Loose Living

by Frank Moorhouse

  But I wish to honour the pleasure of jeans, to celebrate the aesthetic of jeans.

  They have a solid cotton density which subconsciously fortifies us against the winds of the world and snags of nature (toughens our outer shell).

  Yet the blue of the traditional jeans is as self-composed and as calming as the blue of the sea and sky.

  The texture of the cloth imparts to us its soft historical murmurs and the strength of the rustic life.

  After laundering, jeans tease us by being tightened by water and seeming for a short time to be too small, but then, on wearing, they quickly resume our comfortable personal shape.

  And let’s face it, retrieving coins from the pockets of jeans is always a pain.

  Jeans sales have been declining since the eighties. My hunch is that exercise clothing has replaced jeans as lower-status cheap clothing.

  I am amazed at the places where I see people dressed in tracksuits. I have even glimpsed them being worn in Australian and US households (when I have looked through windows) as housewear!

  If there is one place where special care should be taken with appearance it is in the home, I would have thought. But then, I am no expert on Cohabitation.

  The rise of exercise clothing sales is especially true of the US, where, statistically, one in three people are overweight and, by impression, about one in twenty is startlingly overweight.

  A recent study blames Mexican restaurants (there are twice as many in the US as there are Italian restaurants), although movie theatre popcorn is also blamed.

  At the Clinic we would, of course, tirelessly look for some deeper disorder of the culture.

  The looseness of tracksuits is admirably suited to an overweight society which needs ‘fat clothes’, and the wearing of these clothes displays a delightful visual paradox: the unfit wear the clothes of fitness. The unfit have also appropriated the footwear of the athlete!

  And the affluent appropriate the clothing of the poor. What a strange species we are.

  I do not see a connection between loose clothing and loose living. I see the tracksuit in the home as a resignation from sensuality.

  The oversized T-shirt also has become the basic item of cheap clothing often emblazoned with a ‘statement’, as in ‘Don’t ask me 4 SHIT’ which I saw a woman wearing in Washington.

  I have then to report that jeans are giving way to chinos on the upper end of the social scale and tracksuits on the other end.

  I wear both chinos and jeans. I once mused whether, when I turned forty, I would have to give up jeans. I now see them as ageless (although I did feel that John Wayne in his seventies seemed hobbled by his jeans—perhaps they were the wrong kind, or perhaps he had fallen off too many horses in his life).

  But the recommendation I will make to the Clinic is this: wearing jeans must be given—nay, requires—as much consideration, discretion and heed as does the wearing of evening dress.

  Jeans are only acceptable when they are consciously worn.

  Silk stockings, however, as an entire costume, may be worn any time, consciously or when unconscious.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  On the DISORDER

  of Resisting

  SLEEP

  Other folks enjoy all pleasures as they enjoy the pleasure of sleep: with no awareness of them … but I, with the purpose of not allowing even sleep to slip insensibly away … found it worthwhile to have my sleep broken into so that I could catch a glimpse of it.

  MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, 1533–1592,

  ON EXPERIENCE, BOOK THREE, CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I WAS asked by the Clinic to examine the grave and widespread disorder of giving admiration to people who claim ‘to need little sleep’ and how this related to the expressions of geopolitical nationalism in our present world.

  The Clinic staff know that I am preoccupied with boundaries now that I ‘live nowhere’ except, perhaps, in a portable office.

  They also know that I use sleep creatively and that I carefully employ the Dormouse method, which I think works for me.

  My sleep pattern is named after the Dormouse from Alice in Wonderland. I work on the postulate that you should get as much sleep as you can whenever you can.

  I have never, though, slept in a teapot spout.

  A feeling exists among those who live urgently that if one could have less sleep, one would have a ‘fuller’ life.

  It is based on the erroneous premise that sleep is ‘not living’.

  I celebrate sleep as an activity. Ultimate passivity. Camille Paglia thinks that in Keats, the nature mother, or the beloved, lives most vividly by sleeping.

  I am inclined to agree.

  I don’t only mean rapid eye movement (REM), which indicates the bursts of nervous activity at the top of the spinal cord (or rapid movement at any end of the spinal cord, for that matter).

  I tell my French colleagues that if they’d ever been taken in their sleep they might understand. They laugh uproariously, believing all Anglos to be open to that suggestion and not only when Something Has Been Slipped Into Their Drinks.

  I sing, ‘Mr Sandman, bring me a dream, Please turn on your magic screen’, etc. My French colleagues laugh.

  The false distinction between living and sleeping is similar to that false distinction made by advocates of participatory theatre who cannot understand that a quiet, passive, listening audience, is ‘participating’. They cannot understand that there does not always have to be a demonstrative physical expression of participation in life.

  When I was teaching Passive Sex (the soft option in the Hermaphroditics Course) at the Ecole des Beaux Arts Perdus I would point out that it was often by no means passive for the person being passive—ask any buggeree (‘Et habet tristis quoque turba cynaedos’— Virgil, trans., ‘And buggers too are found in groups of serious men’, or something like that).

