' and Lady Jaye represents the amalgam Breyer P-Orridge in the immaterial 'world' creating an ongoing interdimensional collaboration.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote "we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art — for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified." Breyer P-Orridge lived it.
Last week I mentioned the couple encased in plaster from Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, who were depressed about not being able to see each other through the eyeholes. I view Breyer P-Orridge as the anti-world, wrapping themselves in bandages to look more like each other.
Although not a martyr I think we can allow heretic, Breyer P-Orridge, the Patron Saints of Romance. Given their commitment I really hope you have your flowers and chocolates sorted for Tuesday.
Recommendations are easy this week.
The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye by Marie Losier | IMDB
It's available to stream on US Amazon. I can't find it on Netflix, unsurprisingly.
Rupert Thomson has twice before been recommended in this column, a third time must hold some sort of record. But how could I not propose his novel based on the life and times of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.
Never Anyone But You by Rupert Thomson | Buy here
I am very surprised that the contenders for greatest love song in lists from NME, Buzzfeed, American Songwriter, and Billboard are all so uniformly naff. And wrong. I'm hardly expecting Throbbing Gristle, but really. All of the picks fall into the traps of thinking a love song is anything including that word in the title, or thinking love is fun. Love is devastating.
Only American songwriter gets it right including The Greatest Love Song Ever Written*, although failing to place it at number one. Fools. (not in love.)
God Only Knows by the Beach Boys
OK. I'm crying.
* Actually I think the greatest love song ever written is 10CC's I'm not in Love, but the woman I married twice disagrees, and says she has proof God Only Knows is the one. I would be a very foolish man indeed to commit to print a view disagreeing with her judgement just before Valentines.
Our cover stars are Michael Field and Breyer P-Orridge, portrayed by the amazing Fatima Fletcher, our artist in residence.
Please show Fatima your love by following and liking every single one of her posts at www.instagram.com/fatima.fletcher, and visiting fatimafletcher.com, where her work is for sale, she is available for commissions.
Her wonderful Ruff Ruff coasters are for sale at fatima-fletcher.square.site/s/shop
This week featured
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Field_(author)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Cahun
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Moore
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_%26_George
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_P-Orridge
Buy me a coffee at www.buymeacoffee.com/vfnIE9P0Ta
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