the loathly lady
Friday 18 May 2007 | I like a cookie
She’s a common metaphoric device in medieval romance, the loathly lady. Gawain usually has one or two to deal with, historically; they come on all monstrous and haggard, and demand a kiss (or more) in exchange for some assurance of knightly safety or power, or important piece of information. Sir Gawain being, of course, the eidos of gallantry, he always overlooks the lady’s loathly exterior (usually a combination of ancient with diseased and/or just plain plug-ugly) and grants the sexual favor, whereupon the hideous lady is transformed into her beautiful youthful uncurséd self. She then tells the dazzled Gawain that she can be beautiful only half the day, and would he rather it were at night, when she’s with him, or in the daytime, around other people? Gawain’s inspired response liberates her from the curse forever.
Metaphoric, I claim, in a Jungian sense; for when we’re loved unconditionally, our true beauty can become available, gleam forth. In Chretién de Troyes she’s also a quest-bringer, the loathly lady; her physicality symbolically locates the Sangreal where it belongs: hidden in/as our bodies, the real containers of the sacred. Think of the Grail in its Indiana Jones incarnation, if you can stand to do so; it’s not an ornate golden or silver goblet, but a rough wooden carpenter’s cup.
Last night the Brujo offered me a backrub. In the morass of my undermedicated state I felt skittish, because it’s too unselfish—I don’t get to do anything, don’t get to reciprocate, just have to lie there and feel, like, what, I don’t know, pleasure or something?! Hello, I’m Protestant? Simply outrageous. And I was also worried about the self-inflicted scars on my back, an area I tend to conceal from the world—would he be revolted, repelled? T-shirt off, thoughts forgotten as I melted into the mattress. Gentle and merciless pianist’s hands beneath which I whimpered. One thing led to another, and those things led to yet more. (In trying to write this much I feel all flustered and ridiculous.) When I worried aloud, inanely, his hoarse reply. I don’t want one thing that you don’t give me. Assorted hysterical paroxysms later, holding and listening to the rain. “We could do that for Duology II,” he mumbled into my neck. I laughed. “Babe, they can’t afford us.”
So this brain, the same one that gives me no end of trouble, is ineluctably housed in this body, which gives me direct access to no end of love. In a matter of hours I went from tangled and scarified and loathly to humming and brushing my teeth barefoot in the Brujo’s soft, worn, appropriately black Miles Davis t-shirt (”Miles would be proud to cover the breasts of such a fine white woman!”). And Shugetsu wrote such an elegant, sweet calligraphy to accompany the flower someone left outside her door—beauty without and beauty within. I’m not sure, in case you hadn’t noticed, what it is I’m trying to say here. Only that the rain broke open and this morning is cool and sunny and bright. I may work on websites today, or I may not. I may just sit outside in the back garden in the sun and see what it feels like not to believe myself permanently loathly. The lifting, perhaps, of an altogether different curse.
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