  Quickly, to get some of the more obvious things out of the way: rest is as ‘real’ and as important as ‘exercise’.

  However, it is not true that the body heals faster during sleep. Cell reproduction in wounds when we are asleep occurs at the same rate as when we are awake.

  The supposition that sleep is not living is also belied by the common experience of going to sleep with a problem and awakening with an answer (not that common, however, I agree).

  Some people, when staying at expensive resorts, feel that they are ‘wasting money’ if they sleep.

  Passive input is as valuable to creativity as active input. And we dream. The sleeping mind is actively engaged in great enterprises of the imagination even if the ‘purpose’ of the dreams is still a matter for speculation.

  Sleep and waking are the two dramatically vivid ‘states’ of existence—with a clear-cut border. There is that foolish Chinese proverb about the man who dreamed he was a butterfly, then when he awoke feared that he was a butterfly dreaming he were a man.

  The nonsense of this is that we do feel and live as if there is a clear difference between being asleep and being awake. We rarely confuse the states and when we do there are abnormal reasons causing that confusion.

  I think we all sometimes ask, ‘Did I say that to you or did I dream I said it to you?’ But in this essay I am not speaking of dreams so much, but of the general condition of sleep.

  Which brings me to the nature of trespass, excursion and infraction of what we see as our boundaries and borders.

  At the Clinic, as in every work situation in the western world, we are at present especially concerned with the primary human border: our skin—the first border, the border between us and the external world.

  The skin and outside-the-skin, along with sleep and waking, are the two divisions of our biological self which are inherent.

  Salvador Dali, one of the honoured founders of the Clinic, once came to a realisation that he was listening to himself ‘from the outside instead of continuing to listen to myself from within’. He felt that his boundaries with the external world were dissolving. But that was Salvador Da
li.

  The new laws about sexual harassment are attempts to establish and police the fundamental border of self, especially the skin, against infraction, as are the different codes different cultures have for different parts of the skin, e.g. lips, noses, breasts, genitals, left hand/right hand.

  The skin can signal four key border crossings which are observed in complicated and elaborate ways by the world—gender, age, colour and race.

  These are then extended outwards to identify larger boundaries at the national, private, privileged and cultural zones.

  There are parallels between contemporary perceptions of gender borders and perceptions of national borders. This is called ‘making a lateral leap’. At the Clinic we are at present advertising for ‘linear thinkers’, having now too many lateral thinkers on the staff.

  My dear and valued colleague Dr Morte is fond of saying that, in the end, lateral thinkers we all become.

  Those concerned with gender borders are moving in two opposite directions. And taking me with them.

  Firstly, there are those who are demarking the boundaries of ‘male’ and ‘female’ both genetically, culturally and politically, rigidly defining the nature of the female and the nature of male (conservatives, male and female, and some streams of radical feminists share this position).

  These radical feminists and conservatives part ways when the feminists proclaim the separateness and difference between the genders as alien or hostile, or at least remote, ways of knowing and experiencing the world, and even that the needs, sexual and emotional, of both genders are distinctive, if not incompatible. Although it is interesting that some conservative folklore also demarks the female and male as separate epistimological universes—an attitude evident in expressions such as ‘woman’s reasoning’, which ‘can’t be fathomed’; and ‘to change her mind is a woman’s privilege’, etc.

  Curiously this recognition of radical differences in make-up was commonly the position of sexual guidance manuals which called for heroic ‘consideration’ of the needs of the other gender during lovemaking.

  It seems unfair that there should be a great deal of difference between the sexual needs of a man and woman. It sure as hell points to marriage as we understand it being not altogether the perfect arrangement.

  When I read some of the generalisations (all generalisations about gender are sexist, except the physiological, I suppose) about male gender, I wonder why we bother mating.

  A recent example from the Australian newspaper: ‘…men are unwilling to expose themselves in any emotional conflict or even to admit such conflicts occur, but so easily communicate with each other through the medium of sport’.

  Those men and women who find the opposite sex such a trial should perhaps try their own.

  Or, as an extension of this position, some assert the ‘sovereignty’ of yet other proclaimed sub-gender zones—sub-gender sovereignty (gay rights, for example) is an expression of territories other than the simple heterosexual male or female.

  In Sydney the territorial borders of the gay and heterosexual worlds are argued because of the possible exclusion of heterosexuals from Gay Mardis Gras parties and from gay bars. The Balkanisation of gender is beginning.

  The other theoretical movement in gender goes in the opposite direction. It is intent on downplaying, if not erasing, the distinctions between male and female.

  This position argues that gender is not simply male and female but a single spectrum. That along this spectrum are displayed whatever other hues and categories of sexual use the bodies of males and females might be put. Along with sexual practices go other tribal-like codes of conduct and affiliations which form around these categories of sexual body-use.

  Those who argue this single-spectrum position promote the transgendered states as the preferable norm, and urge the lowering of the gender border. To reduce the argument somewhat, they want men to be more ‘womanly’, and women to display more of the so-called positive masculine traits.

  They want less gender in our lives.

  Although Georg Simmel did once complain that there should be more sexes. You were a card, Georg.

  In her book Transsexual Empire, Janice Raymond nicely puts the spectrum position: ‘The notion that gender has a continuum, a fluid range of possibilities, seems to produce such anxious rigidity in many of us that we ignore everything we’ve learned … about the complexities of men and women.’

  There is another lovely but dreamy position, that all of us have all potentials within us. We only need the right social encouragement to flower. So to speak.

  And so it is with national borders.

  In the European Union we have the fading of national borders.

  Yet in the Balkans we have warring to bloodily establish suppressed borders.

  In Africa we have strife from borders falsely created— inexact borders.

  The US and Australia are preoccupied with illegal immigration—the infringement of borders. In the US there is an effective and felt political position against international organisations which is based on the fear of loss of sovereignty.

  Border disputes this century have so far cost sixty-five million lives.

  In geopolitical terms those who proclaim distinctive sovereignty of the genders are akin to nationalists and states’ rights-ists and the one-spectrumists are akin, in geopolitics, to the internationalists who say we inhabit one world and that oneness should be predominant in our identities.

  I rush to say that I raise these distinctions not to argue them in this essay, simply to identify them.

  ‘But what,’ the Clinic cried out, ‘is your position?’

  ‘I am willing to entertain the complexities of all men and women, in a world that is not doing so well.’

  ‘Dodge! Dodge!’ my colleagues shout, slapping the lunch table with their hands.

  These ideological positions, as with all reformist ideologies, view the present or contemporary world as an imperfect and unfinished version of the future.

  The better life or the more perfect state is for most of us now depicted by the agendas of conferences such as the Global Cities in a Global World, or the Commission of the Future, or the National Strategies Conference—all truly producing great works of the imagination.

  Indeed, the Clinic for Civilised Disorders may, itself, be a disorder of this kind.

  Despite the feasibility of improvement and reform, we are never purely arrived in the Globalised World or the Global Village or in the Post-Modern World or the Liberated Society or the Information Superhighway.

  We are forever living the incomplete and imperfect revolution—in the incomplete and imperfect present—in our working lives and maybe, even, in our gender as well, and certainly in the interpersonal relationships between the sexes—one of the revolutions still seen by some as in a state of high imperfection.

  At the Clinic we are developing ‘strategies’ for enjoying this ‘imperfect present’ to the hilt.

  The present should not be seen only as disgustingly deficient but, instead, these ‘deficiencies’ should be seen also as disgustingly enjoyable while we are working to change them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  On FIVE

  curious Disorders

  of DECADENCE

  That fine fellow who, when I was young, castrated so many beautiful ancient statues in his City so as not to corrupt our gaze …ought to have realised that nothing is achieved unless you also geld horses, donkeys and finally everything in nature…

  MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, 1533–1592,

  ‘ON SOME LINES IN VIRGIL’

  Dozens of students have caught the pox before they reach the lesson on temperance in their Aristotles.

  MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, 1533–1592,

  ‘ON EDUCATING CHILDREN’

  BECAUSE OF the exhibition of photographs of men’s genitalia (among other subjects) by the American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and the publication of Love Cries, Australia’s first anthology of erotica, I was assigned b
y the Montaigne Clinic for Civilised Disorders to prepare a report on the state of Decadence in Australia. The Duc, as Regent of the Clinic, urged that I go. He was, I think, hoping to see if his tutelage of me in the arts of decadence had suitably prepared me for such a mission.

  I have to say it was an assignment which brought additional burdens to my already groaning back—having only recently investigated Decadence in twelve other countries and having my own end to keep up.

  From mingling incognito in the arts bars and radical clubs after my arrival back in Australia, I discovered my first curiosity—confusion about transgression and art.

  Given the wider perplexity over sexuality in our awry, shy and edgy country during this poor, sexually blighted Age, it is not surprising that sometimes we forget how erotica and much art is, in its delivery, mode and intention, conservative, not radical—that is, much erotica and art is intended to delight, to confirm, to meet the cultural needs of, and to stabilise, those who choose to involve themselves with art and with erotica. It is not there to shock people.

  But a good part of the Australian literary and artistic life clings to a blow-your-house-down radical and transgressive image of itself.

  Regarding the Mapplethorpe exhibition, I read that ‘…if, people in being over-libertarian in their discussions drain images of their velocity and contestation, they also miss the point…’

  I became excited by this idea and cabled back to the Montaigne Clinic. This was a new notion. Maybe the ‘over-libertarian’ person whom ‘nothing can shock’ is a post-modern type? Or perhaps this was a new disorder, in reviewers especially.

  How can transgression ever be effective when it finds an audience which ‘nothing can shock’?

  At the racecourse (now referred to as ‘the track’ by many who frequent it) and in the parents’ groups and radical clubs which I visited in the course of my investigation, I found Australians teetering among a few flimsily held positions about erotica.